Wizard of Oz and the impact on film Essay

Submitted By ScarletDragon101
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Pages: 4
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Kristen Keller
Dr. Lori Liggett
TCOM 4660
September 30, 2013 Wizard of Oz: The compass, historical and cultural phenomena behind the scenes. The 1939 movie and the book are very different in time periods. I have never read the book series so I fully don’t have enough information to make any responses on the book but I am familiar with the movie so I will speak mostly on that. In 1939, there quite a few major events that were helping to shape the movie in a few different ways. These such events included the Great Depression, the westward expansion, the dust bowl, and we were in between WW1 and WW2. In America, we had the luxury of hearing the news on the radio and thus, there would have been knowledge of going to war again with the axis powers. There were also huge problems with the lack of vegetation out in the outer states like Oklahoma and Kansas. A very big key factor that is highly noticeable within the movie is how the compass is used and interwoven within the storyline. Today, September 30, 2013, we are still using the same exact directions to help us determine right from wrong. In the movie, the evil sides are incorporated to be represented by the East and West while the North and South were the good sides. In the book series, it was written shortly after the Civil War so there is good indication to why the North and South would work together as one. The East and West at that time could have also been representing the Allied and Axis powers that were coming into the picture when the Second World War looming over America. There was a lot of discrimination going on during the westward expansion as well with the Chinese that were coming to America for work. There was a lot of turmoil for those that were of a different nationality because of the treatment they received from Americans and the American government as well. This was a huge issue that led so many Japanese-Americans to get put into camps during this part of the war. This is also led to believe to be another incarnation of the evil East. The West was used the most though in the story. Now I’m not familiar with the time period that the book was originally written in but, in 1939, the Westward Expansion was full of lies from the government. Most of the settlers were told that if they could make their land fruitful, they would receive the deed to their plot of land within ten years. Most didn’t bother to stay that long as the land was being stripped of the nutrients that it needed and the native grasses were destroyed allowing the winds to kick up into the fierce wind storms that this is what we know today as the Dust Bowl. There were also a lot of
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