Cynthia Erivo: No, leave her alone. She hasn't done anything wrong. I'm the one you want. I'm the one you want. It's me. [singing] It's me. So if you care to find me.

Brian Lehrer: No, that's not The Brian Lehrer Show theme song. It's the climax of Defying Gravity, sung by Cynthia Erivo in the new film version of Wicked, but I'm sure many of you know that already. Wicked belongs as well to a broader universe, a broader world of literature, music, theater, and film. That world is, of course, Oz. Now we'll continue our centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. Today it's thing number 46, a hundred years of The Wizard of Oz.

With the release and the immediate popularity of the film version of Wicked being our hook for this, joining me now is John Fricke. He's a historian focused on The Wizard of Oz and Judy Garland and author of The Wonderful World of Oz: An Illustrated History of the American Classic, which came out in 2014. John, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome to WNYC.

John Fricke: Thank you, and congratulations on your centennial.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. Why don't we start a little bit ahead, in fact, of our 100 years timeline back in 1900, because that's the year that L. Frank Baum published the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the first out of 14 books in the Oz series, but that's the original story that eventually was made into the movie and everything. Where did it come from? I've read that maybe it was an allegory for inequality in the Gilded Age, reminiscent of today. Do you think?

John Fricke: No, I think. I think that Oz from day one as a book, and then 40 years later almost as a movie, and then on TV and in all the spinoffs, has become so familiar and so popular that it's been subjected to all kinds of analyses and theories and superstitions and all the rest of it. There's no indication, and I find myself having to say this often. I'm 74, so I've been around for a while, and I was privileged to know one of Baum's sons, several grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren.

Of course, there are all the theories that Oz was a parable on the populist movement, on the gold standard, the silver standard, William Jennings Bryan, all those things at the turn of the 19th into the 20th centuries. There's no family history or indication anywhere that Baum wrote anything except to write. He was prolific, and he was one of those people who had this sort of stuff pour out of him. The Wizard of Oz story grew out of the fact that he told made up fairy tales to tell his four sons and the neighborhood kids back in the late 1890s and beyond when there wasn't any home entertainment, and that's how they all enjoyed themselves.

He was encouraged by his mother in law, the redoubtable suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, that he should start writing these stories down, which he did, and that's where it all began. He needed the money. He was a working author, and I think he just wanted to-- To quote Noel Coward, Baum had a great talent to amuse, and that's all he really looked out to do. I'm certain of that.

Brian Lehrer: Well, because you mentioned William Jennings Bryan, who was the Democratic candidate for president in 1896 and 1900 and 1904, and I can't resist a political hook, I've read at least speculation that the Cowardly Lion was somehow based on William Jennings Bryan. Anything to that?

John Fricke: No, no. All of that grew out of a wonderful New York State history teacher, Henry Littlefield, who in 1963 was teaching history in summer school up in Mount Vernon, and he discovered that by then, The Wizard of Oz movie had been on network television a half a dozen times. People knew the book, kids knew the book, and he found out that he could tie Oz characters from the first book and the plot into the populist movement.

Dorothy's silver shoes, which they were in the book, not ruby slippers, silver shoes on the yellow brick road denoted the silver standard and the gold standard. The Scarecrow represented the farmer. The Tin Man represented the mechanical age that was coming in. Brian, the Wizard, Dorothy, was everybody, representative of every child. Again, The Wizard of Oz story is the story of a journey.

That means that every single human being of all time can relate to it because that's what we're all here doing, and the people you meet, the good witches, the wicked witches, the triumphs, the challenges. Because I've been involved in Oz researching for my own pleasure from the time I was five, it was never supposed to become a career, but I've been subjected to political interpretations, philosophical, religious, sexual. It's so generic a saga that you can plug just about anything into it. I have found that,-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Yes, they're universal.

John Fricke: Yes. Thank you. You did it in one word. It took me a minute and a half. Thank you. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: Well, I have a copy of the book. A friend of mine has a copy of the book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the one archetype that you didn't mention just now was the archetype of the witches, or maybe you did and I spaced. I'm going to read the moment from the original book where Dorothy meets Glinda, and Glinda says, "I am the Witch of the North." "Oh, gracious," cried Dorothy. "Are you a real witch?" "Yes, indeed," answered the little woman, "But I am a good witch and the people love me. I am not as powerful as the Wicked Witch who ruled here, or I should have set the people free myself."

