Day 1 - Queen Ann Soforth resolves to conquer Oz and begins to gather an army 
Day 4 - "Three days later" the Grand Army of Oogaboo departs - Glinda
  enchants path
Day 6 - They meet the Rak after wandering for "three unhappy days" -
  Betsy & Hank washed overboard
Day 7 - Betsy & Hank enter the Rose Kingdom - meet Shaggy Man, pick Rose Princess
  - meet Polychrome - discover Tik-Tok in well - meet the Army of Oogaboo -
  Ruggedo dumps party down the Great Tube - the party appears before Tititi Hoochoo
  - night with Kings & Queens (Betsy & Polychrome with Queen Erma)
Day 8 - Tititi Hoochoo passes sentence on Ruggedo - Betsy's party departs with Quox
  - Grand Army of Oogaboo captured & escapes through tunnel in pit - Ruggedo
  deposed & Kaliko made king
Day 9 - Quox departs - search for the Metal Forest begins
Days 9-11 - "For three days" their search is unsuccessful 
Day 12 - Polychrome meets Ruggedo -they discover the Metal Forest - Ugly One
  disenchanted - Poly, Ann, Army, return home - Tik-tok, Shaggy, Brother, Hank,
  Betsy go to Emerald City

Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 16:31:46 +0000
From: David Hulan <davidhulan at ntsource.com>
Subject: Re: Ozzy Digest, 07-19-97
 
Tyler:
Baum called Hank both a mule and a donkey, but they're not the same. A
donkey is a member of the species Equus asinus. A mule is the hybrid
offspring of a male donkey and a female horse (Equus caballus); the two
species are closely enough related to produce hybrid offspring, but not
closely enough for the offspring to be fertile. The offspring of a male
horse and a female donkey is called a "hinny", and popular wisdom holds
that it is far inferior in strength and endurance to the mule. I have no
idea whether there's any scientific basis for this, though since donkeys
are considerably smaller than the draft horses that are generally used
for breeding mules (why breed a mule, which is primarily used as a draft
animal, from a small breed of horse or pony?) it could be that it's a
result of the developing foal being too crowded in the womb of the
female donkey (or jenny) so that it doesn't develop as well. This is the
sort of stuff I picked up from listening to my grandfather talk; I've
never read much about animal breeding.
 
Incidentally, since Hank is always referred to as "little," and is
certainly drawn more pony-size than horse-size, it seems not improbable
that in fact he was a donkey and not a mule. Mules are generally fairly
large animals - unless Hank was a mistake.
 
David Hulan

Date: Sun, 11 Jan 1998 22:38:03 -0500
From: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
Subject: TIK-TOK OF OZ, pp. 1-12
Sender: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
 
One benefit of these discussions is feeling spurred to read my Books of
Wonder/Morrow Oz books. I grew up with "white cover" editions, which either
dropped the color plates or converted them to line art. Seeing those
illustrations in the text is thus in a small way a new reading experience. 

  Every so often "white cover" editions make up somewhat for the loss of
color. For TIK-TOK, I like the "white cover" better. It shows all our
heroes (except Files) in a chariot whose wheel is the interlaced O and Z;
on the back, Hank pulls the chariot. I recall reading that Neill originally
drew this art for an advertisement or retail display. 

  The original TIK-TOK cover was redrawn for page 2 of the "white cover"
edition, with small changes: Tik-Tok lost his gun and gained the missing
shadow of his hat, and the background and title were left out. The
cross-hatching, line, eyes, and hands make me suspect this and other
redrawings were the work of Dick Martin. Can anyone shed light on that
conversion? 

  Proceeding all the way to page 11, I admire Baum's alliterative chapter
titles for TIK-TOK. The only big lapse is "Shaggy Seeks His Stray BROTHER."
That could have been alliterative, too, if only Shaggy were seeking a
sister. (In 1914 the terms "sib" and "sibling" still meant "relative"
rather than "brother or sister.")
 
Now, just as I approach TIK-TOK's actual story, I rear back to address the
endpapers: the maps of Oz and surrounding countries. 

  I hadn't noticed how in the Oz map the Yellow Brick Road is straight as
an arrow and extends to the east/left into the Deadly Desert. Because that
extension doesn't appear on the continent map, and because there's no sign
of the branch Ojo took, I have to consider the road's rendering unreliable.
 
  More intriguing to me is how these 1914 maps show countries that didn't
appear in Baum's stories until later. We know he'd already written of
Pingaree, Rinkitink, and Boboland in his RINKTINK manuscript. And his note
"To My Readers" shows he was at least planning SCARECROW, in which Jinxland
and the Magic Waterfall appear. So do the appearance of the Yips, Skeezers,
and Mount Munch indicate that Baum already had stories about them in mind
as he guided Neill's cartography? 

  A look ahead shows Baum's vision of these sites was (no big surprise)
inconsistent. In TIN WOODMAN, Ku-Klip says Nimmie Ammee went to "live with
some people she was acquainted with who had a house on Mount Munch" (p.
222). That house must be fairly low, given what MAGIC tells us about the
mountain's steep slopes. Indeed, Munch is described on p. 261 of TIN
WOODMAN, with no mention of its singular shape.

  In GLINDA, Baum has to account for the lack of Flatheads on the map by
having Ozma say, "...on Professor Wogglebug's Map of the Land of Oz there
is a place marked 'Skeezer [sic],' but what the Skeezers are like I do not
know" (p. 18). (Ozma goes on to say, "The Skeezer Country is 'way at the
upper edge of the Gillikin Country, with the sandy, impassable desert on
one side and the mountains of Oogaboo on another side," which cuts out a
lot of Winkie Country.)

  And, though Jinxland is on these maps, it's not across the desert from
Mo. Indeed, Baum seems to have forgotten Mo and Yew entirely. 

