My latest Oz acquisitions, part 2 (or maybe 3, I lost count)

Well, the rest of the Oz stuff from my latest Amazon.com order came in, so let me just wrap things up with the list. It's pretty diverse, and not particularly Ozzy at first glance. But trust me, I got all of these for their Oz content.

• Classic Fantasy Writers by Harold bloom. The first chapter is devoted to Baum. Since I've heard what a curmudgeon Bloom can be, I'm sort of dreading this, but I gather he at least holds Baum in some esteem. Of course, I won't stop there, and plan to read the whole book.
  
• In a similar vein, I also got The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin by Brian Attebery. Two of the chapters are "Oz" and "The Baum Tradition." Again, this should be an interesting Oz-and-Baum-in-the-bigger-context read.
  
• The 2003 edition of The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus illustrated by Michael Hague. After a quick flip-through, it seems to be less lavishly illustrated than Hague's version of The Wizard of Oz, but charming nevertheless. Maybe I'll take some time at the holidays to take a closer look.
  
• The latest edition (I think) of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. I know they cover at least the first seven Oz books, and the map of Oz has locations from even more. Of course, there are also lots of other places, some I know (this version has Hogwart's, even, although there were only three Harry Potter books at the time), and some I'm looking forward to discovering more about. This will be a good "dipping" book, that I can flip through in small chunks whenever I feel like it.
  

Okay, that's it for now. Maybe I can get another big bunch of inexpensive gently used books with my next Amazon gift certificate.

Tales of the Wizard of Oz opening

This has one of the all-time catchiest (or, depending on your point of view, annoying) opening theme songs to any Oz production that I know of. It's the opening to the 1960s cartoon Tales of the Wizard of Oz.

One year, we showed about six of these at the Winkie Convention (they're very short, about four minutes each). By the time the sixth one started, the whole room was singing along!

My latest Oz readings and acquisitions

Hey, I haven't written about my latest batch of Oz readings, have I? Okay, I've been busy, so here it is:

• The 2005 edition of Oziana, the Oz Club's literary journal. As usual, quite a few enjoyable stories. I'm not real sure why more people haven't tried to write and/or publish original Oz short stories, as there's a lot of potential there.
  
• The 2001 edition of The Horn Book magazine with Michael Patrick Hearn's article about why it was the first ever major article about Oz that The Horn Book magazine had published. In other words, another examination of the often stormy relationship between the Oz books and children's literature professionals.
  
• Memories of a Munchkin by Meinhardt Raabe, who played the Munchkin Coroner in the famous film version of The Wizard of Oz. The man has led an interesting life, and while the bulk of the book was about Oz, it was far from the only part. The art is also interesting, as several well-known artists (most, for some reason, from or otherwise associated with Mad magazine) contributed Coroner/Munchkin/Oz/Li'l Oscar (Raabe was the first to portray Li'l Oscar in advertising events for Oscar Mayer weiners) pictures of all types.
  
• I saw the library had it, so I checked out Bloodstained Oz. Oh, dear. It seems that some vampires have invaded Oz and taken over, and so the Ozites have become evil. Then, in 1933 Kansas, during the dust bowl, they invade and kill everyone they can find. Oh, yeah, this is a happy tale. I'm glad now that I didn't pay the rather large price to buy this new, so I'll see if I can get it cheap used someday, but if I can't, I won't mind too terribly.
  
• The catalog from the big Oz art exhibit at the Eric Carle museum. A nice overall view of Oz, and lots of reproductions, but unfortunately, not of every piece in the exhibit. Oh, well, they at least have the list, and I think I have versions of nearly all of them...
  
• The essays from the Baum Trust's "officially licensed" (whatever that means any more) edition of Ozma of Oz. Okay, that was a pleasant little diversion. I can't find any more in this series, so maybe they've stopped. Just as well, I suspect. This was one of my recent Amazon purchases.
  
• Over the Rainbow, another Amazon buy. This is a very nice art book that uses Maxfield Parrish art to illustrate the song. It's very attractive, but since I already knew the text, it also took me about three minutes to read, even with all the stopping to ooh and ahh over the pictures.
  

Well, now it's time to take a break and read some of the other big piles of books that have nothing to do with Oz that are lying around the house. But one book that's finally bubbled to the top of my Oz stack is With Powder on My Nose, a book of make-up and household tips written by Billie Burke. This could be fun!