"But I thought all witches were wicked," said the girl who was half frightened at facing a real witch. "Oh no, that is a great mistake. There are only four witches in all the Land of Oz, and two of them, those who live in the north and south, are good witches. I know this is true, for I am one of them myself and cannot be mistaken. Those who dwelt in the east and the west were indeed wicked witches. But now that you have killed one of them, there is but one wicked witch in all the Land of Oz, the one who lives in the west."

Since our hook is the release of Wicked, what were the witches supposed to be in L. Frank Baum's mind?

John Fricke: The witches were supposed to be part of a fairy tale he was making up for youngsters. I don't think there's any subliminal message there. You can go back to Grimm and Anderson and all the great legends and myths for kids over the ages, for adults even, you go back to Salem wicked witches, I don't think any witch in Salem history was ever mistaken for a good witch, they were all wicked witches. It's just an evil connotation. Baum was adapting that because he had to have some heroes and heroines and villains in his story.

Gregory Maguire, who 96 years after Baum published the first of the four Wicked books that he's done to date, took Oz and turned it upside down and shook it around and made it political and violent and sexual and for an adult audience. Greg is the nicest man, most gentle, sweet, soft-spoken gentleman, and a glorious, gloriously capable and adept writer, but his Oz is not the Baum Oz, nor the real Oz, nor should it be interpreted that way.

Brian Lehrer: Now, listeners, we invite your oral histories as we do in these 100 Years of 100 Things segments. In this case, who has any story of any Wizard of Oz book or movie or play mattering to you, having an impact on you, either as pure entertainment, as our guest is describing it, or with more serious personal overtones. The book, if you read it as a kid, the movie, if you saw it as a kid, some of the other Wizard of Oz movies that came out, and certainly The Wiz as a major thing afterwards, which we'll get to, and obviously, Wicked.

212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text with what any generation of Wizard of Oz stories has meant to you, with John Fricke, historian focused on The Wizard of Oz and Judy Garland and the author of The Wonderful World of Oz: An Illustrated History of the American Classic. 212-433-9692 in our 100 Years of 100 Things series, thing number 46, 100 years of The Wizard of Oz. Before we even go on to the movie from 1939, I just want to note that there were so many other Oz books. 13 other books is the number that I'm seeing in the series.

The Marvelous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz, just to name a few. Have any of those stood the test of time as well or? I guess they didn't become movies.

John Fricke: Well, some of them have been readapted for films. Disney made a picture called Return to Oz in 1985 that had parts of the Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz, the second and third book, in them. I think part of the problem is that it's been very difficult for anything to circumvent the popularity or familiarity of the MGM film. I just want to add too that there aren't 14 Oz books. There are 40 official Oz books in the series published between 1900 and 1963.

Because when Baum died in 1919, the publishers were loathed to let such a successful franchise, even in 1919,-

Brian Lehrer: Right, so there were other writers.

John Fricke: - peter out, so other writers did it. Officially, there are 40 books written by seven different authors over that time, all under their own names. When I fell and fell hard in 1956 and found out a year later that there were multiple Oz books, it was very joyous, and a lot of kids were reading Oz books in those days. The movie on TV had brought it all back into focus. The Oz books stayed in print well into the 1960s, all 40 of them, and the first I think about 18 or 19 are now in public domain and have been put out in beautiful facsimile editions with the original art, the original color, by Books of Wonder.

I think all it takes to get into the Oz books is to start reading them or have them read to you. Especially when they were published, they were probably for kids more of 5 to 12 or 13. Now it's probably kids of 4 to 10 because Harry Potter has come along and we've got Narnia and all these other things. The Oz books were very much the Harry Potter books of their age without-

Brian Lehrer: Yes, that's a great analogy.

John Fricke: - social media to hype them or the internet or anything like that.

Brian Lehrer: Should we at least say the name Ruth Plumley Thompson, who maybe stands out as an original Oz writer after Baum?

John Fricke: Yes, because Ruth was the one they selected to carry on the series after Baum died. She wrote 19 books, one a year, between 1921 and 1939 before she retired. Then, she wrote a couple others that The International Wizard of Oz Club published in the 1970s. As somebody who's read all of them more than 20 times each, they all have their appeal. The only thing I can suggest to adult readers is that when you pick up an Oz book and start reading it, you have to be five years old.

