The Fairy Tale We’ve Been Retelling for 125 Years: Every generation has an Oz story, but one retelling best captures what makes L. Frank Baum’s world sing.

By hill-mountain8664

Honestly, it feels like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is probably the best guess for America’s “favorite” fairy tale. It’s from 1900, and Dorothy gets dropped into this fantasy world that kind of lines up with big American themes—figuring things out for yourself, reinventing who you are, chasing bigger horizons. She makes friends, deals with a witch, and ends up finding her own confidence, but also just wanting to get back home. It seems like Oz was empowering for her, and I guess for Baum and a lot of readers too, even if some of his other stuff had pretty twisted ideas. What keeps it alive today, though, isn’t really the original book so much as all the adaptations. People mostly remember it through the movies, especially that 1939 Judy Garland musical with “Over the Rainbow,” and the whole yellow brick road look. And since the 1956 version basically opened the door for new versions that weren’t officially part of the original lineup, everyone after that just kept riffing on the same images and turning out their own Oz stories.