The Wizard of Oz (film)/WMG

The is WMG of the movie; see Land of Oz entry for theories about the original books by Frank Baum.

Glinda is a Villain with Good Publicity who used Dorothy to seize control over the Land of Oz as her Evil Plan.

Glinda, the so-called "Good Witch of the North," clearly has weather-control powers. She summons Dorothy's house from Kansas with a tornado and drops it on the Witch of the East, killing her. Glinda then gives the Ruby Slippers to Dorothy; these slippers can teleport the wearer anywhere she wants. Naturally, Glinda refuses to disclose this information to Dorothy until the end.

The Witch of the West shows up and demands to know who murdered her sister and tries to claim her sister's slippers as her rightful property. Glinda coldly rebuffs her and threatens to kill her with another dropped house. She then sends Dorothy on an unnecessary errand to the Wizard of Oz.

The Wizard figures that Dorothy is a tool of Glinda and sends her to fight and kill a far superior opponent, hoping the Witch of the West will do her in. This fails when Dorothy's companions break into the Witch's home and murder her by accident. Glinda then causes the Wizard's balloon to go out of control and blow away, getting him out of the picture. Since we never hear from the Witch of the South, we can only assume that Glinda got rid of her some other way. This leaves Glinda as the only remaining powerful entity in all of Oz. She installs the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion as puppet rulers and sends Dorothy home. Glinda now has control over all of Oz, including the Emerald City's lucrative opium (poppy) trade. Just As Planned.

• • This theory sounds familiar. I wonder, where have I heard it before?
• The Witch of the West was still clearly willing to kill Dorothy to get her hands on the shoes. Even if they were rightfully hers, that's a bit excessive.
  • But Glinda still knowingly set Dorothy up as her fall-girl. Whether the Witch of the West was willing to kill Dorothy or not, Dorothy wouldn't be in danger without Glinda putting her there.
• The Xanatos Gambit certainly isn't perfect. According to Return to Oz, the Ruby Slippers ended up in the hands of the Nome King, who used their power to take over Oz. Presumably, Glinda was executed when the Emerald City fell. Even after Oz is restored, her secrets are concealed by the new ruler, Ozma, for her own purposes.
  • er um which part of the MGM Wizard of Oz film and Return to Oz are not in the same continuity did you not understand?
  • ... wasn't aware that wild mass guessing was supposed to make sense...
• Also, where is the Witch of the South?
• Cracked.com provides a pretty thorough explanation of this here.
  • The original Guess predates that article by a good long while. Just sayin'.

Oz is real; it's Dorothy's life in Kansas that was All Just a Dream.

C'mon, someone had to suggest it.

• She briefly became lucid due to a bump on the head when her flying house malfunctioned and crashed... When she "sees" Auntie Em in the crystal ball, it's a sign that she's starting to slip back into delusion. By the time she meets the Wizard, she's already half-hallucinating and thinks she sees and hears the Wizard talk about being from "her world" and flying "back" to it. At the end of the movie, she sinks fully back into her delusional madness and becomes a ward of the Emerald City. The Slippers remain on her until her death.

Dorothy is the first incarnation of Haruhi Suzumiya

After seeing the magical land of Oz and its wonders, her soul strove for more and more supernaturality and never found rest.

Also, if there's a time lord, there must be a Haruhi as well.

Witches are not weak to water, but to houses

Forget the Weaksauce Weakness. The Witch of the East died from being hit by a house. In the land of Oz, water is made up of tiny houses, which combined to slowly churn the Witch of the West into a liquid state.

• "Water is made of..." The internet will be presented to you in a tasteful ceremony on the steps of town hall. Now buy me a new keyboard with your fancy winnings.

The entire film is a pre-emptive allegory of World War Two and its lasting effects

All of which was written by a time-traveler who worked for MGM.