You have to be able to read it, not with critical facility, not with, "Well, this doesn't have description or characterization." No, they're all entertainment.

Brian Lehrer: One more question about the books before we go on to the movies and plays. You can imagine how many phone calls we're getting with people telling-- [crosstalk]

John Fricke: Yes, I wish I had a dollar for everybody who wants to say how scared they were of the monkeys, but go ahead. I'm sorry.

Brian Lehrer: [laughs] Would it be accurate to say that a number of the sequels were further deeper back stories of some of the Oz characters, but that there was never one about the Wicked Witch of the West?

John Fricke: No, the Wicked Witch of the West was gone by chapter 19 of the first book. She didn't exist anymore. No, that's-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Right, but Wicked is a take on a backstory version, so-- [crosstalk].

John Fricke: No, I know exactly what you're saying, but no, there are things about the Lost-- There's a book by Ruth Thompson called The Lost King of Oz about an earlier Oz author. There's a wonderful series for young readers, I would say more middle school readers and up, called Ages of Oz by Gabriel Gale. Simon and Schuster have published the first two editions of that that start with Glinda as a 13-year-old girl. Not the wicked Glinda, not the ditzy blonde Glinda, but a little girl of Oz who wakes up overnight to discover that she is by nature a sorceress.

It is going to be up to her and a couple of other people, including another young girl who turns out to be the young incarnation of the Good Witch of the North, it's up to them to save Oz from the Wicked Witches. This goes back building on the Baum and Thompson kind of foundation of Oz. Doesn't have anything to do with Wicked or the MGM movie, but it is very much pure Oz for those of us who still believe, I guess you could say.

Brian Lehrer: I think Nick in Putnam County has a piece of L. Frank Baum trivia. Nick, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Nick: Yes, hi. I wonder if John has heard this. Well, of course, I'm sure he knows that Frank Baum attended the Peekskill Military Academy when he was 12 and 13 years old. It turns out that his parents would put him on the train. He would get off at the train station in Peekskill and he would walk uphill to the Peekskill Military Academy, and the road he would walk on was a yellow cobblestone brick road. There's a hundred-foot length of that road, a remnant that still exists that you can still see in Peekskill adjacent to the train station. It was constructed about 150 years ago.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe just maybe that was the yellow brick road of his imagination. You ever hear that before, John?

John Fricke: I have certainly heard it. I've been the emcee and host, I guess you'd say, at the annual Oz-Stravaganza in Baum's hometown, Chittenango, his birthplace in Chittenango, New York every June. I've been doing this since 1990. Of course, all the local history is brought into play there as we celebrate the native sun. Again, people have looked at Baum's life so closely now and taken whatever they can interpretation from it, but the yellow brick road in Peekskill is one of the nicer approximations of what might have been.

Certainly I don't think there's a yellow brick road anywhere else in history till Baum immortalized it. I appreciate your bringing that up. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Nick, thank you very much. Sam in Rockland County has a theory, I guess, or a question about where the name Oz, O-Z, comes from. Samuel, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Sam: Hello. I think I read somewhere that the name Oz came from, which kids wouldn't know what it is, a filing cabinet drawer that said O to Z, and then he saw that and said Oz. Is that true?

John Fricke: Well, that's the family legend dating way back to just a year or so after The Wizard of Oz book was published. Some people endorse it, some people don't, but the story, as one of Baum's sons told it, was that Baum was making up the story of The Wizard of Oz night after night just off the top of his head talking to the kids in the neighborhood and his sons. He didn't have a name for the place.

Dorothy was just in this magical land, and one of the kids finally said, what is the name of this magical land, and it caught Baum off guard, and he had a two-drawer filing cabinet in the corner of the parlor, and while he mulled this, his eye caught the bottom drawer of the cabinet, and the top drawer was initialed items from A - N and the bottom was O - Z. If it's not true, it's one of those things that could be or should be, and we can just be glad we didn't all end up in the wonderful land of An.

Brian Lehrer: [laughs] A to N. Now we get to the 1939 MGM movie version of The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland and Bert Lahr and everybody. Let's play a 30-second clip of one of the film's most famous scenes.

Dorothy: Say goodbye, Toto. Yes, I'm ready now.

Glinda: Then close your eyes and tap your heels together three times and think to yourself, "There's no place like home. There's no place like home."

Dorothy and Glinda: There's no place like home.

Dorothy: There's no place like home.