  Such discrepancies show that, rather than Baum shaping the map with ideas
for future stories, Baum's future stories were inspired by the map. I
presume that he and Neill filled blank regions with odd labels like "Yips"
and geographical features like the waterfall to give Oz more
verisimilitude. Later, Baum, seeking inspiration within his established
framework, used those places in his books--again, because they were already
mapped, giving Oz verisimilitude.

  Yet all these border areas turn out to be isolated and little known; the
Hyups, the Yips, and so on are all tiny human communities cut off from the
rest of Oz. Normally mapped features are those we know the *most* about,
places *most* important to us. So, ironically, Baum created and revisited
places like Jinxland to give verisimilitude to the maps of Oz, then
undercut that verisimilitude when he chose to depict those places as
isolated.
 
J. L. Bell                            JnoLBell at compuserve.com

Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 10:32:32 -0600 (CST)
From: Ruth Berman <berma005 at maroon.tc.umn.edu>
Subject: ozzy digest
 
J.L. Bell: You're probably right that Dick Martin made the changes in art
that was changed in the white cover editions.  I don't recall direct
comments to that effect, but he said somewhere that he worked on the
white cover and amused himself by making the ampersand in Reilly &
Lee different on each spine.  Fred Meyer in one of his "Bugle" articles
talked about the presence on the "Tik-Tok" maps of place-names Baum
proceeded to introduce into the texts of the later books and wondered
if he had the stories already in mind, or if looking at the names he'd
put on the map helped him come up with the stories later -- he thought
it was probably some of both.  Your suggestion that Glinda's comment
about not knowing what the Skeezers are like implies that "Skeezer"
was a case of story-growing-out-of-map-name sounds plausible.  I'm
not sure that putting unknown places on the map necessarily
undercuts plausibility in mapping.  The Wogglebug seems like just the
sort of person who would like to put unknown places on the map.  (Of
course, it might be asked how he knew their names if they're unknown,
but they're probably not quite entirely unknown.  He might ask the
birds for a quick bird's-eye view.)
 
Speaking of the "Bugle" -- over the years it's published some articles
relevant to "Tik-Tok": the pair of Nome articles that I mentioned during
the "Ozma" discussion, Phyllis Karr's "Curious Case of King Kaliko"
(Autumn 1978) and Judy Pike's "Decline and Fall of the Nome King"
(Winter 1969); also articles on the 1913 play "Tik-Tok" and its
relationship to "Ozma" and the 1914 "Tik-Tok" Oz book, Fred Meyer's
"Dramatic Influence on Oz" (Best #2), and Dan Mannix's "Ozma, Tiktok,
and Rheingold" (Spring 1978).  Robin Olderman once played the
female roles in an Ozmapolitan convention's staging of the play that
sounds as if it must have been a lot of fun.

Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 21:37:13 +0000 (GMT)
From: David Hulan <davidhulan at ntsource.com>
Subject: Re: Ozzy Digest, 01-12-97
 
J.L. again:
I like the alliterative titles in _Tik-Tok_ too. That's one reason why I
used the same device in the chapter titles of _Glass Cat_ (if anyone
noticed...). In _Eureka in Oz_ (if it ever gets published) I used the
device Baum used in _Emerald City_, where every chapter title starts of
with "How..." (and in fact all of mine start with "How Eureka...").
 
The endpaper maps are not, I'm afraid, very consistent with the texts of
the books. The map of the lands surrounding Oz, in particular, contradict
the texts in many ways. Hiland/Loland and the Mifkets are both described as
being on islands, unlike the way they're shown on the map. Voe and the
Vegetable Kingdom and the Gargoyles are described as being underground. And
so on. I think the Haff-Martin map is much more consistent with the stories
(besides adding in all the places mentioned in the rest of the FF).
 
There's a good deal of question as to whether Yew is really part of the Oz
universe. Back in the early days of the Digest we had a lengthy discussion
of this question which ended up with Eric Gjovaag getting thoroughly bent
out of shape (though it wasn't the argument that ended up with his
unsubscribing). My personal feeling is that it probably _isn't_ part of the
Oz universe; the only tie-in anyone has come up with (aside from the fact
that magic works, and in some of Baum's _American Fairy Tales_ magic works
in our world as well) is a reference that seems to be to Santa Claus. But
while Santa is part of the Oz universe, he's also part of ours, so that
doesn't prove anything. The statement that a hundred years after the events
of the book "civilization had won the hearts of the people" seems to
conflict with the statement in _Wizard_ that Oz isn't a "civilized
country," though of course that doesn't mean that there's no "civilized
country" elsewhere in the Oz universe. But it makes Yew seem to be rather
different from all the other countries we know about in Nonestica.
 
>  Yet all these border areas turn out to be isolated and little known; the
>Hyups, the Yips, and so on are all tiny human communities cut off from the
>rest of Oz. Normally mapped features are those we know the *most* about,
>places *most* important to us. So, ironically, Baum created and revisited
>places like Jinxland to give verisimilitude to the maps of Oz, then
>undercut that verisimilitude when he chose to depict those places as
>isolated.
 
I disagree somewhat. As Baum says in several places, most of Oz is just
peaceful farming country or forests with few human (or humanoid)
inhabitants; as far as he was aware, at least, there weren't many features
worth putting on a map (beyond the ones that had already been described in
books) except for a few tiny isolated communities. Thompson later added a
lot of little kingdoms and cities and such, but Baum apparently didn't know
about them. (That's if one is speaking in the "Oz as History" mode; in the
"Oz as Literature" mode, Thompson's Oz was more European in nature,
something like 16th century Germany, whereas Baum's was more American.
Neill and McGraw followed Thompson's lead; Snow didn't really show us any
of Oz except the Emerald City in his two books.)
 