• Dorothy is America (she desires a return to the status quo), the Scarecrow is the USSR (he seeks validation of its system of government), the Tin Man is Nazi-occupied nations (struggling to regain their national character), and the Cowardly Lion is Great Britain (struggling to regain recognition of status as a world power). Toto represents American minorities (seen as a lesser force which nevertheless proves invaluable to the war effort).
• The Wicked Witch of the East is Japan, the Wicked Witch of the West is Nazi Germany, the flying monkeys are the Luftwaffe, and the Winkie soldiers are the German people.
• Glinda the Good is the fleeting promise of peace, the Munchkins are the people of Japan, and the Yellow Brick Road is the journey to prewar norms.
• The house dropped on the Eastern witch is the atomic bomb, and the bucket of water thrown on the Western witch is the chain of events begun by the Normandy invasion. The ruby slippers are the prosperity and political influence offered by being a major world power.
• The Emerald City is the dream of a post-Depression prosperous future, and the Wizard is FDR (who unintentionally abandons Dorothy/America in her time of need). The poppy field represents World War I, whose status as the "war to end all wars" lulled the major world powers into a false sense of security.
• The Kansas farm and all its inhabitants represent a nostalgic, sepia-tinted vision of American life before the modernized nightmare begun by WWI. The fact that Dorothy returns to it was an optimistic footnote added by the time-traveller.
  • That's a complex theory, filled with in-depth symbolism. It also depends on the idea that Japan surrendered first in WW 2. As it turned out, Germany was defeated earlier.
    • The writer didn't get everything right; they might have jumped around in the time-stream a bit and gotten mixed-up. Maybe all the competent time-travelers were under contract to Warner Brothers, and Jack wouldn't lend them out. Or, even more likely, the release of the film affected the events of the war itself.
  • Partially jossed. The film is based off of a book written by L. Frank Baum in 1900. This would mean that he would have to be a time traveler as well. In addition to that, couldn't these so called "Time traveling writers" do something more useful? Like warn us in a more direct fashion?
    • Maybe he was a sociopathic jerk? Or a time travelling Nazi?

Oz is real, Miss Gulch is the Wicked Witch of the East, and the shoes created the appearance of All Just a Dream

Gulch follows Dorothy but is crushed by the house. When the shoes brought Dorothy back to the real world, she fell asleep, leading to the apparent All Just a Dream ending. This also explains how Return to Oz could work and why Toto was never in any danger again.

• • Return to Oz is NOT in the same universe as the MGM Wizard of Oz film

It's all a Reaper's Game

Dorothy and her family were all killed by the twister and entered Kansas' UG. Glinda is the conductor, the Wizard is the composer and the Wicked Witch of the West is the GM. Dorothy's entry fee was her Aunt Em, the others' fees are obvious. All differences between Oz and the Shibuya UG can be chalked up to regional rule differences (which canonically exist according to the secret reports).

Oz was a matter of life and death.

Uncle Henry tells Professor Marvel at the end of the movie, "For a moment, we thought she was going to leave us!"

The brilliant Technicolor of Oz is the temptation. She may stay or she may return home to the gray dustbowl. If she returns home, she lives and recovers. If she stays in Oz, she dies.

• To reword that, Dorothy's exposure to dust, debris, and being hit on the head almost killed her, and Oz was a Near-Death-Experience. The entire thing was her brain creating a hallucination of sorts (like how sometimes people who have Near Death Experiences say they saw a light, heaven, or hell, or at least how they imagine it to be) which was all representative of her brain struggling to get her to wake up. It also showed her what could be her eternal reward, which is colorful and full of adventure, unlike Kansas. She really was dying the whole time, and if she had utterly lost her will to live, and stayed in Oz, and died in the real world.
  • Watch Charley Grapewin's face as Dorothy tells what happened to her. This is exactly how he is playing it. He is the only one who doesn't laugh with the others, and says "Of course we believe you, Dorothy."

Kansas is Dorothy's first-level dream. Oz is her second-level dream.

"Professor Marvel", "Hunk", "Zeke", "Hickory", and "Miss Gulch" are a team of dream thieves who are trying to incept in her the idea that all your troubles will be easily avoided or resolved by surrounding herself with the comfortable and familiar.

By extension, the Munchkins are Dorothy's projections, and the Gatekeeper, Doorman, and the grandiose Wizard of Oz are manifestations of Professor Marvel's subconscious narcissism, which threaten the plan by trying to take over the story as the real villain. "Miss Gulch" therefore arranges to be a distraction while Marvel resolves his personal issues; by the time Dorothy and company return to the Emerald City, Marvel is back in control and managed to retcon Oz's original appearance into an intentional trick covering up an inferiority complex.

Because Dorothy isn't nearly as self-reflective as Fischer, only two levels of dreaming are needed; hence, the sedative is normal, there's no risk of Limbo ("Miss Gulch" is woken up when she melts), and there doesn't need to be a simultaneous kick in Oz to boot her back into Kansas. (The kick from Kansas is, of course, the house falling to the ground.)

The Coroner of Munchkinland has other jobs.

He examined her (the witch) as coroner, because it would be inappropriate to examine her as butcher or tanner. It's either this or one of the next two or three guesses.

Munchkinland is so idyllic even under (or perhaps because of the witch's rule) that anyone can have whatever job they want.

