Ever since L. Frank Baum first published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, it has been hailed as an original American fairy tale.
It's easy to see why: It's a hero's journey and a coming-of-age story with timeless themes. Dorothy Gale learns the value of courage, kindness, self-reliance, and imagination, but the plot is so wild and characters so strange that it doesn't seem like a moral tale. No wonder generations of writers, filmmakers, musicians, and TV producers have returned to Oz over and over.
Emerald City, the latest Wizard of Oz adaptation, which premieres on NBC this month, promises a brand-new Dorothy. She's all grown up and Latina (played by True Detective' s Adria Arjona) — and if the show knows what's good for it, she'll have some of that spunk that has kept fans coming back for more.
As we look back at some of the many Dorothys of the past 117 years, that vivacity stands out as the one characteristic necessary to make the character faithful to the original. Each of these girls (and a couple of men, too), has something relevant to her/his time. Place her in Kansas, Harlem, or a maximum-security prison, and you can mold her story into something new and still completely recognizable.
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Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum (1900)
In his introduction, Baum wrote that while older fairy tales used "blood-curdling incidents" to teach morals to children, there was no more need for such dark allegories, since they learned morality elsewhere. "Having this thought in mind, the story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written solely to please children of today."
On the most basic level, orphan Dorothy is a heroine on a quest who learns about the power of her imagination and the value of her family back home in gray, tree-less Kansas. That doesn't mean that she isn't open to interpretation by grownups. Since the '60s, there's been a much-debated theory that the book is about populism and American monetary policy. Others have said it's a story about religion (either glorifying it or debunking it, depending on whom you ask). We choose to believe that Baum wanted the story's meaning to be in the eye of the beholder. It wouldn't have aged so well if he'd been any more specific than that.
Photo: Courtesy of HarperCollins.
Bebe Daniels, The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz (1910)
This isn't the first movie adaptation of Baum's book, but it is the first surviving one. At 13 minutes long, the silent film assumes that viewers already know the story and are just there to see a cinematic spectacle. Dorothy isn't the main attraction here; she's a cute observer blown to Oz in a haystack along with the Scarecrow, a donkey, a cow, and Toto, who are all people in costumes. (There are real camels in the movie, but they didn't want the bother of training a dog?) To us, Daniels stands in for all the young actresses in cinematic history who have been asked to stand around looking pretty while the special effects guys make a movie around them.
Photo: Popperfoto/Getty Images.
Judy Garland, The Wizard Of Oz (1939)
In 1939, America was still recovering from the Great Depression. Across the Atlantic, Hitler was terrorizing Europe. And on the screen, Garland's Dorothy sang "Over the Rainbow " with both sadness and hope. We can see her as every American in that fluctuating time, deciding that no Wizard is as powerful as their own grit. After growing up watching this movie in India, Salman Rushdie wrote in his book Out of Kansas that Dorothy sang the hope of all migrants: "What she expresses here, what she embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of leaving, a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots... In its most potent emotional moment, this is unarguably a film about the joys of going away, of leaving the grayness and entering the color, of making a new life in the 'place where there isn’t any trouble.' " The interpretation we like best, though, is that Dorothy is an artist, dreaming up the Technicolor Oz as an escape from drab farm life.
Photo: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images.
Diana Ross, The Wiz (1978)
Though it's loosely based on the 1975 Broadway musical by the same name, this movie has some key differences that made it both a flop at the box office and a cult classic. First off, there's Ross, who was 33 when the movie was made, so rather than a girl in Kansas, she's a spinster schoolteacher living with her aunt in Harlem. Then, there's the fact that both Ross and screenwriter Joel Schumacher were followers of Werner Erhart's "est" self-help movement. They turned Dorothy into a not-so-subtle symbol of the power of self-actualization — as in, she always had the ability to go back home by herself and never needed the Wiz. Yeah, that's pretty overbearing, but given the performances by Ross, Michael Jackson (the Scarecrow), and Lena Horne (Glinda), and the Oz-ified New York setting, modern audiences can overlook its flaws for the sake of nostalgic enjoyment.
Photo: John D. Kisch/Separate Cinema Archive/Getty Images.
Elton John, "Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road" (1973)
"I should have stayed on the farm/ I should have listened to my old man," John sings in this hit about longing to leave behind life in a penthouse, surrounded by the "dogs of society." Nope, it wasn't John who wanted to shed his glitzy life but co-writer Bernie Taupin. "The lyrics to the title track do say that I want to leave Oz and get back to the farm," Taupin told Rolling Stone. "I think that's still my M.O. these days. I don't mind getting out there and doing what everybody else was doing, but I always had to have an escape hatch."
Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images.
Fairuza Balk, Return from Oz (1985)
In this Disney sequel, Balk's Dorothy's second trip to Oz is an escape from electroshock therapy. The Oz she returns to isn't the Technicolor dream world of 1930, but an eerie land filled with '80s stop-motion animation and animatronics. This Dorothy represents an era where moviemakers couldn't quite figure out how to tell dark children's stories without giving them nightmares for life.
