Surrender, Dorothy

When I first saw “The Wizard of Oz” as a child, it was so long ago that Judy Garland’s fan club was still heterosexual. Since then, I have sat through the thing at least a dozen times, always with enjoyment, sometimes with a tear in my eye.

But now I discover that, to true Oz buffs, MGM’s 1939 Technicolor extravaganza borders on sacrilege. Why? Because at its conclusion, the Land of Oz--with its Munchkins, wizard and witches, good and bad; with its cowardly lion and talking scarecrow and tin woodsman; with its yellow brick road snaking through an enchanted landscape to Emerald City--turns out to be a mere dream of Dorothy’s.

Nothing of the sort happens in the book on which the movie is based. “The Wizard of Oz” was written in 1900 by L. Frank Baum, a true American eccentric who was born in a little town in upstate New York in 1856 and who died in Hollywood in 1919. Baum followed up his first Oz book with 13 others. Dorothy figures in some but not all of them; in one, the little orphan from Kansas is magically teleported back to Oz as a permanent resident, along with her Uncle Henry and Auntie Em.

The Oz that emerges from Baum’s books has rather precise contours that are most un-dreamlike. For instance, its capital, Emerald City, is revealed to have 9,654 buildings and 57,318 residents--the latter a fairly constant number because no one grows old and death is rare. Oz pullulates with rococo beings unknown in the movie like the Woozy, a blue, square-shaped wooden animal whose eyes dart fire when anyone says “Krizzle-Kroo”; the Nome King, a somewhat loopy figure of evil who is Dorothy’s arch-nemesis and who is afraid of fresh eggs; and Princess Ozma, the benign and exquisite sovereign of Oz.

The reality of Oz has been compelling to the countless children who have devoured these books over the decades--including Gore Vidal, who some years ago stated in an essay that it was the Oz books that got him addicted to reading. As for adults, some stern-faced librarians might have been just as happy if this fantasy realm had never been conjured into existence, since it offers no “improving” moral lessons. Others find it seductively real: It was big with hippies back in the ‘60s, and today there are an International Wizard of Oz Club and a quarterly magazine devoted to Oziana, the Baum Bugle.

In the eight decades since Baum’s death, two dozen additional Oz books have been written by would-be successors; these efforts have varied considerably in quality, with only a few approaching the original heights of imaginative whimsy. And now, with the centennial of the whole thing drawing near next year, Martin Gardner becomes the latest writer to assume the mantle of the Royal Historian of Oz.

Gardner, a longtime columnist for Scientific American, is a versatile, humorous and often profound writer and the author of numerous books on scientific, philosophical and literary matters. He has also served as something of a public debunker, a scourge of pseudo-science and superstition. One of his targets is Freud’s theory of dreams and their significance. When Gardner has a character in “Visitors From Oz” say, apropos of the MGM movie, “How dare they turn Baum’s faithful reporting [about Oz] into something as trivial as a dream!” the remark is really meant to have some resonance.

To prove the world of Oz has a place in the real world, Gardner brings Dorothy, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman to modern-day New York, where, as one might guess, they get into some sticky spots. (The Cowardly Lion wisely decides to forgo the trip, because outside of Oz he would lose the power of speech and be just another dumb beast.) In doing this, the author clears up a major conceptual difficulty with Oz: Just where is it supposed to be?

“Somewhere over the rainbow” is, after all, a trifle vague. For Dorothy’s first visit to Oz, she had been blown there from drab Kansas by a cyclone. A subsequent sojourn occurred after she was washed overboard from a ship en route to Australia; after Dorothy decided to move there forever, the good witch Glinda cut Oz off from our world. She accomplished this, Gardner explains, by shifting it 10 yards or so into the fourth dimension. So near, yet so far.

Improbably enough, however, Oz is accessible by e-mail. That is how Hollywood’s wealthiest producer of blockbuster movies gets in touch with Glinda. An Oz freak, he wants to make a computer-animated movie about the magical land in time for the 100th anniversary of the first Oz book. And who better to help this studio head launch the publicity campaign in New York than Dorothy and her sidekicks?

Dorothy, the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow are game for the adventure. The problem is getting them from Emerald City to the Big Apple. It looks insuperable at first, but another famous denizen of Oz, Professor Wogglebug, solves it. A pompous (and very large) insect comes up with the idea of using a Klein Bottle: a bizarre mathematical object whose neck passes through the fourth dimension. An obliging Emerald City craftsman fashions a human-sized working version of the Klein Bottle and, with the aid of this topological prop, our Ozites have soon dropped into the middle of Central Park--but not before they have encountered the Greek gods, Mary Poppins, Humpty Dumpty, the Mad Hatter and other over-the-hill fantasy stars who reside in the outer reaches of Oz.

If all this sounds a little remote from MGM’s Oz, matters become even more so once the scene shifts to contemporary New York. There, our trio meet Mayor Rudy Giuliani at City Hall; appear before amazed audiences on “Oprah” and “Rivera Live”; get denounced as demoniac by Pat Robertson; and are interviewed by political reporter Margaret Carlson (for sheer fright value, I would have used Bob Novak).

They are also pursued by a couple of murderous thugs in the employ of a rival studio head who is planning to make a new version of “Peter Pan” and is jealous of the buzz the Ozites are generating. Now here is what’s weird. This sinister rival production is to star Madonna as Peter Pan, Roseanne as Tinkerbell and Sylvester Stallone as Captain Hook, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and . . . lyrics by John Updike! What the devil is Updike doing in this galere? Presumably, Gardner is taking a gentle dig at the exalted novelist by lumping him with such low commercial talents, but won’t the joke be lost on younger readers?

Thanks to some magic pearls Princess Ozma has given her, Dorothy manages to thwart her various adversaries before returning to Oz. Surprisingly, Gardner’s heroine is a rather brassy and even pugnacious creature, given to using every means short of a head-butt to extricate herself from a tight situation. One misses the meeker, sweeter Dorothy of old.

Nevertheless, “Visitors From Oz” did hold my attention, though no tears came to my eyes while I was reading it, and I never really felt scared. The language is simple, and there are passages in it that could, I am sure, delight an 8-year-old. Yet, for my money, a Land of Oz that you can get to through a Klein Bottle seems a lot less real than one that exists in a dream. Gardner’s update of the Oz saga is a must for all true believers. It is a maybe for the rest of us.