There's No Place Like Home

When I was a kid, my sister loved theWizard of Oz, so I watched it all the time when she did. Back then, I thought that it was a flashy musical that played off the use of color versus black and white. Looking at it now, I almost feel the same way. I didn't know that it started as a book but now that I've read the book, I think the movie really just took it to make a movie.

The biggest thing for me is the fact that in the book, it's not a dream. I think that was fact changed the entire view of the story. The movie added characters and the characters in the dream paralleled characters in her real life. To me, that took away the meaning of the original characters of the book and just made them into something of her subconscious view of the new characters. There was a lot of details from the book that I thought were important enough to what they left in the movie that were still taken out anyways, such as the winkies being enslaved by the witch. They still react to the witches death but it almost doesn't make sense without a backstory. The fact that it was a dream also made the ending seem unsubstantial. She just wakes up, starts pointing out people saying you were there and you were there, looks confused and everyone thinks she's lost it, and that's the end. Even though the end of the book was very abrubt, it was still more meaningful than what the movie portayed.

I think another issue raised by the film were the slippers Dorothy recieves. In the book, with the silver slippers, it really does give some economic undertones such as the silver standard. It gives the story a lot more to think about when you go deeper and look into these facts. However, in the movie, they switched it to ruby slippers. Whatever the reasoning to that may be, I honestly feel like they did it because it was flashier to see. To me, all the movie was is something that they could sell. It pulls apart a lot of the issues you could see beneath the story of the book and just made them into something meaningless. It bothers me because I don't see a lot of what people say about how the movie brings out a psychological understanding of the character Dorothy. I get what they are saying as her dream is a challenge to authority, but I don't feel like that is actually the case. I thought the movie was just a movie and that it lost a lot of what the book was trying to point out.

Religion vs. The World

When I was young, I used to go to church with my family. Needless to say, I don't remember anything about going there. To me, it always felt forced and I never really connected with it. However, there are a bunch of stories that I remember from when I was a kid that I've come to find out are from religion. I didn't know it at the time, but they were stories out of the bible that were popularized to try to compete with a secular world.

Probably one of the biggest ones for me to find out was from the bible was Noah's Ark. I knew the story had god in it but I never realized it was specifically from the bible. Looking into the differences between the original version from the bible and the popularized version most people know, I noticed how much people get from popular culture rather than from actual church. Anytime I've ever heard anything about the story, it's always that he gathered two of every animal, a male and a female, so that he had one pair of each. In the original, he actually fourteen of every animal making seven pairs of each. I never knew that detail about the story and it makes me wonder how much religion relies on popular culture now to get out its stories into the world.

On the flipside of things, it also makes me wonder how much religion has had to change in itself in order to compete with everything else in the world. Originally, going to church was, in a way, the only form of entertainment people had. Over time, those who weren't actually devout had other things that they could do. As more people found other forms of entertainment, the church had to try to compete and its from this that more popular versions of stories in the bible were created. In order to continue spreading its message in today's world, religion must continue to find ways to grab peoples attention or else it will begin to fade as the world becomes more secular in its ideas.