A Thanksgiving Treat

What is now available on home video as Dorothy in the Land of Oz first aired on television in 1980 as a Thanksgiving special called, appropriately enough, Thanksgiving in the Land of Oz. The most overt references to the holiday were removed or replaced for home video, however. But someone just uploaded the original television edition to YouTube. This includes Dorothy and jack talking about Pilgrims, not pioneers, and every commercial! This is a real time capsule, folks. And here it is! Enjoy.

Oz in Jeopardy!

The October 3, 2025 episode of Jeopardy! included the category We Love You, Judy all about women named Judy. Naturally, our favorite Dorothy actress popped up, which resulted in this extremely strange post-game exchange. (Incidentally, there was also a clue about Wicked in the same game. And you can watch this episode for yourself now for the next week on Hulu or Peacock, if you subscribe to either streaming service.)

It's Here! The Final Trailer!

Oz in Jeopardy!

Earlier this year, Jeopardy! had an entire category devoted to The Wizard of Oz. And here it is!

I am impressed that they got them all right, especially the one about King Vidor.

Oz in Jeopardy!

On tonight's episode of Jeopardy!, this was the Final Jeopary! clue. Because of the dates, I knew it with only the first few words.

Oz in Jeopardy!

All kinds of technical issues, plus just plain time, make this former regular series of posts here a challenge. But now that Jeopardy! is posting Final Jeopardy! on YouTube, I can revive it every once in a while when something like this happens:

Oz in Jeopardy!

I haven't had a chance to do ose of these in a very long time, due to all kinds of technical issues, as well as just not having time. But Jeopardy! kindly put up this clip from a recent show highlighting one category. Let's see how long it takes for its inclusion here to become apparent:

Yeah, not long at all, was it?

New "Wicked" Ad!

Last night on the Tony Awards, a new ad for Wicked debuted. (As if they really need to tell Broadway fans about it!) It looked a lot like this:

L. Frank Baum on "Saturday Night Live"!

In case you haven't already seen it, here's a skit from last weekend's edition of Saturday Night Live with a special Ozzy guest star!

Clearly this sketch is not about Oz, it was just an excuse to show people being silly in front of a camera. But here are a few things they didn't quite get right:

1. Where's Baum's big ol' walrus mustache?
2. Why is Baum writing with his right hand? Baum was left-handed.
3. Why is he writing in the streets of New York? He was based in Chicago, and didn't spend a lot of time in New York so far as I know.
4. If he's actually writing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it would not be the early 1900s. The manuscript was completed in 1899, and published in 1900. But maybe this is another, later book.
5. And that's not a terribly knowledgeable Oz expert if he doesn't correct the host's mention of Dorothy's ruby slippers. (I'm sure you all know that they were silver shoes in the book.) Since L. Frank Baum decorated show windows before turning to writing full time, maybe he was just admiring the fine job they did.

I will give them credit, though, for pronouncing L. Frank Baum's correctly. Also, our Baum "expert" is played by cast member Bowen Yang, who's playing Pfannee in the Wicked movies.

And Now for a Word from Our Sponsor

Oz in Jeopardy!

Hey, Sony, keep putting these clips up! This has been great reviving this series, and having something other than comics to blog about. Here's the Pets on Film category from the Jeopardy! round of the June 9, 2023 game. That $200 clue will be of interest to everone reading this, I'm sure.

Oz in Jeoopardy!

Yes, it's been quite some time since I presented one of these. But now that Jeopardy! is posting its own videos, it makes it really easy when they present something like this Final Jeopardy! from last night's episode:

More Lost in Oz!

Appropriately enough, with today being 11/11, Bureau of Magic dropped a new Lost in Oz short:

Yes, at last word is out that there will be more of the show, with Lost in Oz: The Movie. I am excited to see this!

Oz in Jeopardy!

Well I haven't been able to do one of these for a while! But now that Jeopardy! has its own YouTube channel, when things like this guest giving video clues happens, I can easily post them.

Now how in the world did I know that last one was going to be in there?

The Latest Oz Reading

At last, something that's not a comic! Yeah, I've been busy, and I have a huge backlog of just stuff I need to take care of in the coming weeks and months. How big is the backlog? I have a whole bunch of books and other items I read in my last round of Oz reading, last winter, that I haven't blogged about yet. And now I've started the latest round. I'll go back and hit some of those in the coming weeks, but right now I want to start with what I started off this round with:

• In my attempts to reread all of L. Frank Baum's Oz books, I realized I missed one a few books back. Despite his success as an author, L. Frank Baum still wanted a career in show business, and the success of the 1902 musical version of The Wizard of Oz only whetted his appetite. Shortly after the publication of The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Baum put together a treatment and scenario for a stage adaptation. It didn't get very far, and was eventually adapted to become the 1914 silent film version. Only one copy of the original treatment is known to exist, but Michael O. Riley turned it into a gorgeus little hand-bound book in his Pamami Press series. Since I've gotten all the other ones, I had to get this one as well, and Michael kindly let me buy it in installments. Baum clearly learned his lesson from previous theatrical adaptations, as this is not the book, but streamlined, with a few other characters to appeal to different audiences. The parts that become Jesseva and Danx in the movie are Jellia Jamb (!) and Pugly Muffins, and a few extra characters are thrown in for comic effect, but it follows the general arc of the story. One new character, the Scorner, is probably the genesis of Pessim, who happens to appear in the next book I read.
• After The Sea Fairies and Sky Island in my previous rounds of reading, naturally I was going to tackle The Scorecrow of Oz next (which, coincidentally was the reverse of The Patchwork Girl of Oz, in that it was based on a silent movie; The Scarecrow of Oz is considered to be one of the earliest novelizations of a movie). There's not a lot I can leally say about this, it's still a fun romp that brings Trot, Cap'n Bill, and Button Bright to Oz for good (although there's still the lingering question of Trot's parents).

