Beware of tomorrow...

As I type this, it's already past midnight on the east coast, which means it's April 1. April Fool's Day. Do I really need to give everyone my little warning to take anything you may hear about sudden discoveries of lost manuscripts or new film projects or the like with a grain of salt? Well, if I do, I think I've already said it. I really don't want a repeat of that April Fool's joke I put out a couple of years ago that found its way into The Baum Bugle as a news item!

Oz in Jeopardy! Celebrity Edition

Way back on March 18, I had a very surreal experience watching Jeopardy! I've watched the show enough now that I think I have a pretty good idea what goes through the writers' minds at times, and a lot of the same information keeps popping up in their clues. (I'm not the only one. Ken Jennings and Bob Harris both made the same observations in their books about being on the show, and even Jeopardy! will sometimes have categories about its own clichés.) So watching this episode — another preliminary round in this year's Million Dollar Celebrity Invitational — I almost thought an Oz clue would pop up in a couple of places. For instance, in the Jeopardy! round, one of the categories was Is This Place for Real? This is just the sort of category where Oz could pop up. But no, it didn't. Then in the Double Jeopardy! round, one of the categories was Broadway Musicals. Often, there have been Wicked questions in this category the last few years — but not this time. So when the Final Jeopardy! category, Authors, came up, I didn't think much about it. But then I read the clue, and:

Of course, I knew the correct response right away, but did the celebrity contestants, playing for charity?

Aisha Tyler, who went in with $8000, wrote down, "Who is Faulkner?" She had bet everything, and ended up with nothing. Anderson Cooper, who also had $8000 to bet, simply wrote "Who?" sice he couldn't even come up with a guess. He also bet everything, and also ended up with nothing. The leader going in, Cheech Marin, had $14,200 and, as his response was revealed, admitted that he'd misread the date. He wrote down "Who is Stephen King?" and lost $4000, but he still ended up with $10,200, which was bumped up to $50,000 for the Hispanic Scholarship Fund (Tyler and Cooper's charities each got $25,000), and he gets to play in the semifinals in May. The correct response is, of course, "Who is L. Frank Baum?" And despite the bad predictions about earlier possible Oz clues, I got to blog about this game anyway.

I think I have to start watching "Glee"

I've become a fan of the "Legends Revealed" series online. Various incarnations have touched on Oz before, but here's one I was not familiar with. Today, Television Legends Revealed has one about a storyline in Glee involving a Wicked song (scroll down to the third one) — and reveals that Idina Menzel will be appearing later this season!

Today's Oz comic

Thanks to alert reader F. Douglas Wall for spotting today's edition of The Born Loser. But what's with equating mothers-in-law with wicked witches? Mine is a peach!

We're Off to See the Kid, The Wimpy Kid of Oz

Several years ago, I read the book Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It includes a somewhat off-kilter production of The Wizard of Oz. So I thought to myself, I wonder if the current film version also has The Wizard of Oz play in it? Well, wouldn't you know...

Yup, I think I've got to see this movie some time.

Oz in Jeopardy! Mega-Deluxe Bumper Edition

Boy, oh boy, was the first round of the March 11 episode of Jeopardy! a lot of fun for us Oz fans. First off, the last two categories on the board formed a pair:

and



So our three contestants jumped into The Wizard first, which was all about wizards in books and movies and television (and believe it or not, not a single mention of Harry Potter). Most of the clues weren't Oz related, but the $600 clue was:



Ryan, at the rightmost lectern, rang in and correctly responded with, "What is The Wiz?" Further down the category, at $1000, this clue came up:



Cyd, the defending champion, got in first and correctly responded with, "What is Excalibur?" I bring this up only because Williamson would go on to play Doctor Worley and the Nome King in Return to Oz a few years later. The players went on to some other clues, but eventually came to Of "Oz". The Oz being in quotation marks means that the letters O-Z will appear in the correct response. Even though it's not about Oz, I thought it was fun anyway, so here they are. For $200:



Leslie, in the middle, got in this time, and said, "Who is Bozo?" Under the $400:



Believe it or not, none of them even wanted to ring and try to respond with, "What is frozen?" Good thing it was time for a commercial break, I suspect. After the break and the brief player interviews, they went back to the category to find this clue for $600:



Leslie correctly said, "What is a bulldozer?" She then picked the same category for $800:



Ryan got in this time, and asked, "What is a lozenge?" They went on to some other clues for a while, but finally they got to the $1000 clue, which was:



Leslie got in and correctly asked, "What is protozoa?"

And that was it for the Oz content. Cyd went on to win the game and become a two-day champion, even though he didn't correctly respond to any of the Oz or "OZ" clues.

Savage Chickens in Oz!

My lovely wife/co-conspiritor Laura found this installment of Savage Chickens for me. So, I get to pass the goodness on to you! Enjoy.

New Oz movie?

Before anyone asks, yes, I've heard the news stories about a possible "remake" of The Wizard of Oz. In case anyone's interested, I first heard about it here, at SciFi Wire. I'll be honest, I'm not worried or panicked. First of all, Oz has survived a lot of other retellings — including the famous 1939 movie version, which got so much right, but still didn't quite live up to the book, in my opinion. Second, there have been at least a dozen remakes/retellings/reboots/sequels/what-have-yous talked about in the last decade or so. Most have not gotten anywhere near production. So it's entirely possible that neither of these projects will, either. I'll start getting excited about this once something is actually green lit and production begins.

And let's not forget, there's still a film version of Wicked that could possibly appear on the horizon before long, too.

Today's Oz comic

Here's the extra jumbo-sized version of today's Strange Brew. Actually, this might make for an interesting "what if?" Oz story. After all, we do know that the Wizard eventually made it back to the "real" world; he could have actually gotten Dorothy home.

And if that's supposed to be the Wizard's balloon, why does it say "Professor Marvel"? If that's supposed to be the Movie version, shouldn't it say "State Fair Omaha"?

The latest Oz reading

It's a two-fer, actually. I've just been swamped with a lot of magazines lately, and I'm slowly wading through the pile. Among them are the Winter 2009 issue of The Baum Bugle (which I will write more about soon on my website's news page), and issue #4 of Marvel's adaptation of The Marvelous Land of Oz. This one is, as you may be able to tell from the cover, mostly about the Tin Woodman and how he gets involved. It starts with Tip, Jack, the Sawhorse, and the Scarecrow arriving at the Tin Woodman's castle, and ends with the arrival of Mr. H. M. Wogglebug, T. E., and his assistance in helpin to repair the Sawhorse's broken leg. We also get a bit of a look at what's happening in the Emerald City, with Jinjur finding she has to kowtow to Mombi. This scene wasn't in the book, but from what I understand, writer Eric Shanower has dipped into some other Baum writings for inspiration in this adaptation, so this could be taken from a scene in The Woggle-Bug (the 1905 play version of the story that utterly failed to woggle, as one critic of the time put it). Artist Skottie Young's version of the Wogglebug is startling and unusual, but it makes sense that he would walk on four legs and use two more as arms. (Hey, he's an insect, of course he has six limbs, despite how John R. Neill originally drew him.)

One question that I often ask myself when I read this story, and it just came up again: Whatever happened to Professor Nowitall, the eminent Oz scholar from whom the Wogglebug learned so much, and caused him to become highly magnified?

Today's Oz comic

In today's Frazz, all you really need to know is that Caufield has been dropping the remote controlled projector screen behind his teacher with some interesting things written on it. Well, today... Nah, you'll figure it out.