Getting Oz Censorship Right

This week’s posting at Banned Books Awareness highlighted L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a story kept off certain shelves over the years. Unfortunately, it overstated the case with this anecdote:

In 2004 both Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson conspired to get the movie banned from broadcast on public television because of “moral turpitude.” Robertson would publically state that “The Almighty told me that flying monkeys and witches are an affront to all good Christians.”

When asked at the time if either had ever seen the movie or read the book, they denied, saying that they “feared ungodly influence.”

Those quotes and the story came from this story at Deadbrain.com, a parody site that describes itself as “America’s least reliable news source.” Falwell, Robertson, and the FCC were too politically savvy to take on an American institution like the television showings of the MGM Wizard of Oz.

Complaints about how Baum depicted witches as potentially good, like Glinda, did fuel some small-town religious challenges to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the late 1900s. However, religious objections had little to do with the policy of several big library systems not to stock the Oz books in the middle of that century. I think there’s a risk of projecting present-day issues back into earlier controversies.

As memos reprinted in The Baum Bugle in 2000 showed, some American librarians objected to restocking the Oz books because they were:

• fantastic and unrealistic.
• a long series of increasingly indifferent literary quality.
• cheaply made (and enthusiastically read) and thus quick to wear out.

Glinda had nothing to do with it.

In 1957, this Toledo Blade article shows, Detroit library head Ralph Ulveling told a state library conference: “There is nothing uplifting or elevating about the [Oz] series.” He said they promulgated “negativism” and have “no value.” [Not “no value for children of today,” as the Banned Book Awareness article and other webpages render the quotation.] Some sources state that Ulveling also said the books dragged children down to a “cowardly level,” but that’s a paraphrase from the Blade’s editorial against Ulveling’s policy.

Two years later, Florida librarian Dorothy Dodd wrote a memo calling the Oz books “unwholesome for children in your community.” But, as this editorial in Life magazine shows, she didn’t single out the Oz books. She grouped that series with “Uncle Wiggly [sic], Tom Swift, Tarzan, the Bobbsey Twins,…Horatio Alger, the Campfire Girls, the Hardy Boys, and others of the ilk.” That editorial also reports and exemplifies the reaction against Dodd’s edict.

The 1950s brought to light other examples of librarians choosing not to stock or shelve the Oz books. But that institutional disapproval wasn’t really a reflection of the decade. In at least some cases, those practices had been in place for years. Responding to critics, Ulveling protested that he was simply explaining a policy that was three decades old.

The fact that people were asking about the Oz books and newspapers were covering the controversy showed how Americans of that decade wanted more access to the series. Few people complain about libraries stocking books that nobody wants. In 1956, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz entered the public domain, and in 1959 the MGM movie was shown on television for the first time. Widespread access to the original story cemented its place in American culture, good witches and all.

“Robin Is a Shadow of a Shadow”

The last weekly Robin looked at two ways DC Comics responded to the unexpected popularity of its new Robin character in 1992. This is about a third, known as Robin 3000.

The project originated with Byron Preiss, a New York book packager who loved comics and sci-fi and constantly juggled a lot of projects. Among the titles he commissioned were Bruce Coville’s My Teacher Is an Alien series and Sherwood Smith’s recent Oz sequels. Preiss died in a car accident in 2005, still juggling.

In the mid-1980s, Preiss approached the comics artist P. Craig Russell with the idea of producing a futuristic Tom Swift comic for Simon & Schuster, which then held the license for that technophilic teen. Preiss wrote the script with Steve Ringgenberg.

Russell recalled the project at length, as quoted on this webpage about his work:

It was around ’85 or ’86. . . . after just having finished adaptations of works by the likes of Maeterlinck, Kipling, and Wilde I thought it would be fun to draw a space opera with all the sorts of hardware and futuristic backgrounds I had not drawn since Killraven. A lark. “You know...for kids.” . . .

I had never worked on a project in which the script was being re-written in the course of drawing it. I also had never had to deal, albeit second hand, with such a hands-on art director as I had at S & S. I would send in pages to Byron who would take them to S & S, and then relay to me the needed changes. . . .

