Wizard Of Oz

The Wizard of Oz has been one of my favorite movies since I was five years old! I remember being very excited when my mom told me that it was coming on TV, we always made sure we watched it. Still to this day I believe the Wizard of Oz is one of the most popular films ever created, and still one of the most entertaining.

The world of Oz has always been one of my favorite fantasy worlds, and even when I was young I thought about this movie as being a fairy tale. Now that I’m older and have studies myths, I can easily make the connection from this film to being a myth. “Although a film is not, in the strict sense, a fairy tale, The Wizard of Oz can be treated as such because it was created communally by many writers, directors, actors, all whom shaped the story” (Myth 543). I’m not exactly sure if a fairy tale and myth are the same thing or if they are technically different, but I view them as being one in the same. This film is easily considerable to being a fairy tale because the whole world of Oz is a different universe. The creatures, buildings, scenery, and characters are like nothing in our world, all this makes me thing myth.

What attracted me to this movie when I was young was the amazing colors and the creepy characters. I loved the sense of strange that it gave me. Then I was not capable of analyzing specific characters, I simply viewed Dorothy as a scared girl trying to just get home. Today I can look at this character and believe her to be a hero. “If we consider The Wizard of Oz from the point of view of Dorothy, we can see a process of growth that occurs in the main character as she moves through the story” (Myth 544). A hero in a story has to overcome something and learn from it. Dorothy overcomes many things in this story, for example she defeats the wicked witch, faces many scary events, she goes out of her way to help other characters, and she even helps the divine wizard in the end. She is very much so a hero.