Customer Reviews

The Visitors from Oz

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After the publication of The Marvelous Land of Oz in 1904, the publishers decided to raise interest in it, though their publicity tools are very interesting in themselves. All at once, pins or buttons with a strange insect on them, bearing the slogan "What Did The Woggle-Bug Say?" began to appear. A newspaper carried reports of a strange monster terrorizing other planets by it's presence. However, readers of The Marvelous Land of Oz and anyone who happened to read a newspaper called The Ozmapolitan (which ran for a couple issues) had a better idea of what was going on.

Sure enough, August 28th, 1904, newspapers began to run Queer Visitors From The Marvelous Land of Oz, a comic page in which the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, the Woggle-Bug, the Sawhorse, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Gump come to visit the United States of America. The first seventeen stories ended with the question "What did the Woggle-Bug say?" The tale had ended with someone asking the Woggle-Bug a question and the Woggle-Bug's answer was not revealed. Children tried to discover the answer using clues in the text, written by none other than L. Frank Baum, or the pictures by Walt McDougall. Baum and Paul Tietjens, who had written the music for some of the songs as well as instrumentals in the original stage version of The Wizard of Oz, wrote a song called "What Did The Woggle-Bug Say?" After the contest stories ended, the series ran for nine more stories.

This was the beginning of a "Woggle-Bug" craze. Items directly connected with the series and items not connected with series appeared featured the Woggle-Bug, including The Woggle-Bug Game of Conundrums, the first toy connected to the Land of Oz. Baum followed the series up with a picture book called The Woggle-Bug Book, in which the Woggle-Bug had more adventures in America as he tries to get a dress made with "Wagnerian Plaids." This, as well as The Marvelous Land of Oz, served as the basis of a play called The Woggle-Bug, which didn't last very long.

After that, nothing more was heard about the characters from Oz until Ozma of Oz in 1907, in which some of the visitors from Oz appear or are mentioned. (The others appeared in other books.) Queer Visitors was forgotten until Dick Martin rediscovered them in the late 1950's. Because of this, a book containing a heavy rewrtiting of some of the stories by Jean Kellogg (though it was completely attributed to Baum) called The Visitors From Oz was published in 1961. A collection of recordings of Baum stories read by Ray Bolger contained some of the Queer Visitors stories, now available on audio cassette in The Oz Audio Collection.

In 1985, a collection of slightly edited versions of the Queer Visitors stories and The Woggle-Bug Book were printed as The Third Book of Oz, and illustrated by Oz artist Eric Shanower. The "What Did The Woggle-Bug Say?" answers were edited into the stories. It went into a second printing, but quickly became unavailable. The only version of any of these still available was an expensive black and white edition of The Woggle-Bug Book from Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints. (A digital version in color was released on CD-ROM in 2002 by Golden Age publishing.) In 2004, Dorothy & Ozma Productions launched a website, with a page of Queer Visitors stories, promotional material, the "What Did The Woggle-Bug Say?" song (with synthesized music), and a promise for more. The answers were again edited into the stories.

Shanower and David Maxine began Hungry Tiger Press and began printing an annual magazine called Oz-Story in 1995. The 1999 issue contained a black and white reprint of "The Woggle-Bug Book." However, in 2005, they reprinted The Third Book of Oz as The Visitors From Oz, (not to be confused with the Jean Kellogg/Dick Martin volume of the same name, or the Martin Gardener novel Visitors from Oz) this time with minimal editing. (Walt McDougall's name was changed to "the illustrator" in the introductory "Proclamation Extraordinary," and mention of a black man's skin color was accidentally excised.) A hardcover edition contained some of promotional material for the series. The answers to the "What did the Woggle-Bug say?" questions were not edited into the stories, but put at the end of each one in quotation marks so they could be read as part of the stories.

The new volume contains three sets of Shanower pictures: the pictures from both editions of Third Book, and some new pictures made especially for the new book. It's printed like the latter Baum Oz Books from Reilly & Britton/Lee in their original editions, and is the same height as those books, but not the same width. The text is printed in a rather large, easy-to-read type that makes it look like a children's book. A few typos are present in the text, but they are few and far between.