Continuing comment on _Tik-Tok_, I find Queen Ann and Jo Files to be
particularly interesting characters because they're among the few in the
Baum books who aren't either very good or very bad. (Jinjur is another,
though in her case it's more a transition from being a villain in _Land_ to
being a good citizen in the later books where she appears.) Both are
aggressive and ambitious, wanting to conquer the world, but they're rather
choosy about the means they're willing to use to do so. Ann, in particular,
is also egotistical and unrealistic.
 
As has been said on the Digest before, this book is a case of Baum
economizing on imagination - that is, he wrote the play _The Tik-Tok Man of
Oz_ based on _Ozma_, and then wrote the book _Tik-Tok of Oz_ based on the
play, which is why there's so much similarity between the two books.
Personally, I think _Ozma_ is far superior to _Tik-Tok_; the latter is a
good enough book (much stronger than, say, _DotWiz_ or _Road_), but because
of the similarity it inevitably suffers by comparison. It's clear that
_Tik-Tok_, like _Land_, is related to the stage musical extravaganza
(though in this case the play came before rather than after the book); both
the Rose Kingdom sequence and Ozga's appeal to the flowers are obviously
designed to show off a chorus of pretty young women, and Ann's bumbling
army gives lots of opportunity for dashing about chaotically like the
Keystone Kops. It doesn't, however, include a comedy duo like the Scarecrow
and Tin Woodman in _Wizard_ or the Woggle-bug and Jack Pumpkinhead in
_Land_. Tik-Tok comes across as a comic character in this book (unlike his
sagacious role in _Ozma_), but there's no real straight man for him.
 
I haven't reread the book for this discussion yet, so I won't go into
specific bits that struck me as worthy of comment. Hopefully I'll get to it
before the discussion lags.
 
David Hulan

Date: Mon, 12 Jan 1998 22:03:41 -0500
From: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
Subject: TIK-TOK OF OZ, the big stuff
Sender: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
 
Speaking of the roc, isn't that beast an antecedent for the monstrous,
flying Rak? Which brings us to TIK-TOK.
 
If there's any guiding moral to this stew of old and new, it may lie in
Betsy's odd little anecdote on page 235: "I once knew a little boy who
wanted to catch the measles, because [sic] all the the little boys in his
neighborhood but him had had 'em, and he was really unhappy 'cause he
couldn't catch 'em, try as he would. So I'm pretty certain that the things
we want, and can't have, are not good for us." Though Shaggy and Ann
disagree, the rest of the book seems to back Betsy up on the danger of
desire. 

  Ann wants to conquer the world, and finds privation and woes. The roses
want a king, and force out a perfectly nice princess. The Shaggy Man's
brother wanted wealth, only to be captured by the Nome King and nearly
starved in a golden forest. Polychrome wants to dance on the earth, and
ends up fending off a proposal to wed and live underground. Ruggedo wants,
well, everything under the earth. Not until his pockets burst does he see
his error (and, as we know, his repentance won't last). 

  True happiness seems to come serendipitously. Of the questers, only
Shaggy achieves what he desires, and then not in the way he expected to get
it. Ozga and Files meet by happenstance. Betsy finds her way to Oz by luck.
Kaliko gets a better job because his boss annoys the wrong guy--not because
of those letters of recommendation he wrote for himself [the passage I
liked best this time around, now that I have job applications pending].
 
Throughout TIK-TOK Baum also explores the theme of good and bad rulers.
Starting from chapter 1 we watch Ann, a bad ruler, learn to be a better
one. The book's biggest lasting effect on the Oz series is that Ruggedo, a
very bad ruler, is replaced by Kaliko, who shows signs of being a good one.
 
  Ozga would be a good ruler, but she lacks a prerequisite for ruling: the
consent of the governed. The roses reject her, and as sexist as their
desire is, they control the Rose Kingdom and she doesn't. Similarly,
Oogaboo maintains the Soforth dynasty "as a point of pride" (p. 14). The
fairy kings and queens have chosen the Private Citizen to rule them (p.
131). 

  Because of their subjects' consent, these rulers seem to reign supreme.
Ann can call on the loyalty of all her male subjects but one to march off
with her. Glinda can exile the Oogaboo army from the Tin Woodman's
territory without even telling anyone. Tititi-Hoochoo, before whom fairies
prostrate themselves, can order a dragon to the other side of the world. 

  Ruggedo is, of course, this book's epitome of the bad monarch. Indeed, he
seems a little worse than Baum portrayed him before, and the other Nomes a
little more victimized. In OZMA Roquat drove harsh bargains, but didn't
break his word until he sent his army after the Ozians; Kaliko in OZMA and
Guph in EMERALD CITY were just as nasty as their boss. But now Kaliko is
gneiss [a geological pun] and Guph threatened. Ruggedo is completely
tyrannical. We know he's a bad ruler because "the nomes hated Ruggedo
and...when Ruggedo abused them worse than usual, they grew sullen and threw
down their picks" (p. 150). This king lacks the support of his subjects;
only Kaliko can call on their loyalty.

  How rulers treat strangers (or, more specifically, how they treat our
heroes) seems to be another big test of goodness. The heartless roses throw
Shaggy, Betsy, and Hank out. Ruggedo imprisons the Shaggy Man's brother,
tosses Tik-Tok down a well, and is otherwise inhospitable. (Many of
Ruggedo's actions may be justified, however, if we accept his view that he
owns the underground; the Shaggy Man's brother was mining the earth, and
Hiergargo's tunnel belongs more to the Nomes' domain than the Great
Jinjin's.) Even Tititi-Hoochoo's subjects have "fire and pincers" ready for
Tik-Tok and his party (p. 115), though they give our heroes a good night
before sending them away. 

  In contrast, Ozma actually brings four immigrants into Oz (Ozga, Betsy,
Hank, the Shaggy Man's brother). Tititi-Hoochoo is a just ruler, but he's
heartless and feared. Ozma is, by implication, a better ruler because she
is merciful and loved. Given all that, however, the book ends on a down
note: Ozma warning readers *not* to expect to be let into Oz. Even the best
of rulers has her limits. And we mustn't want what we can't have.
 
