#2 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
While I am a lifelong fan of technicolor, ruby slippers, and Judy Garland singing Over the Rainbow, there is no denying how amazing the original novel was. The happy part of this is that it is also a novel on the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge that I already owned.
While I could go on and on about the many differences between novel and movie, I think I’ll leave that for one of the many other reviews and analysis papers on the two. The novel in and of itself is this amazing and colorful world that is a separate being from the movie. Reading it made me realize just how many horrible things people can digest when its in a children’s story. I could imagine using that novel to read a child to sleep while simultaneously giving them nightmares about the terrifying things in the novel. Getting various body parts chopped off, dropping two beasts down a huge chasm, enslaving a race with an enslaved race, the list just goes on and on. The Wizard of Oz of Disney is a radically different Wizard than that of L. Frank Baum. But an equally good Wizard, which is to say a poor one.
In a world so full of magic and hope, it’s amazing just how calm and nonchalant people are about horrible things. Dorothy didn’t freak out when she was caught in the tornado, she just went to bed. And her Aunt and Uncle didn’t seem in the least bit concerned when Dorothy disappeared and were so calm when she suddenly reappeared. It’s kind of amazing what the grey state Kansas can do to the nerves. And I do mean the grey state, it was explicitly stated on the first page. Sorry Kansas, you got the short end of that stick. Even the the Scarecrow who got bran and nails shoved into his head got a better hand than you did, damn.