Brian Lehrer: That obviously near the end. There are so many things we could say about the film. One is that when it was released in 1939, The Wizard of Oz was likely to be many moviegoers' first experience ever watching a film in full color. Right? Because the Oz scenes are in color, the Kansas scenes are in black and white. Can you talk about that?

John Fricke: Well, certainly. The idea came from people at MGM who were determined to make this extraordinary film. It was a showcase designed for Judy Garland, and it was built around a book that had been a success for 38 years at that point. They just thought because Baum uses the word gray nine times in chapter one of The Wizard of Oz book to describe Kansas, the weathered boards of the farmhouse and the barn, the sunburnt hay, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are worn and gray from their work, well, Yip Harburg suggested that rainbow be the theme of the song because rainbow would have been the only colorful thing that Judy or Dorothy would be familiar with.

Even before that, the idea was to make Oz as magical as they could, and the idea of filming Kansas in black and white and then bathing it in sepia. If you see the restored prints now, the Kansas opening and closing are kind of in brown and white and then going to Technicolor. You're absolutely right. I think Oz was the seventh or eighth Technicolor feature film made in color, and certainly the first one that was inordinately family directed.

Well, because I've done two books about the movie over the years, when I've done signings, sometimes there are very, very elderly people who saw the film as children in 1939, and they remember that by the time the color came on, everybody was so involved in Dorothy and her losing her dog and running away and having to get home and the cyclone, they had forgotten all about the fact that the film was supposed to be in color, so that when she did open the door to Munchkinland and the film jumped to that glorious three-strip Technicolor, so many people said people just applauded.

One woman said the whole audience stood up and cheered because it was just such an emotional transition, and it works to this day. There are certainly a number of YouTube videos, reaction videos being posted by young adults, late teens, young adults of people who somehow have never seen Wizard of Oz and they're watching it and commenting as they go on. That moment always devastates them. They are so impressed by that, that they had that technical.

Brian Lehrer: You said that this was built as, did you say a vehicle, a showcase for Judy Garland, who you, I should say to our listeners, are also a biographer of, a historian of. It wasn't just they had the Dorothy character from the book and they set out to cast it, they were looking for something because they knew Judy Garland as a little girl was so talented?

John Fricke: Yes, absolutely. It was her seventh feature film. She'd done the earlier six across the preceding two years, but she was already making an impact on box office. She already had had a hit record of her song from the Broadway Melody movie, the song Dear Mr. Gable: You Made Me Love You. She was a hit on all the personal appearance tours that MGM was sending her out to do. She had a radio following.

Arthur Freed, who was the songwriter at MGM, who wrote Singing in the Rain, the words to Singin' in the Rain, You Are My Lucky Star. Broadway Rhythm, All I Do Is Dream Of You, he wanted to become a film producer, and after working with Judy in some of those earlier films, he went to Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, and said, "Boss," in effect, "I would like to produce movies, not just write lyrics." Mayer said, "Well, I can't let you use Eleanor Powell or Jeanette MacDonald or Nelson Eddy, our big musical stars. Who would you work with?"

Freed said, "No, I don't want them. I want to work with Judy." Later on, Freed said, "I put my money on Judy and she helped me as much as I helped her." He went on to produce the Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney musicals, Meet Me in St. Louis, Easter Parade. They put each other on the map, in effect. He was the one who decided that build a film around Judy. They did not expect it to become a $3.2 million budget Technicolor musical fantasy. That just happened when Freed picked Oz as the vehicle and they were able to get it, and they went crazy making it, but what an achievement.

Brian Lehrer: What an achievement. We will continue in a minute with our 100 Years of 100 Things, number 46, 100 years of The Wizard of Oz. When we come back, we will move toward the present with The Wiz and Wicked and other things. However, reality needs to intrude here for just a minute because relating to our previous segment in this show, we have breaking news from a Manhattan courtroom. A Manhattan jury has unanimously found Daniel Penney not guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the killing of Jordan Neely on the F train last spring.

The manslaughter charge ended with a hung jury on Friday, but they have now unanimously, meaning they reached a verdict, found Daniel Penney not guilty. They acquitted him of criminally negligent homicide in the killing of Jordan Neely. That just in. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We continue.

Judy Garland: Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high.