J. L. Bell                    JnoLBell at compuserve.com

Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 14:42:58 -0500
From: Richard Randolph <dixnam at worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Ozzy Digest 1-10/12-98
 
Re: Tik-Tok in Oz.
 
Where have I heard this before?  Young girl is
shipwrecked along with an animal, meets a group
from Oz, runs up against and defeats the Nome King,
ends up, happily, in Oz! 
 
And, was the Royal Gardner of the Rose Kingdom's
remark on page 54, "Plenty of royalties are growing, 
I admit; but just now they are all green", Baum's
sly way of saying "this book writing about Oz is
really paying off!", I wonder? ;)
 
Dick

Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 19:09:14 -0500 (EST)
From: Ozmama <Ozmama at aol.com>
Subject: Re: Ozzy Digest, 01-14-98
 
White cover art: Ruth and John, yes, Dick did the changes in the artwork for
R&L.  
 
John: Nice rundown of  _Tik Tok_.   It was one of Jim Haff's favorite books,
though I never could see why, since I'd viewed it from childhood as a mere
rip-off of _Ozma_.   I was really pleased when, after joining IWOC, I learned
that it really *was* a reworking of _Ozma_, but for the stage.  Poor Baum,
chasing the elusive butterfly of stage fame one more time.  _Wizard_ was his
only true stage success.  Much of _Tik Tok_ is based on broad comic elements
of Baum's time.  Ann is a comic stereotype, strictly for laughs.  Shaggy
doesn't recognize Poly because in _Ozma_, he hadn't met her yet and because it
gave Baum opportunity for punny dialogue between them...(beau/bow...Shaggy
wouldn't have said that to the Polychrome he'd been through so much with,
would he?)  Ozga is an ingenue.  Pure and simple.  Also simpleminded, as some
of us have probably noted.  Files is the young leading man type. Shaggy's some
kind of catalyst, I guess. I'll have to think about his role more.  Visually,
he's a satisfying character for the stage. The C. Lion did so well in _Wizard_
that it just made sense to have Hank, rather than a dog or chicken companion
for the little girl heroine.  I'm gonna have to think more about this.  No
time now.  Bye.    --Robin

Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 22:00:03 -0500
From: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
Subject: TIK-TOK OF OZ, the heroines
Sender: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
 
About the verisimilitude of the maps credited to Prof. Wogglebug in
TIK-TOK, Ruth Berman wrote:
<<I'm not sure that putting unknown places on the map necessarily
undercuts plausibility in mapping.  The Wogglebug seems like just the sort
of person [sic] who would like to put unknown places on the map.  (Of
course, it might be asked how he knew their names if they're unknown, but
they're probably not quite entirely unknown.  He might ask the birds for a
quick bird's-eye view.)>>
 
And Dave Hulan wrote:
<<As Baum says in several places, most of Oz is just peaceful farming
country or forests with few human (or humanoid) inhabitants; as far as he
was aware, at least, there weren't many features worth putting on a map
(beyond the ones that had already been described in books) except for a few
tiny isolated communities.>>
 
Prof. Wogglebug could indeed have picked up extra knowledge of geozgraphy
from birds (not jackdaws, of course) and other travelers. And I have no
doubt he would have put little-known places on his map just to show how
thoroughly educated he was. But that still leaves the question of how he
could have learned about the Yips, Jinxville, and the Skeezers without also
learning about Herku, Loonville, and other sites closer to the capital. 

  If I were a traveler relying on these maps, I'd be quite upset at the
professor for spotting Mr. Yoop but not warning me away from Mrs. Yoop's
valley. 
 
Bob Spark wrote of the Oz Club maps in the Del Rey editions:
<<Both show the Deadly Desert to the west, the Impassible [sic] Desert to
the north, the Shifting Sands to the east and the Great Sandy Waste to the
south.  I am familiar with the properties of the sands of the Deadly
Desert, but do the sands of the other three have the same properties?>>
 
These labels originated on the TIK-TOK maps, probably as a way to fill
those barren spaces. Because only the "Deadly Desert" name seemed to figure
in the books, I always assumed the other labels were synonymous and
superfluous. The quality of the desert seems the same everywhere:
undoubtedly "great" and "sandy," but not really impassable (on the TIK-TOK
map of the region, the Magic Carpet's route cuts right between the E and R
of "Impassable Desert"). 

  As for "deadly," do we ever actually see anyone die on the desert? There
are, of course, folks who survive the sands in LAND. Maybe those wordy
signs warning travelers away from the Deadly Desert (as in ROAD) are merely
a trick of Glinda's to discourage visitors.  

  Finally, on "Shifting Sands," in my own manuscript the sands actually do
shift, propelling someone across to Oz--but that's due to a freak storm.
Some sources say Baum's last words were something like, "Now we shall cross
the shifting sands," but does that label appear in any book?
 
Scott Hutchins wrote:
<<According to Angelica Shirley Carpenter and Jean Shirley, Baum wrote
_Magic_ and _Glinda_ around 1914 and put them in a safe-deposit box, if the
need arose to publish them posthumously.  He liked the stories enough that
he took them out and revised them, even while in bed after his gall bladder
operations.  Though they did end up published posthumously, the early
drafts existed for quite along time beforehand.>>
 
Thanks, Scott, for the reference. (You may have mentioned this earlier, but
I couldn't track it down.) I wonder what the Shirleys' source is. 

  If Baum had chunks of two new Oz books in the can in 1914, we should ask
why he spent that year and the following rewriting a stage play (TIK-TOK),
a screenplay (SCARECROW), and an old novel (RINKTINK). Riley's OZ AND
BEYOND posits that Baum adapted old work in this period because his studio
and his ill health took up so much energy. 