Happy birthday, Ozma!

For the second year in a row, birthday greetings to our queen.

More Oz music videos

Poking around on the CD of The Best of The Muppets the other day, I found it included CD-ROM stuff, with links to two music videos on the Disney website. So, if you want to see music videos for "Kansas" and "When I'm With You," click here.

My latest Oz acquisitions, part 1

I just got my latest Amazon.com gift certificate for selling stuff through my website, and so I naturally ordered a bunch of stuff. And this time, I went for lots of cheap stuff, much of it used or otherwise second-hand. So I'll go ahead and keep a running tally here, as there are quite a few. So far, I've received:

• The "authorized" Baum Trust edition of Ozma of Oz. I'll just read the essays in the front, as I think I know what's in the rest of the book by now.
  
• The CD The Best of the Muppets featuring The Muppets' Wizard of Oz. This is basically the soundtrack album for last year's big Ozzy Muppet special, but as that only had four full-blown songs, they've padded it with a couple of short musical riffs and a few classic Muppet songs. So now I have "The Rainbow Connection," "It's Not Easy Bein' Green" and "Mahna Mahna" downloaded to my computer. Those three songs along may have been worth the price I paid!
  
• I've had the Adventures in Oz workout set for some time now, but for whatever reason I never got around to opening the videocassettes and seeing what the whole workout was about. But now that I have the DVD, I can see it all more clearly. Hmm, this may be a good way for me to shed a few excess pounds...
  

I am SO glad I've already ordered this!

I don't normally link to other blog entries. But this entry on J. L. Bell's blog about Adventures in Oz makes me really antsy to get this. Fortunately, we've already ordered it from our local comic shop, so it should be showing up any week now. I'm going to be magnanimous and let Laura read this first, however, because (a) she'll probably get to it first anyway, and (b) I've read all the main stories before, and she hasn't — although I am really looking forward to seeing the extras!

(Addendum, 8-17-06: It came today! Yeah, it looks terrific!)

The love/hate relations between Kansas and Oz continue

Thanks to The Daily Ozmapolitan, I found this editorial from a Kansas newspaper about some legislator in Kansas trying to push the Cairn Terrier as the state dog, since Toto was a Cairn. Okay, cute, ha ha. But what evidence is there that Toto — the real Toto, not Terry who played him in the famous film version — was a Cairn? He's never named as being of a particular breed in the books, and has been illustrated as numerous breeds in as many editions. Oh, well, nobody pays attention to the book anyway, so it will probably happen...

My latest Oz readings and acquisitions

As a teacher, I was especially interested to read The Theory of Oz: Rediscovering the Aims of Education by Howard Good. And I was not disappointed. Good is a journalism professor and former school board president who likens school to the journey Dorothy and her friends take in Oz. And it works! Each chapter represents something someone in the book was looking for. "Brains" is a natural, of course, but Good uses the chapter to point out the flaws in the current emphasis on performance-based tests to make or break students. "Heart" talks about character education, and what it should be to actually help students become empathetic, caring people. "Courage" talks about moral courage, right and wrong, and how little of that is dealt with in schools. And "Home" talks about the sense of community and belonging that students need, but so few of them get in school. Good primarily uses The Movie (no surprise) for his examples and metaphors, but he cites the books — yes, books, as he mentions several incidents and developments from Baum's later books, as well as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — often enough that it's clear he knows what he's talking about. It was a short, pleasant read, and both the teacher and Ozophile in me were satisfied.

After the bacchanalia of stuff I got at Winkies, I'm trying to taper off for a while, but I made an exception for what's going on at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. I'd love to make it to their Oz exhibit, of course, but distance and money make that impossible. So I did the next best thing, and ordered a catalog and poster. They came the other day. The catalog is, surprisingly, a little light on pictures, and I gather they're not all in there. But the text seems to make up for it, and I'm looking forward to reading it soon.

The Wizard of Ozaka

So, what if The Wizard of Oz had been made in Japan as an animated video game? Why, it might look something like this:

Happy birthday, MTV!

In honor of today being the twenty-fifth anniversary of the debut of MTV, I thought I'd take one more look to see if I could find that last Ozzy music video. Sure enough, I found it! It seems I'd been misspelling the name of the song the whole time. So here they are, Blues Traveler with "Runaround" "Run-around"!