Brian Lehrer: There's Judy Garland singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow from the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz. Let's jump way ahead in time to 1974 in this hundred years timeline when the story was retold from the point of view of Black Americans in the Broadway musical The Wiz. Then, Shortly after, in 1978, it became a movie starring Diana Ross as Dorothy Gale. We also had Michael Jackson as the Tin Man, Richard Pryor as The Wizard. Here's 40 seconds.

Diana Ross and Michael Jackson: Don't you carry nothing that might be a load

Come on, ease on down, ease on down, down the road

Ease on down, ease on down the road

Ease on down, ease on down the road

Brian Lehrer: You want to make that leap from Somewhere Over the Rainbow to Ease On Down the Road, John?

John Fricke: Oh, absolutely. May I offer two little corrections first?

Brian Lehrer: Oh, of course.

John Fricke: The name of the song is Over the Rainbow, not Somewhere Over the Rainbow, if you look at the copyright. Everybody does that, your vast majority of the world, but just as a journalism graduate of Northwestern, I have to point these things out. Plus the fact-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Fair enough. Am I right that that song has had resonance in the gay community among others?

John Fricke: That song has had resonance everywhere, absolutely everywhere. The other small correction is that Michael Jackson played the Scarecrow, not the Tin Woodman, in the movie of The Wiz.

Brian Lehrer: Sorry about that.

John Fricke: No. Over the Rainbow won the Academy Award in 1939. After the turn of the new century, it was voted the number one song of the 20th century. It has since been voted the number one movie song of all time. The song has staying power. It's a wonderful thing. Of course, the Hawaiian gentleman who had the hit record of it not too long ago murdered the lyric, massacred the melody, but it didn't matter because he was sincere and people loved that song. It goes on and on and on.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a few more oral history calls. People who to whom any generation of Wizard of Oz stories has mattered. 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. How about Don in Samsonville, New York? Don, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Don: Hello. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Speaker C: Hello? Oh, okay. Hi. Yes. When I was a kid, I loved The Wizard of Oz. I started reading at least one of the other books in the series, I think it was the second one maybe, and was surprised to discover the backstory of Princess Ozma where when she is young, she is a he, Tip, a boy who's under a spell and is later transformed into the young Princess Ozma. I'm wondering what this says about Frank Baum and his fantasies and his real life.

Brian Lehrer: John, anything on that?

John Fricke: What it says is that-- [crosstalk] Yes, very happily. The Wizard of Oz came out in 1900. In 1902, Baum and a number of people turned it into the most successful stage musical of its age. It was very much the Cats of 1900 to '99. Two national companies touring on and off engagements on Broadway, but it was a vastly different musical play. That being said, Baum was also getting thousands of letters from kids because the two stars of the Oz musical were the Scarecrow and Tin Man. Dorothy was there, but the Scarecrow and Tin man were the comedy team.

Kids were writing, "What happened to the Scarecrow and Tin man? Write another book about them. We love them in the stage play." Baum wrote the second book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, and he wrote it with a view toward putting it on the stage more than anything else. He has a boy hero named Tip, little boy who's in the custody of a wicked witch, and what he doesn't know and what the readers don't know till the end is that Tip was really Princess Ozma, the rightful ruler of Oz, given to Mombi to hide away when Ozma was a baby, and to disguise her, Mombi turns Tip from Ozma into Tip, becomes a little boy.

By the end of the book, come to realize that no, Tip is really Ozma and is restored to her original form. All of this was done with no agenda and no fantasy on Baum's part. He was doing with the idea of putting that book on the stage as soon as it had been published as a book. In those days, it was very often that young man parts were played by women playing young men. That was the idea that Tip would be played by a young girl dressed as a boy who would then become a girl at the end, as in the story.

It was all a theatrical conceit and theatrical tradition. There was nothing gender specific about it or subliminal or subconscious or subversive. He was just writing a book that he expected to adapt into a stage musical of that era.

Brian Lehrer: Some texts that are coming in. Listener writes, "I gobbled up all the Oz books by Baum and Plumley Thompson as a child. The blend of creepy, frightening, and whimsically magic really influenced me forever after." Another one writes, "When we were kids, our friends in our apartment building were the only ones who had a color tv. Always a commercial came on before Dorothy opened the door. That was just enough time for us to run to the other apartment."

Another one writes, "An Oz memory I have was my college roommate and I watching it. I guess the movie synced up to Pink Floyd's Dark side of the Moon." You ever hear that kind of thing?