  On the other hand, one could say that *because* Baum wasn't writing
all-new stories in these years, he had time to stockpile drafts. 

  Are there textual indications of chronology? Some have argued here that
TIN WOODMAN should follow GLINDA because Ozma is more powerful in the
former book. Yet MAGIC (in its final form) must follow TIK-TOK because
Ruggedo is a wanderer in it. Hmmm.
 
About THE TIK-TOK MAN OF OZ musical, Dave Hulan wrote:
<<It doesn't, however, include a comedy duo like the Scarecrow and Tin
Woodman in _Wizard_ or the Woggle-bug and Jack Pumpkinhead in _Land_.
Tik-Tok comes across as a comic character in this book (unlike his
sagacious role in _Ozma_), but there's no real straight man for him.>>
 
From the TIK-TOK MAN poster in ANNOTATED WIZARD, I got the impression that
the Shaggy Man and Tik-Tok were meant to be Scarecrow and Tin Man
stand-ins. The musical Shaggy Man was a clean-shaven white-face clown, more
like Fred Stone as the Scarecrow than like the Shaggy we know, while
Tik-Tok was a tall metal man, very like David Montgomery as the Tin Man. 

  You're right that Tik-Tok's different from his OZMA persona. In that book
he told Dorothy all about Ev and was a ferocious fighter when he felt wound
up. In TIK-TOK he's almost naive; he's never seen a gun (p. 89), though the
Soldier with the Green Whiskers has carried one for years. Perhaps being
dismantled in his LITTLE WIZARD story cost him some memory.

  Another new detail about Tik-Tok, on page 74: "little flashes of light
began to show in the top of his head, which was proof that he had begun to
think." And I'd thought the computer that blinked to show it was thinking
didn't appear in our popular culture for a few more decades.

  Why doesn't the Shaggy Man like being asked why (pp. 52, 98, 110, 140,
161)? I'd ask him myself, except he doesn't like it. I theorize this bit of
business might have roots in the stage play.
 
Dick Randolph wrote:
<<was the Royal Gardner of the Rose Kingdom's remark on page 54, "Plenty of
royalties are growing, I admit; but just now they are all green", Baum's
sly way of saying "this book writing about Oz is really paying off!", I
wonder?>>
 
Nifty idea! In our discussion of PATCHWORK GIRL, I hinted that its text
might show that going back to Oz books made Baum feel frustrated and
confined. Peter Glassman's afterword for that book reports, "THE PATCHWORK
GIRL sold nearly half again as many copies as either SEA FAIRIES or SKY
ISLAND." In his next book, Baum has Betsy say, "I'm pretty certain that the
things we want, and can't have, are not good for us." Things like writing
non-Oz books, perhaps?
 
And speaking of Betsy...well, what's to say? Obviously, Baum created her as
a stand-in, since he'd sold the stage rights to Dorothy Gale. She's as bold
as Dorothy--she speaks up to the Great Jinjin (p. 122), for instance. But
she shows almost no drive: to get home, to have adventures, to punish
wrongdoers. In PATCHWORK GIRL Dorothy asks Hip Hopper, "Do you surrender?"
In contrast, Betsy asked Ruggedo, "Are you conquered yet?" (p. 172),
expecting others to accomplish this.

  As Dave Hardenbrook has pointed out, Betsy's an observer most of the
time. She does have the idea to pick Ozga (p. 58) and to drag the well (p.
71), and later she takes the lead in rescuing the Shaggy Man's brother (p.
241). But the central battle with Ruggedo would be the same without her.
It's significant that Betsy doesn't even come into TIK-TOK till chapter 4. 

  The only fact Betsy volunteers about herself is that she loves onions (p.
160). She doesn't even say she's from Oklahoma; rather, the Shaggy Man says
it (p. 80), and she casually mentions the state (p. 226). Neither she nor
Baum ever mentions her family or life before she befriended Hank at sea.

  What can we infer about Betsy? She knows of Oz, Ozma, and Dorothy (p.
50), indicating that she's familiar with Baum's books and/or theatricals.
When Ruggedo complains that she arrived unannounced, she replies, "There
wasn't anybody to announce me. I guess your folks are all busy" (p. 172),
showing knowledge of upper-class etiquette and servants. Being on an
ocean-going ship at the start of TIK-TOK means that Betsy has come far from
Oklahoma. (In HUNGRY TIGER Thompson says Betsy "often" rode a subway in the
US--since Oklahoma was rural, having become a state only in 1907, that's a
later indication she's traveled.) 

  Putting all that together, ILTT that, in contrast to Dorothy and Trot,
Betsy came from a wealthy family; she went on trips, had servants, and
enjoyed the best in children's books. Oklahoma was probably not the Bobbin
family's only home; perhaps they located there for someone's health. Betsy
may not think of going back to her family because she had, as a "poor
little rich girl," received little love from them. Alternatively, she may
know that her parents died in the ship explosion, and is too traumatized to
speak of them. One detail going against this theory: Betsy's speech is as
full of colloquial ellisions as Dorothy's and Trot's.

  On p. 266, Baum writes that Dorothy and Betsy "were almost of one size."
In LOST PRINCESS, he says Betsy is a year older than Dorothy and Trot a
year younger (which seems to have influenced Eric Shanower's depiction of
them at three different heights). Either Betsy is short for her age,
or--and this I find more interesting--she let herself grow after reaching
Oz.

  Dave Hulan, I know you've written an adventure for Betsy--how do you
conceive of her?
 
In one of my first postings to this list, I listed "Ann/Jo" among romantic
couples in Baum's Oz books. Folks quickly reminded me that should be
"Ozga/Jo." On rereading the first chapters of TIK-TOK, I was reminded of
why I thought Ann Soforth and Jo Files should get together. They're the
only two people in Oogaboo who have any ambition; they understand one
another. (As Dave Hulan wrote, they're both mixtures of good and bad
qualities.)

