I think it's safe to say that this movie, like the novel/musical "Wicked," is an amalgamation of ideas from both the 1939 film and Baum's work. I haven't seen Raimi's film, but the trailers and TV spots have given a ton of information away. I had already guessed which actress would turn out to be the w.w. of the west, and then Roger Ebert bluntly spoiled it in his review anyway. I have read the first three of Baum's 14 Oz books, and in those three, he never provided backstories for the wicked witches. There was no indication that they were sisters, and it is my understanding that this relationship was invented for the 1939 movie. Baum also never described the witch of the west as having green skin (though she did have only one good eye that acted as a telescope), nor did Glinda float in a bubble. All of these elements came from the MGM film.
Now, the new character of the china doll
is apparently drawn from Baum's work. In the first novel, Dorothy and friends pass through a small land inhabited entirely by china figurines. Beyond that, having not seen the film myself, I can't say what else has been drawn exclusively from the original novels, but it does appear that the new film is more interested in fashioning ideas from both the books and older film into an entirely new mythology.
CSM126 wrote:because Baum never wrote his female protagonists as weak, pathetic ninnies in need of a man to save them.
While it is true that (in the first three novels) Dorothy and later Ozma are both headstrong, self-reliant young women, there is a subplot in the second novel,
The Land of Oz, that could either be read as absurdly satirical or horribly mysoginistic. It involves an all-female army that stages a revolution in the Emerald City, using knitting needles as weapons, apparently because they are tired of being ruled by men. They liberate all the women in the Emerald City and force the men to carry out household chores, but their main desire is to laze about and procure all of the emeralds in the city for their own enjoyment. I chose to read this as satire, and there is a great amount of satirical humor in Baum's books that unfortunately has never made it to any of the popular film adaptations. For one thing, his characters are hilariously self-absorbed and petty, and sometimes just downright dumb (in the first book, even after discovering that the wizard is a fake, the scarecrow et. al. still demand their desired gifts, and the wizard resorts to sewing a pin cushion inside the scarecrow's head, installing a plush heart in the tin man's chest, and giving the lion some kind of Jesus juice just so they'll stop bothering him).
