I watched The Wizard Of Oz yesterday for the first time in a long time. There’s a bit which I’m curious about and I hope there are some movie buffs here who have an answer.
It happens at the point where the Wicked Witch is watching Dorothy & Co. in her big crystal ball. It’s right after Glinda causes a snowfall to revive the sleepers from the poppies.
The Wicked Witch gives her speech “Somebody always helps that girl! . . . Woe to those who try to stop me!” The monkey captain hands something to the WW, and she waves it around during her speech.
What is that? It looks like some kind of purse with broad ribbons attached.
I know a lot of cuts were made to the movie before it was released back in 1939, so I suppose this had to do with some bit that was cut out. But what?
I just pulled up that scene on youtube, that’s exactly what it was. Unless you’ve read the book(s), you wouldn’t know that the flying monkeys aren’t evil, they’re just under the control of whoever happens to have that. In the book, at one point, Dorothy has command of them and they help her out. IIRC they may have even told her that they don’t like doing what the wicked witch says, but they have no choice.
The movie is essentially just one excerpt, one of the adventures out of many that she goes on. In the book, the wicked witch of the west didn’t have nearly as large of a role.
And, for all those people who thought Glinda was a big prat for putting Dorothy through all that stuff before revealing the shoes could have done it all the time, in the book she was visited in Munchkinland by the (unnamed) Good Witch of the North. Said witch sent her off on pretty much the adventure the movie shows because, being a lesser witch, she didn’t know about the shoes.
After all the stuff about killling the WWotE, the Wizard being exposed as a humbug, and blowing the chance to return home by balloon, she is advised to seek out Glinda, the Good Witch of the South. She’s flown there by the monkeys. Glinda immediately tells her of the shoes and she uses them to get back to Kansas after giving Glinda the Golden Cap with the understanding it will be returned to the flying monkeys, thus freeing them from servitude.