  But instead of marrying his queen, Files goes dopey over Ozga (p. 86) and
turns entirely boring. Oh well--no accounting for fictional tastes. Plenty
of folks still object to which March sister Lorrie married, and I so
dislike Nikolai's choice of wife in WAR AND PEACE that I once blocked it
from my head.

  Judging by my little information about THE TIK-TOK MAN OF OZ, I infer
Baum created Ozga for the book. The play included a scene in a rose
greenhouse, but there's no rose princess in the cast. Jo Files dances with
Polychrome. That probably explains why Ozga has so little to do in the
latter chapters.

  I'm disappointed Baum didn't make the remedy for the Shaggy Man's brother
a kiss from a mortal maid who used to be a fairy (p. 243). That would be
more interesting and rare than a fairy's kiss--and it would have created a
reason for Ozga to be among the heroes. Instead, she merely achieves the
minor honor of becoming the sixth mortal person Ozma allows to immigrate to
Oz.
 
Finally, the December 1998 issue of FORBES AMERICAN HERITAGE shows on its
back a 1923 painting by J. C. Leyendecker for the SATURDAY EVENING POST
depicting Santa in a red suit with white trim, white belt, lace-up boots,
and long floppy hat with holly sprig. So sometime in the 1910's seems to
have been the crucial codification of that costume. Now I can sleep
soundly...if only I wasn't wondering what bent Eric Gjoovag out of shape lo
those many months ago.
 
J. L. Bell                            JnoLBell at compuserve.com

Date: Thu, 15 Jan 1998 11:15:47 -0600 (CST)
From: Ruth Berman <berma005 at maroon.tc.umn.edu>
Subject: ozzy digest
 
David Hulan: In the play, Shaggy was the straightman to Tik-Tok's
comic.  I don't know if Baum rewrote a good deal to make that less
obvious in the play, or if his script had less material for them in the 
first place.  (Maybe he wrote less for them expecting them to interpolate
routines anyway.)

   You're right that Yew seems like a different "sort" of country from the
Borderlands Baum tied in as being geographically near Oz.  All the
same, I thought it was nice that the Haff/Martin map put it (along with
Mo) onto the map.
 
Bob Spark: So far as the Oz books indicate, the different names for the
Deadly Desert are simply variant names, and don't refer to physical
differences.  (The different names are on the "Tik-Tok" map, too --
Haff&Martin didn't invent them.)  There are differences from book to
book in how deadly it is and how clear its edges are, but those
differences don't seem to correspond to the names.  (Perhaps the
amount of magic in the sands varies from place to place, or even in the
same place over time as the sands shift around.)  Which reminds me of
a small "Tik-Tok" speculation that occurred to me on this reading --
Baum doesn't explain how Ann & Army got across the Desert.
Perhaps he expected readers to assume that Glinda's magic spell
twisting the road included protection against the Desert.  But one way
she could have given them such protection would have been to open
up the Nome King's tunnel (closed at the end of "Emerald") and twist
their road through the tunnel.  Looking ahead to Snow's "Shaggy Man,"
this suggestion would have the advantage of explaining how the Nome
King's tunnel was open when the King of the Fairy Beavers wanted to
use it.  (Of course, in that case, an explanation would be needed of
why the Oogaboo people didn't run into the difficulty of getting around
while invisible that the KotFB worried about.  Perhaps the invisibility is
a one-way affair, or perhaps Glinda's twisting spell included protection
against it, or perhaps the degree of invisibility, like the degrees of
deadliness and demarcation, varies from place to place and over time,
anyway.)
 
J.L. Bell: Interesting comments about dangers of desire.
 
Ruth Berman

Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 10:01:01 -0600 (CST)
From: Ruth Berman <berma005 at maroon.tc.umn.edu>
Subject: ozzy digest
 
Chris Straughn: Aurissa and Ribdil are from "The Witchcraft of xx-Marie"
(I forget the character's exact name), one of the three stories added to
the second edition of "American Fairy Tales."  It was reprinted in the
"Baum Bugle" a few years back.  I forget if Bilkon is from the same
story or elsewhere -- probably someone else will check before I'm back
on Digest (which I access at work).  Seventon is from Thompson's
"Enchanted Island of Oz," published by the Oz Club (illustrated by Dick
Martin).

   Yes, "Scarecrow of Oz" as book grew out of Baum's "Scarecrow of
Oz" movie, which was an adaptation of "Wizard."  (Similar to the way
"Tik-Tok" grew out of "Tik-Tok" play which was adaptation of "Ozma.")
 
Robin Olderman: Cowardly Lion's popularity in stage "Wizard" may
have been a factor in choosing Hank as an animal companion in
"Tik-Tok," but probably even more of a factor was the popularity of
Imogene the Cow, Dorothy's companion in the stage "Wizard" (can't
very well cast a human as a small dog, and they didn't want to trust a
real dog onstage for so long).  Reasons for liking "Tik-Tok" as a story
different from "Ozma" -- well, the parody of military glory and conquest
in the Oogaboo characters is fun, and Quox is an interesting character,
and there's a more detailed picture of Nome life.  Maybe some of those
factors were among Jim Haff's reasons for counting it a favorite.  (I
don't think I'd count it a favorite, but am fond of it, more so than of
"Dorothy and the Wizard" or "Road."  As a child, I loved Neill's
illustrations of the Rose Princess, and I still like his artwork in the
volume, but not as much as in some of the others, such as "Road" and
"Emerald City," or his transition-from-Denslow style for "Land.")
 
Bear: I think Glass Cats are hypoallergenic.
 
J.L. Bell: Yes, you'd think Prof. Wogglebug would have heard about
places like Herku.  Then again, if his informants are little birds (as in
birdbrained), perhaps the information they gave would be erratic?  Nice
point about the desert-passage marked on the "impassable desert"
section.

