I’ve still been plodding my way through the Thompson Oz books. Some I feel like I don’t have a lot to say about, but I’ll briefly give some thoughts on the books I’ve read since The Lost King of Oz.
The Giant Horse of Oz was okay. I find the title a bit baffling because the titular horse doesn’t appear until many chapters in and is not the main focus of the book at all, but that does happen in this series from time to time. I did wonder how the Munchkins and Gillikins felt about Ozma haphazardly assigning monarchs who she just met to their countries. Like “hey, you seem like a nice guy, here, rule one fourth of Oz.” Surely Ozma could have found better rulers than some guy she’s known for five minutes. I don’t think Thompson really goes anywhere with the characters Joe King (King of Gilliken Country) and King Cheeriobed (King of Munchkin Country) in subsequent books either. They show up at Ozma’s parties, that’s about it.
I didn’t like The Yellow Knight of Oz, partly because I just wasn’t ever invested in the character, and it seemed like just one event after another without much of a point. Like The Road to Oz, it was almost just a travelogue with not much at stake. The knight sets off on his journey because he’s bored rather than for any special reason, and he tours the often pun-based gimmicky communities of Oz. As Handy Mandy in Oz showed, even having a likable, well-rounded yet flawed main character can be enough to save a book with kind of a cliche and predictable plot, but the Yellow Knight was not a character like that, to me at least.
And lastly I read Pirates in Oz, which kind of like Baum’s Rinkitink in Oz was only barely an Oz book, with 98 percent of it taking place outside Oz. I actually liked this book too, and I shall need to give the public domain direct sequel Captain Salt in Oz a read now that I’ve familiarized myself with its predecessor. Thompson’s character Peter, who visits Oz from America in a few books, has a little more personality in this book than the blank slate, audience surrogate he seemed to be in Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz.
Which gets me to the next book I read, Ojo in Oz.
Overall, despite a few flaws I thought this was one of the better Thompson books, actually. I had heard mixed things about it. Working on an Oz book of my own in which Ojo is a character, I had long felt the need to familiarize myself with this book, although it is still under copyright and I couldn’t include anything directly from it legally anyway. It’s still canon. I can see why the modern Oz authors I’ve talked to tend to hate this book because its ending kind of limits Ojo’s storytelling potential, since (spoiler alert) he moves to Seebania to live with his newfound parents. Even Jack Snow, an official author of the Famous Forty, decided to retcon it and have Ojo and Unc Nunkie living back in their cottage outside the Emerald City as if Ojo in Oz had never happened. Its ending is going to force me to change my story around as well, that is, depending on how I publish it (if I’m self-publishing I will ignore this book too, if only for legal reasons). I think I can still work with it if I bend and twist the plot around, it’s not enough to completely sink my story. I may also have to work in other modern Oz stories I haven’t read yet to make it fit in with the Oz Timeline, making this story the least of my problems.
Anyway, back to the book. The first thing I would like to discuss is the title itself. Ojo IN Oz. It should have been Ojo of Oz. The titles of Oz books generally follow a formula, besides the odd titles like The Road to Oz and Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz. There isn’t always a character in the title (The Marvelous Land of Oz, The Emerald City of Oz), but when there is and the title character is a native of Oz, the formula is “((character name)) of Oz”. If the title character is from outside of Oz and visits Oz, the formula is “((character name)) in Oz”. Ojo is a native of Oz. Why then, is it Ojo IN Oz? Of course he’s in Oz, he’s never left Oz. The “in” makes it sound like he’s just visiting Oz. He’s a citizen of Oz. OF OZ. Ozma of Oz, Tik Tok of Oz, The Patchwork Girl of Oz, The Scarecrow of Oz, Glinda of Oz. They’re all of Oz, because they live there. Come to think of it, now that I’m looking at a list of the Famous Forty, two other books also have this problem, and both are Thompson books; Kabumpo in Oz and Grampa in Oz. Both title characters are Oz natives. It annoys me. It’s probably the publisher’s fault. Anyway, enough on that, it’s just a pet peeve.
The second thing I should discuss, and this story is fairly notorious for this, is the unfortunate racism. Yes yes, Baum could be racist too on occasion, and it was the 1930s, people didn’t know any better, but that’s less an excuse and more just an explanation. At the beginning of the story, Ojo is kidnapped by Gypsies, now widely known by the more politically correct name Romani. It is never explained why there is a group of Romani in Oz. Now Thompson could have easily replaced them with whatever fictional gimmicky group of Ozians she wanted and it would have been fine, but she had to go and needlessly vilify an ethnic group from the real world, in a way that makes zero sense in the context of the Oz series. I know attitudes were different in the 1930s, and this is far from the only negative depiction of Romani people in literature and media even going into recent decades, but I guess what irritates me about it most is how easily avoidable this could have been by simply replacing them with a fictional group of people native to Oz. It would both make more sense and be less racist. At the end of the book Ozma sends them back to Europe, and it’s the 1930s. Yikes. Not that Thompson would have known what was to happen in a few years. Thompson was merely a product of her environment. This book gives us a glimpse into the mentality that led to the genocide of Romani during World War II.
Moving onto more pleasant topics, this book contains in it one of the most unintentionally hilarious chapters ever in an Oz book. Now it’s best read if you dumb your sense of humor down to the maturity of a 12 year old, which fortunately I can do on command. When Dorothy, Scraps and the Cowardly Lion are searching for Ojo, one of the towns they visit is a place called Dicksyland. Dicksyland is populated by the “queer” Dicks. Some Dicks are described as short and fat, others thin and handsome. Their leader, Dickus the Third, the Dicktator of Dicksyland, has a “Right Hand Man” (I guess the Left Hand Man was fired, he just didn’t have as good of a grip on his job). The innuendos go on; the fact that “dick” already had its current slang meaning in the 1930s makes one wonder if Thompson knew. Was she a pure and innocent children’s book author, or could it be that she was somehow privy to obscene locker room jargon of the day and wanted to see how much her publisher would let her get away with? The world may never know.
In all, while I appreciate the effort Thompson often put in to revive some of Baum’s more forgotten characters (it always bugged me how Scraps just kind of stopped hanging out with Ojo after becoming a favorite at the palace, despite their previously close friendship, and he became relegated to mere cameos from then on), she unknowingly and unintentionally threw a monkey wrench into the stories of Oz authors for decades to come by taking Ojo in her own drastic direction. It’s similar to how she did her own thing with the Scarecrow’s backstory. Not that I really blame her for it, she was the Royal Historian after all, given free reign over Oz by the publisher, and the only more legitimate source on Oz canon than her is Baum himself. To be fair, Unc Nunkie and Ojo always had being former royals as part of their backstory, as Baum mentions Unc Nunkie could have been king of the Munchkins had Ozma not ascended to the throne. It just so happened that characters turning out to be royalty was one of Thompson’s favorite plot twists, so it almost seems like something she made up herself. Plenty of royals to go around in Oz when their towns seem to have kings and queens instead of mayors. At least Ojo’s dad, the lovable rogue Realbad, is a pretty cool guy and a well-rounded character. His mom could have used some characterization though.
In any case, Ojo later moved back to the Emerald City to be roommates with Button-Bright in modern post-Famous Forty canon, so there.