John Fricke: Oh, of course. Even Pink Floyd has gratefully denied it. Again, you can apply almost anything to The Wizard of Oz story or movie and make it work, depending on your own mindset.

Brian Lehrer: Chris on the Upper West Side, you're on WNYC. Hello, Chris.

Chris: Hi. Before I forget, that clip you played from the original movie, I don't know if you caught that. When she says, there's no place like home, the music had a little hint of Foster song, I think. [hums] They just throw that in. They threw all this stuff in that movie. It was the first movie I saw as a kid, and it just blew me away. The word play, the colors, just the constant action. I was a kid, and it stayed with me forever. That song, Over the Rainbow, I think on your station some time ago, there was an analysis of how that was the most perfect song ever written, analysis of the song.

The Wiz, as a musician, I got to play it in the '70s and '80s, and that was amazing to me to just-- in a Broadway show. It's so not Broadway. The music was so not Broadway. It was the music I loved, and getting to play that in a play-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Can you talk about that a little bit, Chris? I'm rushing you because our time is short, but do you have a memory of what The Wiz as a play seemed to mean to the audiences?

Chris: Well, yes. First of all, there were people we never saw in the audience. I mean, Broadway was often so white. I mean, I started Broadway playing Godspell, which was rock and roll, which was great, but to see young audiences, but then to see a lot of Black people, and the kind of response. In the middle of performances, you'd see response that you just don't. People sit there and clap at the end or laugh or something, but there was just visceral response to the music that was just--

It wasn't just like playing in a club, but it was a real live give and take with the audience that was just amazing. The last iteration, of course, is Wicked, and an interracial family like ours, that's part of our DNA now, and the play itself. Then, of course, Erivo in the movie, I mean, just resonates so much with my kids and my grandkids that adds a whole nother dimension. This has been a saga of our life.

Brian Lehrer: Chris, thank you. It's a wonderful set of stories.

John Fricke: [unintelligible 00:34:19] Thank you, Chris.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. We're almost out of time, but let's play one clip related to Wicked. He mentioned Cynthia Erivo. Here's a clip that I guess has gone viral. It's sort of a confusingly humorous clip from the press tour where Cynthia Erivo is being interviewed by Out Magazine journalist Tracy Gilchrist. Gilchrist speaks first.

Tracy Gilchrist: I've seen this week people are taking the lyrics of Defying Gravity and really holding space with that and feeling power in that.

Cynthia Erivo: I didn't know that that was happening.

Tracy Gilchrist: I've seen it.

Cynthia Erivo: Yes, that's really powerful. That's what I wanted. I didn't know that was happening.

Tracy Gilchrist: I've seen it on a couple posts. I don't know how widespread, but I am in queer media, so that's my [unintelligible 00:35:23].

Cynthia Erivo: That's pretty cool.

Brian Lehrer: Anything on that in our last minute or so, and since this is a hundred years of history series, we've dwelled mostly on everything leading up to Wicked, but on that clip or where Wicked fits into the pantheon?

John Fricke: Well, as I said earlier, Wicked is its own Oz. It is not the Baum Oz or the MGM Oz. People are trying desperately to align them, which is impossible to do. You can't. They all have to stand on their own as stories. I love what Wicked has done in terms of entertaining and in bringing people to the story and what Winnie Holzman has done with the Maguire characters and bringing them on that level of the friendship of the two girls, what the film has done in having Cynthia there with Ariana, what Stephen Schwartz has done with the songs.

I mean, For Good has got to be one of the single greatest Broadway ballads of recorded time. As the 85th anniversary of the movie this year, the $32.5 million sale of the ruby slippers on Saturday, I don't think Oz is going to go away. That makes me, as somebody who's been self-buried in this since 1956, it makes me very happy and very delighted to be enjoying it so much. End of sermon.

Brian Lehrer: And appropriate end of our 100 Years of 100 Things, thing number 46, 100 years of The Wizard of Oz. We thank our guest, John Fricke, historian focused on The Wizard of Oz and Judy Garland and author of The Wonderful World of Oz: An Illustrated History of the American Classic. Thank you so, so much.

John Fricke: Oh, thank you for the privilege.

Brian Lehrer: The Brian Lehrer Show was produced today by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Serna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Our interns this term are Andrés Pacheco-Girón and Olivia Green. Megan Ryan is the head of Live Radio. Juliana Fonda and Shayna Sengstock at the audio controls.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.