   Interesting set of speculations about possible background of Betsy.
She doesn't strike me as a poor little rich girl, though -- doesn't, for
instance, have the rich clothing of poor-little-rich-boy Button Bright.  I
wonder if her knowledge of the custom of announcing guests and her
presence on an ocean-cruiser might mean that she was an orphan who
had been hired as a servant by a well-to-do family, rather than that she
was a member of such a family.
 
Ruth Berman

Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 16:42:11 -0500
From: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
Subject: TIK-TOK OF OZ, the end
Sender: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
 
Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding! We have a winner in the "Obscure
Quotation Sweepstakes": Richard Bauman correctly identified the painful
phrase "in this crazy world in which we live in" as from the chorus of Paul
McCartney's "Live and Let Die." Bear wins a four-foot-tall platinum trophy
engraved with his smiley, which can be picked up at Queen Zixi's castle any
weekday between the hours of three and five.
 
Bob Spark wrote:
<<Mention is made from time to time about the "white cover editions". The
majority of my OZ books by Baum are soft-cover editions published by Rand
McNally that appear to me to be copies of the original editions.  The
covers have a white background.  Are these the editions referred to?>>
 
Yes, those are the vintage of Baum books I've referred to. I grew up on
twelve Rand McNally softcovers and two Reilly & Lee hardcovers from the
1970s.

  R&L seems to have prepared these editions around the time it published
MERRY-GO-ROUND. Rand McNally sold paperback versions in the '70s. They have
cover art printed on white cloth rather than on colored cloth with dust
jacket (like the first edition of PATCHWORK GIRL) or on a pictorial paper
label glued onto colored cloth (like the first edition of TIK-TOK and most
books that follow). Several "white covers" besides TIK-TOK have cover art
different from the originals. LOST PRINCESS has a back cover that screams,
"Dick Martin!" [Thanks to Robin and Ruth for confirming my suspicion that
Martin converted Neill's art for these editions.] 

  "White cover" books' interiors also differ from the originals, but in
ways that don't affect the texts: different endpapers, no color plates, new
frontmatter and backmatter. DOROTHY & THE WIZARD had several (but not all)
of its color plates redrawn as line art. If you have that "white cover,"
compare the style of Neill's large line drawings on pp. 71 and 94 with the
art on pp. 81 and 82, which are redrawn color plates. If you don't have
that "white cover," don't bother with those page numbers; they were changed
from the original. I think that's the only "white cover" edition in which
the page numbers shifted, but I haven't checked. 
 
About TIK-TOK's stage origins Robin Olderman wrote:
<<Shaggy doesn't recognize Poly because in _Ozma_, he hadn't met her yet
and because it gave Baum opportunity for punny dialogue between them...
(beau/bow...Shaggy wouldn't have said that to the Polychrome he'd been
through so much with, would he?)>>
 
Quite so. Whether he was allowing Dorothy the last name Gale or writing
that Tottenhots are less human than Mifkets, Baum let little get in the way
of an easy laugh. 

  From one L.A. TIMES review of THE TIK-TOK MAN OF OZ, 1 April 1913: "I was
not so favorably impressed with the book lyrics [sic]. To be sure it formed
the basis for the wonderful scenic conceptions of Robert Brunton, but there
is little real sparkle. Compared with the music and the setting, the work
of L. Frank Baum must take third place." 
 
Dave Hulan wrote:
<<we don't know that the nasty Chief Steward in _Ozma_ was Kaliko, and
based on Kaliko's character in the next two books the odds seem to be that
he wasn't. Roquat certainly had a habit of throwing away his underlings who
displeased him; my opinion is that the Chief Steward of _Ozma_ was thrown
away in Roquat's initial fit of pique over losing his Magic Belt and all
his new ornaments.>>
 
Interesting theory. The Chief Steward's personality certainly differs in
OZMA and EMERALD CITY, but Kaliko's personality also changes between
TIK-TOK and RINKITINK (which was, of course, first drafted around another
Nome King). 

  In RINKITINK Dorothy tells Kaliko, "You must be more wicked than I
thought you were," which implies a prior acquaintance. If that encounter
was recorded in the Oz books, it can only be when Dorothy met the Chief
Steward in OZMA. But in RINKITINK there are hints that Dorothy has
interfered in Kaliko's royal doings already, implying some unrecorded
meeting. 
 
Ruth Berman wrote:
<<a small "Tik-Tok" speculation that occurred to me on this reading -- Baum
doesn't explain how Ann & Army got across the Desert. Perhaps he expected
readers to assume that Glinda's magic spell twisting the road included
protection against the Desert.>>
 
I'd assumed that Glinda's spell temporarily took the "narrow mountain pass"
out of Oogaboo and arranged its twists--rock walls and floor and all--in a
different direction. Thus, the army was still marching over rock, not sand.
 
  As for the barrier of invisibility, Snow's version is much more powerful
than Baum's own. In SCARECROW the barrier is just "a few moments" of mist
tinged by the red country behind it. In RINKITINK and MAGIC it doesn't
interfere with travel from and to Oz by land or air. I read Glinda's
calling it "the Barrier of Invisibility" and saying it would cut off and
protect Oz forever as a well-intended exaggeration. 

  The path out of Oogaboo is the first in a series of tunnels or
near-tunnels in TIK-TOK--appropriate to a book about Nomes. There's the
Hollow Tube, the tunnel into the Nome King's castle, the two tunnels into
the Metal Forest, the deep gulf around the Rose Kingdom, and the dry well
where Betsy finds Tik-Tok (a tunnel that leads nowhere).
 
