Board Thread:Spoilers!/@comment-11464223-20140207061100/@comment-1916997-20140215164348

Saintfighteraqua wrote: Sorry for the rant but...

It makes me sad how few people on here understand the source material for Oz. I hope they keep as close to the books as possible and stay classy by avoiding Wicked and the MGM musical references.

I don't mind the occasional reference but as a fan of the books I am pretty annoyed by the constant need to change so much. Oz has so much more to offer than that.

Glinda should NOT be the black fairy because first of all, she is a witch or sorceress. (Later books say all the people of Oz are fairy people, but NOT that kind of fairies though.) She also should not be blonde. Glinda is absolutely a redhead. She was a red head in all of the Oz books, the MGM movie and even the novel Wicked. The ONLY reason people think she is blonde is the Wicked musical (she would have been a redhead even there but they wanted to insert as many blonde jokes as possible and tailored the role for Kristin Chenoweth.) And for whatever ever stupid reason Disney decided to make her a blonde in their latest Oz movie. (My guess is they are still in the blonde = good mindset.) For the people who think Glinda is secretly wicked, she's not. In the books she was mysterious and kept to her own palace in the south but she was not wicked...though she might control more than she appears to. She also didn't try to deceive Dorothy as a lot of people think...she didn't even meet Dorothy until the end of the first book. Dorothy met the Witch of the North first and she just didn't know how to use the shoes.) It's the MGM musical that combined the two characters and made Glinda seem like a jerk for not telling Dorothy until the end.)

I hope they do show Dorothy and I hope she is a child and a flashback only character. The Mad Hatter was searching for the Silver Shoes but he said they were gone when he got there, so Dorothy's story was obviously in the past...or an alternate dimension. (Ruby Slippers are owned by MGM so I doubt they will be in the show even though Bae mentioned them.)

I don't mind Once putting it's own spin on Oz, in fact I look forward to that...but I also dread the thought of them just turning it into a Wicked/MGM crossover. They are better than that and have way more imagination.

The books have way more to offer and though I know they won't veer go there, I'd love to see Ozma eventually and see how they'd treat her...as a spoiler, Ozma was a girl who was transformed into a boy until her teens and then changed back into a girl after being rescued by Glinda. After having my hopes smashed over and over as an Oz fan (I'm looking at you Oz: The Great and Powerful) I don't hold out much faith that book fans will be given much with this, I just plan to enjoy it either way.

Sorry again for the rant, but ugh! While I see your point, I don't think we can deny that many people only know of Oz because of the MGM movie and the musical Wicked. Mind you I am someone who has read all 14 of Mr. Baum's original books, and enjoyed them. But unfortunatly, not many people read and even fewer will read a 100-year-old children's book series that is not even that easy to find (a company has recently packaged the 14 original books plus the 15th by whoever wrote that into a set of 5 omnibuses (3 books per omnibus) if you are currently looking to read them anybody, unfortunatly they are text only i.e. the original illistrations are not included, but it is still the easist way to find them currently), so naturally references to the things more people know about are going to be made. That includes things like WWW's green skin and Glinda's blonde hair. In a way, these have taken over the original character's design, after all no one talks about wanting to see a normally skin colored hag with an eyepatch as the next big bad, and I had even forgotten that Glinda had red hair canonlly, to me I like her as a blonde better, it contrasts the WWW's dark hair, and makes more sense as she's already in the red country presumably wearing a red dress, she doesn't need red hair as well. Besides, the thing you take away from Glinda is she's beautiful and elegant, her hair color, eye color, and skin tone really are unimportant (as long as she's not green) to her character. Finally, I totally agree that Oz has lots of characters that would be cool to see Ozma being at the forfront, but lets also not forget Tik-Tok, the Patchwork Doll, the Gnome King, or any of the other unique character Baum created. Would it be awesome to see in OUAT, yes, will we get them, probably not, the best hope for most of them is that we get Once Upon a Time in Oz, in a similar vein to Wonderland, which has given us lots of the Wonderland characters that did not make the main show cut.