…it was finally finished, 58 pages and a cover designed by [Jim] Steranko (an 8 by 11 xerox layout that looked like he tossed it off in a matter of minutes and was absolutely spot-on in its dynamics and composition. I followed it exactly). Nothing happened. It was slated for S & S’s Spring schedule. It was slated for S & S’s Fall schedule. It was slated for Spring. Then Fall. Finally it was slated for bupkis! S & S was not going to be publishing graphic novels.

Preiss’s business model meant he constantly had to sell new titles to pay the costs of current projects while waiting for royalties on those that hit big. So he couldn’t afford to let Tom Swift 3000 die. He held onto Russell’s finished pages waiting for an opportunity.

And then the Tim Burton Batman movie was a huge hit. Tim Drake as Robin was a big hit. The comics market exploded with speculators buying lots of product, especially if it combined an established brand name and a #1 issue.

So Preiss sold DC Comics on the Tom Swift material rewritten to be a variant Batman adventure—what the post-Crisis publisher calling “Elseworlds,” meaning “stories that don’t count as part of our official continuity, even though less than a decade ago we wiped out everything but our official continuity.”

Tom Swift became Tom Wayne, descendant of Bruce Wayne and protégé of Bruce Wayne XXVIII, who had taken up the mantle of Batman a millennium on. Tom Swift 3000 was now Robin 3000! (Officially, the two-issue miniseries is titled Batman: Robin 3000, but the biggest logo on the cover was the same one created for the Robin series.)

Russell explained the necessary changes:

Tom would be re-incarnated as Robin in the year 3000 and new material would be added to incorporate Batman and bracket the story. And why is this guy running around who is now called Robin but is not dressed like him? Um... ’cause he’s undercover... yeah, that’s it, he’s undercover, that’s the ticket. So I called back my ‘Tom’ model, now married, a daddy, and a good 25 pounds heavier and drew the new 18 pages and produced a new cover for the second volume—my Wally Wood/EC Comics/Sci-Fi homage.

The result looks nice, with a mid-1980s MTV vibe on good paper, but it doesn’t read well. It doesn’t draw on the traditional themes of the Robin saga, such as coming of age, inheritance, and justice. Instead, the story’s heart is definitely in Tom Swift territory, all about fantastic flying machines.

Furthermore, the lettering shows how Preiss’s staff crammed the “Tom Wayne” name into existing word balloons. (In addition, Ringgenberg’s name was written poorly enough that many websites credit “Stevev Ringgenberg.”)

As with the Robin miniseries of the same vintage, copies of Robin 3000 are relatively common in US comics shops; more recent comic books are harder to find because, once the comics market bubble burst, they were printed in much smaller numbers.

The Latest Miracle Tech

When L. Frank Baum wrote The Master Key (1901) and The Boy Fortune Hunters in Yucatan (1910, using the pseudonym Floyd Akers), the answer to almost every technical problem his characters faced was that burgeoning technology: electricity!

Guns that stun instead of kill? The ability to fly? Pills that fill all your nutritional needs? Boxes that allow you to look at anything happening anywhere in the world? Those books took advantage of how readers were ready to believe that a hard-working inventor might soon come up with just that device, harnessing the infinite potential of electricity.

In the same era, the Stratemeyer syndicate gave us Tom Swift and His Electric Runabout, Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle, and Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive.

Half a century later, the new technology with unlimited reach was: atomic power! So it's no surprise that the Tom Swift, Jr., series (1954-1971) featured titles like Tom Swift and His Atomic Earth Blaster and Tom Swift and His Triphibian Atomicar.

So what is today's equivalent? Judging by a reading copy of Doc Wilde and the Frogs of Doom, by Tim Byrd, it's: nanotechnology! Do you as an author need your characters to breathe (and, apparently, see) while swimming through an underground stream? To coat an airplane with impervious armor? To heal all wounds and kill all bacteria? Nanotechnology is the answer for you!