In this volume we discover some new facts about Oz characters, especially the Woggle-Bug. He uses four arms instead of the two he seems to have in the other Oz stories, and he has wings that serve as a parachute. Some contradictions to the other Oz books are in the volume as well, such as fairy magic working outside of Oz.

These stories contain racial stereotypes that may be offensive to many people. (But many newspapers contained such things back in 1904.) There is also some language that has had it's meaning change since it's first publication (e.g., the word "queer"). For this reason, this volume is not reccommended for children. Certainly some of the stories are still suitable, especially the Thanksgiving and Christmas stories, but parents who think their children will enjoy these may find that it would be a better choice to read them aloud with personal on-the-spot editing rather than letting them read the volume by themselves. If your children can overlook these, then let them read on their own.

All in all, a great addition to any Oz or Baum book collection.

This book is considered by some to be the lost "Third Book of Oz" since the material it contains was written in 2004 and 2005 after the publication of Baum's first two Oz books: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904). The book features six characters from The Marvelous Land of Oz who leave Oz to travel through the United States of America.

This is probably the worst of Baum's Oz writing. Baum reused ideas from other books, and engaged in what are today offensive racial and ethnic stereotypes. Twenty six chapters of this book were originally Sunday newspaper pieces that were written as promotional material to advertise the books and the upcoming 1905 stage musical called Woggle-Bug. Seventeen of these were part of a contest in which each story ended in a situation that puzzled all the visitors except the Woggle-Bug who told them the answer but which wasn't revealed until the next week. The readers were invited to guess the answers for a chance at a prize. The last and longest chapter was originally published in 1905 as The Woggle-Bug Book. This segment follows the plot of the stage musical and, with its heavy reliance on ethnic humor, gives a pretty good idea as to why the musical failed. At the end of the book are 15 newspaper articles dated between August 18 and October 3 1904 that detail the flight to Earth by the Oz characters and relate their adventures in false news story style.

At the back of the book is a history of the material's creation and publication called "American Fairyland" that was written by David Maxine. Here we learn that two prior attempts to publish these stories in 1960 and 1986 were edited or abridged to remove offensive words and dialect. This is the first time since its original publication that the stories are printed as they were written.

The book does provide a look into life in the US as it was perceived by Baum 100 years ago. In that sense it provides a clearer perspective on Baum's world than his fairy tales. Also the illustrations by Eric Shanower, although created much later than the text, are delightful representations of the stories by the best Oz illustrator.

These stories were all fun to read. They are interesting, amusing, and could probably be used to cheer someone up. They're also a bit educational as they reflect the way America was when they were first written a century ago and so we can see how much we've evolved since then.

Eric Shanower is the best as the illustrator of Oz. His drawings are the most expressive ones I've seen. The Oz characters are cute and kind of cartoony and the human ones are as realistic as can be. I also found it funny how his illustration of Dorothy looks like Denslow's when drawn in a flashback of when she meets the Scarecrow, and yet she looks like Neil's in all other drawings of when the travelers visit her in Kansas!

My favorie stories are:
1. How the Wogglebug got a Thanksgiving Dinner
2. How the Wogglebug and his friends visited Santa Claus
3. How the Wogglebug proved his knowledge of chemistry
4. The Wogglebug encourages charity
5. Nan's magic button
6. Dorothy spends an evening with her friends
7. Jack Pumpkinhead and the Sawhorse win a race and incite a riot; the Wogglebug restores harmony
8. How the Tin Woodman became a fire hero

My favorite character is the Wogglebug of course, and in this early volume he is portrayed as very differently than in much later years. He is nice and kind, and smart and knowledgable just like he says he is, and generous and charitable as he encourages charity at least five times. At the end of most of the short stories he mentions something which the readers were left to find out for themselves and there was a prize winning when the stories were first published, and it also gives them a bit of educational value which went with it quite well.

For at least two years he was Oz's most popular character and was the star of of stage musical written by Baum which was a total flop. I really believe if now he and his story were just given the right treatment, the right material, the right directing, and the right casting he and perhaps his comrades would really make a top rated show for kids. Which is why I have began my first manuscript of the second Oz book.