Some spoilers for the Oz books below.

I’ve been reading the Oz books with my 5 year-old daughter, Georgia, before bed every night. I knew people called them classic American mythology, but I thought that was primarily based on the 1939 film, and a bit on The Wiz! and Wicked. I knew that the other books had many adaptations, but their cultural impact I thought must be small because I’d never seen or heard of their characters or plots.

Instead, what I’ve found is that, although clearly 100 years old, they have aged very well, and seem to have had broad and deep influence on popular culture beyond the first book’s adaptation in film.

We’re on the third book now, Ozma of Oz, and the number of popular culture echoes I’ve identified is already large. There is a strong theme of “animated people,” “talking animals,” and transformation in the books, but somehow each one that’s introduced seems fresh:

•  Jack Pumpkinhead was the first one I noticed strongly—Jack the Pumpkin King from the Nightmare Before Christmas is clearly based on him.
• The Tin Woodman’s origin in the books is very different than implied in the film. He’s not an animated statue—he’s a clumsy axeman who keeps amputating body parts, and having them replaced with tin ones, until nothing’s left; the transformation left him without any heart. He’s a cyborg that has lost his humanity. From the Skywalkers to countless cyborg films, this theme is now common in film.

  

  Jack Pumpkinhead with some familiar and less-familiar characters from Oz from The Marvelous Land of Oz

• The “group of friends that heedlessly head into adventure and peril, and prevail through luck” storyline is used a lot. The books are serial, and there’s lots of unlikely coincidence and favorite characters meeting and teaming up to please fans of the books (as Baum admits in an author’s introduction). Baum probably didn’t start this, of course, but it’s a great and early example of the form in American popular culture that’s thriving today in this Golden Age of television.
• Tiktok is a robot. Baum makes it clear he can think, has memory, is trustworthy and has empathy, but is not alive.  He’s a great exploration of what that could mean—in what sense is he not alive when the Tin Woodman is? Where modern characters like Data make this tension an explicit plot point, Baum prefers to simply assert the contradiction, like the droids in Star Wars.
• The jolly but sinister Nome King and his nome army in his Underworld Kingdom is a direct ancestor of the dwarf (and goblin?) kingdoms of Middle Earth.  The description of the underworld halls read like they could have been the basis for Jackson’s film adaptations of LOTR.
• I detected echoes of Princess Langwidere in the Fireys in Labyrinth, but she’s also a metaphor for moodiness and the inconstancy of personality.  The theme of trying on someone else’s personality and/or face is another cinema favorite.
• Unlike the film version with her “mid-Atlantic” accent, the book version of Dorothy is a hick, a Mark Twain-ian noble uneducated rural American. She’s got a great line about why, unlike the haughty Princess Ozma, she’s not too proud to beg for an audience with the Nome King: “I’m only a little girl from Kansas, and we’ve got more dignity at home than we know what to do with.”
• The Gump is basically a zombie, a reanimated monster from found parts. He’s clearly based on Frankenstein’s monster, but with full memory and faculties from his old life.  At the end of the book he begs to be disassembled because he’s an unnatural abomination. A great example of how Baum can explore some pretty dark themes with a cheery tone.
• The brainless but wise and faithful Scarecrow seems to me an echo of Sancho Panza.  A similar character from another American myth is Jar Jar Binks; Julia suggests Inspector Gadget as another.
• The idea for the Hungry Tiger is brilliant, but I can’t think of any similar characters since.  He’s a bloodthirty predator with morals.  He’s always growling threateningly about how hungry he is, how much he wants to eat the other characters, how much he’d love to find a fat baby to devour.  But he knows that it would do no good—eventually he’d get hungry again, and then he’d be responsible for a needless, innocent death.  So he’s always hungry.  This isn’t really Baum moralizing—the Cowardly Lion happily, regularly heads into the forest to find dinner.  This is sort of like the “reformed vampire” trope, except that the rationale is different: the Hungry Tiger would gladly take a life to permanently satisfy his hunger.

In some ways, the mores of the Oz books were ahead of their time.

• For instance, there is a lot of gender-bending.  There’s a hen named “Bill” because she was misgendered as a chick (Dorothy calls her “Billina” because “Putting the ‘eena‘ on the end makes it a girl’s name, you see”). And there’s even a sex-change of a major character I can’t write more about without major spoilers (can you spoil a 100 year-old classic American myth?)
• Oz is basically ruled by women:
  • The witches ruling the cardinal kingdoms of Oz at the opening of the books are all women.  When we finally see another “fairy land”, Ev, we find it is ruled by the feckless Princess Langwidere.
  • In the second book, General Jinjur leads her army of women (volunteers recruited from all four cardinal kingdoms) to depose the Scarecrow from the Emerald City (recall the Wizard installs the scarecrow as his successor before departing in his balloon). She’s basically a feminist Social Justice Warrior out to overthrow the unjust patriarchy, and she briefly succeeds!

General Jinjur’s army conquers the Emerald City, deposing the Scarecrow

In other ways, there’s a lot of retrograde material:

• Slavery is a thing, explicitly.  Our heroes chastise the Nome King for having (human!) slaves, but among their number are Tiktok and the Saw Horse, both of whom obediently and happily serve the “masters” that animated them.
• General Jinjur’s army of women is incompetent because of their femininity— they’re armed only with knitting needles and motivated primarily by the prospect of raiding the Emerald City for gemstones to make jewelry with.
• Men are always the muscle.
• For an American classic, democratic principles are surprisingly absent. Rule by birthright is the norm, with the occasional usurper by force or trickery (the Wizard, General Jinjur).

OK, what modern influences from Oz have I missed?  I haven’t finished Ozma of Oz yet, so please don’t give any major spoilers in the comments if you’ve read past me, but go ahead and name characters I haven’t met.