Segregated by sex, of course. They have a coroner not because they need a full-time coroner, but because the coroner thought it would be a cool job, and all he really has to do is kick the body and see if it kicks back, or hold a mirror under its mouth if he's feeling really thorough.

Munchkinland has an extremely high birthrate and a lot of fatal crime.

Hence why they have a full-time coroner with a population of around a hundred.

The Munchkinland Coroner's job boils down to professional skiving.

Assuming everyone is immortal in Oz no matter how dead they seem, like in the books, he's pretty much never called in. When he is called in, he either says "yep, they're dead" and that they were only mostly dead in the event of a revival, says "nope, they're not dead" in the case that the body kicks back, and "not are they only merely dead, they're really most sincerely dead" in the rare event that something he knows can't be revived from happens (like a witch getting watered) or he is better off with them Deader Than Dead and doesn't want to risk them being healed (like when a maniacal despot who made his life miserable has a house fall on her, and is incapable of kicking back because of full-body paralysis).

• • Alternately, since in the film it appears that people can actually die, the coroner's job amounts to determining how dead somebody is. Somebody who's been rendered effectively helpless but still alive is not dead. Somebody who is helpless and unresponsive but capable of revival is "merely" dead. In the Witch's case with the house, she was "most sincerely dead", meaning dead forever and incapable of being brought back.

The Wicked Witch of the West is related to the aliens from Signs.

It explains her greenish skin, clawed hands, and water vulnerability. She wears the big black dress to hide her chameleon powers.

The "secret 60s ending" wasn't from MGM.

• The alleged secret ending shown once, sometime in the sixties, and it wasn't just a dream.
• The movie was first shown in 1939, so we have a three-decade gap between that and the supposed ending.

Why would MGM have had another ending on tape but only used it once? If it wasn't theirs. My idea is that it was made by a TV network for that one viewing. The real ending would have still been shown. (Senshi Sun)

Dorothy really is a witch.

She just doesn't know it, and so uses all her magic unconsciously. She was bored with her dull, dreary life in Kansas, so she summoned the tornado to take her to Oz. The Good Witch of the North, seeing that Dorothy has immense magical potential she's unaware of, makes a show of offering her protection to get in her good graces, while sending her to see the Wizard, the one person (she thinks) who might be able to handle this Tyke Bomb.

Along the way to the Emerald City, Dorothy gets lonely, so she brings a scarecrow and a statue made of tin to life to keep her company. And when a lion attacks them, she uses a spell to turn the great beast into a coward. And, when faced with the wrath of the Wicked Witch of the West, turns a bucket of water into a potion of dissolving in order to kill her. Again, all unintentionally. Under this theory, the silver/ruby shoes are just placebos like everyone else's gifts; Dorothy transported herself back to Kansas by her own power; she just needed Glinda to convince her she could.

• • This theory actually makes some sense when it comes to the books, as she comes into possession of a magic belt that grants wishes, and uses magical artifacts with the same ease a native Ozian would. It would also fit with Tin Man, where her granddaughter (the lavender-eyed Queen) and great-granddaughters (DG and Azkedellia) are shown to have some potent magic at their disposal.

There is no Witch of the South, only the Wizard.

We see a total of four practitioners of magic in the movie. Glinda in the North, the Witches of the East and West, and the Wizard of Oz. If three of the four are assigned to a specific direction, it just stands to reason that the fourth is assigned to the remaining direction. The Emerald City must be somewhere in the South. Glinda doesn't seem to know that the wizard can't do real magic, she and the other witches have accepted his Sufficiently Advanced Technology as proof of his wizardry and appointed him the magician of the south.

• This is loosely supported by the original book, in which the Wizard wears a different guise for each of the four travelers, whom he meets individually. In one case he is convincingly disguised as a beautiful woman. So why not another woman entirely?

The house didn't kill the Wicked Witch of the East.

It was the still-dripping water intake pipes that went plumb through her body, making a slowly-dissolving wound. The socks didn't curl up because the lack of slippers made her feet dissolve; her feet were already dissolving from the inside, and the slippers just kept them shaped like feet until the removal of the slippers and the subsequent collapse of the feet. The coroner looked in the slight gap and saw the witch's body slowly dissolving under the house, which is certainly a sign of being really, most sincerely dead in witches.

• That's certainly way more plausible than the "Oz water is made of houses" theory.

It was not just a dream

• Even as a kid I always thought it was real.

Oz really is a wizard, and encountered Dorothy in Kansas as Prof. Marvel after the events in the Land of Oz.

He felt the society built around him was limiting his potential, so he used Dorothy as an excuse to downplay his existence so he could escape to travel through space and time.