The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, Meet Me in St. Louis…
Why was this theme/attitude so common at one point?
Because that’s where the people who love you are.
Remember, this was when it was a lot harder to stay in touch with people when you weren’t physically present with them.
Personally I still feel that my home is superior to the outside world. Is that unusual? I would have thought that most people felt that way. And, by the way, it’s not “Because that’s where the people who love you are.” It’s because the stuff here is stuff I picked, and there aren’t very many people in here, and nobody is bugging me in here. Or something like that.
Don’t forget, Meet Me in St. Louis was released in 1944, and It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946, so those two were made with World War 2 as the overriding cultural and social touchpoint. The desire for home and family was especially strong at that point.
Also those films are also a product of a less cynical (and less mobile) time. In contrast, many modern films (Garden State and Lord of the Rings comes to mind, but there are others) tend to portray “home” as something where you should seek to leave at a certain point and that you can’t really go back to without feeling alienated (quite literally in the case of the film ‘The Worlds End’).
Notice that in the newer film Oz the Great And Powerful, the wizard doesn’t return home. Although one might argue that he was a drifter prior to landing in Oz and never really had a home.
In a modern version of Wizard of Oz, I suspect that Dorothy would be changed by her experiences in Oz and would have a hard time to adjusting to life back on the farm in Kansas.
Yeah, what with having to go back to sepia and all.
In an 80s film called Return To Oz, Dorothy was put in a mental asylum after her first trip to Oz.
Supporting my theory that the 80s were a HUGE mistake.
Anyway, in the Oz books, little miss Gale eventually pulls up stakes and remains in Oz.
Wouldn’t have to be a modern version, just film another of the original books. Oz was real, and eventually Dorothy went back there to stay.
Shoot, should have read the previous post before making my own.
I don’t think what the OP meant by “home”. I think he meant it more in the sense of home being a place where you grew up and had that special bond with friends and family. Possibly going back generations. In those films the OP describes, the plot typically revolves around the home community, defending the “home” from some crisis or trying to return back home.
I have yet to see the modern Oz: The Great and Powerful but I understand it’s based more on the book than on the old movie. It should probably be pointed out that in the movie her trip to Oz was just a dream (from being hit on the head), in the book, her trip to Oz was real, as were subsequent trips in the squeals (there were like 20 books after the first one which the movie was based on).
I don’t recall if she had a hard time adjusting to life back in Kansas but I don’t think they spent a lot of time exploring that, maybe part of one the books was spent there.
As for the movie when she was in an asylum, I don’t recall that from the books, but I only read the first four or five, so either they added that in or it wasn’t in one of those.
The asylum was made up for the movie.
I think Baum wrote 14 Oz books, and several other books in the same world. The publisher hired someone else to do continuations after he died, and the style of writing is very different in those. More in voice than in subject matter, though.
And the style of the movie “Return to Oz” is very different from either.
I recall Return To Oz actually being scary, but then I watched it when I was pretty young and remember very little of it, mostly the asylum stuff (with what I know now is a distorted version of Tik Tok), The witch (princess?) with 40 heads and the flying couch.
I see on the wiki page for the movie it says “The movie received mixed reviews from critics, who described the film’s content as too dark and intense for children”. So I know it wasn’t just me being a kid. Maybe it’s because it deviated too far from the books or maybe it’s because I read the books as an adult, but I don’t recall the books being scary in any way. Of course, as I said earlier, in the books Oz is a real place that Dorothy actually travels too. In fact, not only do her Aunt and Uncle not question her about it (or send her to an asylum), I think her Uncle may have traveled to Oz with her once (or if not all the way to Oz, done some kind of traveling with her).
ETA, The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, really is a good book, I’d recommend it to anyone.
Also, there’s The Dreamer Of Oz (movie) that shows how L Frank Baum came up with the story. And John Ritter is a dead ringer for Baum.
As far as the Oz books go, my WAG would be that it’s a response to the increasing industrialization over the previous century. Young people were leaving the farms behind to look for work in the city. So if Dorothy ends up moving to Oz in the books, I guess the takeaway is that working 12 hour days at some soul-killing factory in the city is still better than shoveling shit on some smelly farm.
As Robert Frost put it,
In one of the later books, Uncle Henry and Aunt Em move to Oz, and with them there, Dorothy is perfectly happy to become a permanent resident of Oz. (This is, of course, when the wicked witches are no longer in power, and Oz is, on the whole, a pretty pleasant place.) Apparently they’re the main thing that makes Kansas “home” for Dorothy.
Baum certainly didn’t intend for Oz to be particularly dark and scary. From [Wikipedia](L. Frank Baum - Wikipedia):
I agree: the overall tone of the books is light and cheerful and positive, even though some of the incidents could be considered nightmarish. See the thread The Oz books are seriously screwed up.
This theme is not limited to “old” movies.
Look at Michael J. Fox’s*** Doc Hollywood or Pixar’s Cars*** (some might argue they’re essentially the same movie). In both cases, a young hotshot who’s bound for fame and fortune in LA decides he’d be happier in a small town filled with quaint, lovable rustic folks.
That’s STILL a fairly common type of ending in Hollywood.
As I started reading that wiki quote where it said “avoid stereotypical characters such as dwarfs or genies, and remove the association of violence and moral teachings” my first thought was ‘well, he really missed the boat on that one’. I mean, not only the munchkins, but the first few books were quite violent. Also, some of the antagonists were pretty twisted for no particular reason.
There is no home like the one you’ve got because that home belongs to you.
Return to Oz is a terrific movie and kept far more of Baum’s imaginative ideas.
And their Dorothy grew up hotter than Judy Garland.