Photo: Buena Vista/REX/Shutterstock.
Wicked , Book (1995) & Musical (2003)
Gregory Maguire helped to kick off a huge trend in novels that reimagine classic stories with this version of Baum's world, in which the Wicked Witches of the West and East were misunderstood sisters, Elphaba and Nessarose. Dorothy's a minor character in the conflict between green-skinned Elphaba and the evil Wizard, though it is still her house that kills Nessarose. In the book, she's an accidental pawn of the Wizard, and means to put out a fire when she throws water at Elphaba. In the musical, she's but a silhouette manipulated by those around her.
Photo: ITV/REX/Shutterstock.
Oz (1997-2003)
Okay, there's no actual Dorothy in this HBO drama about inmates in the experimental "Emerald City" program within the maximum-security Oswald State Correctional Facility. Believers in the need for criminal justice reform can go ahead and assume most prisoners are Dorothys who really need to find their way back home.
Photo: Abbot Genser/Rysher Entertainment/REX/Shutterstock.
Ashanti, The Muppets Wizard of Oz (2005)
In this ABC TV-movie, Dorothy is a teenage waitress working in her aunt and uncle's Kansas diner who wants to join the Muppets' latest production. Her dream of Oz is pretty close to the standard story, though there's a showbiz slant and Miss Piggy plays all three witches. We're going out on a limb to say this Dorothy stands for everyone's wish that we, too, could join a Muppets show and have a pet talking prawn.
Photo: Sylvain Gaboury/Getty Images.
Zooey Deschanel, Tin Man (2007)
In this Sci Fi (before it was Syfy) miniseries, DG (Deschanel) is a waitress in a small town in Kansas who keeps having disturbing dreams about a woman with lavender eyes until a storm caused by a sorceress transports her to a land called the Outer Zone, or O.Z. Rather than being a regular girl in a strange land, DG turns out to have been born in it, with hidden magical talents to match her wicked sister's (they're both the O.G. Dorothy's great-granddaughters). This DG is much more of a modern heroine, called upon to take real action to save her world from a permanent eclipse. You should just watch this to see Alan Cumming and Deschanel in such an odd setting.
Photo: Courtesy of Sci-Fi.
James Franco, Oz The Great And Powerful (2013)
In this origin story, it's Franco's Oscar who's a stand in for Dorothy, even though he eventually becomes the Wizard himself. Back in Omaha, he's a small-time illusionist and ladies' man, and those skills actually come in handy when he finds himself in the land that shares his same nickname, Oz. Sure, this is the story of how a regular guy faked his magic to become king, but it's also about Oscar learning to be less selfish and more loyal. (Too bad that lesson becomes a bit of a yawn in this overblown movie.)
Photo: Walt Disney Pictures/REX/Shutterstock.
Lea Michele, Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return (2014)
Michele's Dorothy is ostensibly based on the original Baum character, as written in a sequel penned by his great-grandson, Roger Stanton Baum. But what she represents in this animated movie is just how much can go wrong with an iconic character when a bunch of random big names (Bernadette Peters, Hugh Dancy, Dan Aykroyd, Jim Belushi, Martin Short) phone-in their voice talent. Just check out some of the reviews that make up its 16 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating, and you'll get the picture.
Photo: Courtesy of Summertime Entertainment.
Dorothy Must Die , By Danielle Page (2014)
After Wicked and all sorts of YA re-imaginings of fairy tales, no one was all that surprised to see this series take Dorothy to the next level: Villain.
She's gone corrupt with power as she rules Oz, and it's up to the protagonist, Amy, to assassinate that formerly sweet girl from Kansas. Even former heroes can grow up to have flaws.
Photo: Courtesy of HarperCollins.
Teri Reeves, Once Upon a Time (2016)
Dorothy first appeared on the show in season 3 as a young girl (Matreya Scarrwener) who poses a threat to witch Zelena, but doesn't exactly kill her with that bucket of water. However, she really made an impact in season 5, when she returned as a grown woman (Reeves). Put under a sleeping spell by Zelena, she can only be awoken by "true love's kiss," which comes from her wolf friend Ruby (Meghan Ory). This is the series' first LGBTQ couple, marking a change in Dorothy from archetype to something more like a real human.
Photo: Courtesy of ABC.
Adria Arjona, Emerald City (2016)
In this brand-new NBC series, Dorothy is a nurse searching for her birth mom when that darn tornado takes her on a detour to the Emerald City. This being a show for grownups, the familiar elements are all given adult themes — the scarecrow is an amnesiac man she finds being crucified; there's a yellow opium road; and the Wizard's got drones instead of flying monkeys. Arjona's character is certainly not the naive girl on which she's based — the modern world is not in Kansas anymore.
Photo: Courtesy of NBC.
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