That's all for now, but there are going to be a lot more reading recaps in the next few days, I hope.

This Week's Oz Political Cartoons, With Video

In case you haven't heard, Dr. Mehmet Oz is runnnig for the Senate in Pennsylvania. Well, here's an ad his opponent put out:

To celebrate, we have a historical cavalcade of Dr. Oz cartoons!

• Let's start with this very recent one from Drew Sheneman.
• And here's a recent one from Jeff Darcy.
• Going back to last year, Sheneman may have borrowed the idea for his cartoon from John Cole.
• But that's hardly the first time John Cole has commented on Dr. Oz.
• Cole may, in fact, have been inspired by his own 2015 cartoon.
• Going even further back, Mike Peters had a few things to say about Dr. Oz even before he entered politics.
• Peters' history with Dr. Oz goes back even further, as evidenced by this 2012 edition of Mother Goose and Grimm.

Oz in Jeopardy!

I've pretty much had to give up posting every single Oz clue from Jeopardy! over the past few years, for various reasons, but mostly because they just keep coming up, and it was getting very hard to keep up. Then there are all kinds of technical issues getting screen grabs now. But recently, they've started putting Final Jeopardy! up on YouTube, and it dawned on me this morning that I could post this one from September 30:

What Ozzy Thing Am I Doing Now?

It has been a busy couple of weeks around here, as you'll see by the flurry of new blog posts you'll be seeing this week. But here are two of the biggies:

• Remember my mysterious other book I read, but couldn't tell you about yet? Well, here it is! I'm also a Doctor Who fan, and so I was very excited to hear about the new book The Wonderful Doctor of Oz by Jacqueline Rayner. Yes, it's a full-blown Wizard of Oz/Doctor Who crossover. And I get to tell you all about it because Laura and I were recruited to record an episode of the Trap One podcast about it! So, here it is!
  
• My other big recent Oz project involves the L. Frank Baum Memorial Award, the International Wizard of Oz Club's highest honor. It is decided on each year by the previous winners, which for some extraordinary reason has included me since 2013. Normally, we keep very tight-lipped about who won so that it comes as a complete surprise to everyone at the National Oz Convention when it's announced. But thanks to our current pandemic (get vaccinated and keep wearing your masks, everyone!), the last two years it has all been virtual, and the winners have been announced via a This Is Your Life-inspired video. Since this year's winner is someone I've known for over forty years, and I had all the contacts, I offered to put the video together. So, here is the announcement video for my long-time Oz friend, Lynn Beltz.
  

I think that's going to do it for big-time Oz projects for a while, since I start back to work tomorrow and that's going to keep me pretty busy. But you never know what this crazy hobby of mine will throw at you!

This Week's Oz Short Story

Actually, at the rate I'm going, maybe I should call it "This Month's Oz Short Story". But starting a new job and dealing with minor crises on the home front have made it a challenge to get this one up, even though I read "Rob Zombie in Oz" by Aaron Solomon Adelman, with illustrations by John Troutman, as published in the 2014 issue of Oziana, in plenty of time to write about it last week. This story (which, despite its name, does not feature any heavy metal singers) takes place during Ojo's first trip to the Emerald City in The Patchwork Girl of Oz and, surprisingly, incorporates some of the changes that book went through when it was turned into a movie a year later. A lot of this story centers around Jinjur, former commander of the Army of Revolt, and her decision to blackmail Dr. Pipt's daughter, Jesseva, into becoming a Yookoohoo. (No, really, it makes sense in context.) In the process, Jinjur spills some Powder of Life in an Emerald City graveyard (from before Oz was enchanted), creating a zombie! She has to deal with not only a zombie, but also a vengeful Yookoohoo, and in the end, it doesn't really work out well for Jinjur. We also see a little bit of what happened in the Emerald City while Ojo and his party were out looking for more ingredients.

It's a fun little exercise in melding the events of the book and the movie, and both Jinjur and Jesseva prove to be interesting characters. Despite my odd description of the story, it all flows very logically and sensibly, although maybe not in the way some people would expect. Even Ozma doesn't come off quite as well as one would expect, but it all fits into what we've seen in both the books and the movies.

A Gaggle of Elphabas

You know what? I've gotten into a rut with this blog. Lately it's just become comics, what I'm reading, and what I'm watching. It's time to mix things up again! So here's a supercut of a whole bunch of different actresses, over the last two decades, playing Elphaba and singing "Defying Gravity" in various productions of Wicked.