A few more TIK-TOK comments:
  Unlike PATCHWORK GIRL and SCARECROW, all the illustrations in TIK-TOK are
either chapter openers, full pages, or chapter closers--there's none in the
middle of a page of text. Also unlike PATCHWORK GIRL, the book's design
lets chapters start on left- or right-hand pages, so Neill didn't need to
fill blanks. Stylistically, his draftsmanship is much simpler than ROAD and
EMERALD CITY; especially in the color plates, the contrast is striking, and
regrettable. Those choices in design and art style probably made production
easier for Reilly & Britton. I wonder if TIK-TOK was on a tight schedule. 
 
On page 151, the Long-Eared Hearer says he's 9,306 miles from the people in
the Tube. Since the Earth is only about 8,000 miles across, does this mean
he's hearing around corners?
 
On page 253, Shaggy seems to be breaking one of the rules of 1990s
etiquette--don't place calls on your cell phone during a dinner party. Or
perhaps it's been transmitting the whole time: on the previous page Ozma
seems to have heard the party's conversation. 
 
Dave Hardenbrook wrote:
<<Kaliko: Oops!  Here's 32 megs of memory I forgot to put back into
Tik-Tok!
 
Ruggedo: Forget it!  No one will ever know!  Install it in the Giant With
the Hammer!>>
 
Hee hee. Better than "install it *with* the Giant With the Hammer!"
 
J. L. Bell                            JnoLBell at compuserve.com

Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 13:49:36 -0800
From: Bob Spark <bspark at pacbell.net>
Subject: Item for the _Ozzie Digest_
 
Howdy,
     In _Tik-Tok_ on my page 260 there is a drawing of Dorothy running
downstairs.  She has a definite coltish adolescent appearance. 
Apparently in (at least) Neill's concept of the scheme of things Dorothy
is maturing.  On my page 269 there is a drawing of Dorothy, Ozma and
Betsy.  Ozma in particular is represented quite differently than Neill
had done in earlier works.  On thing that really struck me was the
absence of the flowers on either side of her face, but she seems more
mature also.

     Any comments?
Bob Spark

Date: Sat, 17 Jan 1998 20:32:13 +0000 (GMT)
From: David Hulan <davidhulan at ntsource.com>
Subject: Re: Ozzy Digest, 01-16-98
 
J.L.:
>Prof. Wogglebug could indeed have picked up extra knowledge of geozgraphy
>from birds (not jackdaws, of course) and other travelers. And I have no
>doubt he would have put little-known places on his map just to show how
>thoroughly educated he was. But that still leaves the question of how he
>could have learned about the Yips, Jinxville, and the Skeezers without also
>learning about Herku, Loonville, and other sites closer to the capital.
>  If I were a traveler relying on these maps, I'd be quite upset at the
>professor for spotting Mr. Yoop but not warning me away from Mrs. Yoop's
>valley.
 
You could use Tyler's "wormhole" theory - that is, a lot of the little
kingdoms and such that turn up in Oz books aren't really there all the
time, but are only occasionally accessible (sort of like Brigadoon, maybe).
Alternatively, we could say that Prof. Woggle-bug is a busy person, so he
doesn't spend a lot of his time talking to birds and other travelers; he
just didn't know about a lot of the other places in Oz that he put on his
map. And as far as the ones in _Tik-Tok_ are concerned, we know they're
inaccurate as well.
 
>It's significant that Betsy doesn't even come into TIK-TOK till chapter 4.
 
I think this is standard for most Oz books - that is, books that include
parallel plots and a child from America coming to the Oz universe almost
invariably begin in the Oz universe and pick up the American child later.
The only exceptions are _Wonder City_, _Lucky Bucky_, and _Shaggy Man_
(i.e., Neill and Snow). But it's the method used in _Emerald City_,
_Tik-Tok_, _Cowardly Lion_, _Gnome King_, _Yellow Knight_, _Pirates_,
_Speedy_, and _Merry-Go-Round_, which are the other books that use parallel
plots and bring an American child to Oz. (_Wizard_, _Ozma_, _DotWiz_,
_Road_, _Scarecrow_, _Jack Pumpkinhead_, and _Hidden Valley_ don't have
parallel plots, but follow the American child throughout - well, there's a
short stretch of _Scarecrow_ where the Scarecrow is getting from Glinda's
palace to Jinxland where we leave Trot, but that's so far into the book
that I don't think it counts.)
 
I think you're right that Betsy is more upper-class than Dorothy or Trot,
though whether her family was actually "rich" is a separate question. I
guess it depends on how you define "rich" - in 1913, someone with an income
equivalent to $60,000 a year or so today would certainly have servants,
probably even live-in servants, but I don't consider that "rich."
 
There aren't that many places where Betsy could have ridden a subway, are
there? Boston and New York, yes. I'm not sure about Chicago; was the subway
part of the CTA around as early as 1913? Philadelphia? Buffalo? Most cities
used above-ground light rail of some kind in those days, either
street-level or elevated. It was only when the increasing number of
automobiles made street-level rail too slow, and people started objecting
to the noise of elevated trains, that it became worth the large extra cost
of digging the tunnels in most cities.
 
>  Dave Hulan, I know you've written an adventure for Betsy--how do you
>conceive of her?
 
Unless you're talking about Betsy's chapter in the _Emerald City Mirror_, I
haven't written an adventure for her - that is, she's a pretty minor
character in _Glass Cat_, very minor in _Magic Carpet_, and not present in
_Eureka_. I conceive of her as a sweet-natured, rather shy and naive little
girl, not nearly as strong as Dorothy or even Trot; she's popular with the
other residents of the palace, but isn't fond of adventures and isn't often
called on to _do_ anything. Even her biggest adventure after _Tik-Tok_, in
_Hungry Tiger_, is one that she gets into entirely by accident; she did
nothing more adventurous to get into it than going out to the street to buy
some strawberries. And she does nothing much but follow Carter and Reddy
and the tiger around for the rest of the book.
 
>  Judging by my little information about THE TIK-TOK MAN OF OZ, I infer
>Baum created Ozga for the book. The play included a scene in a rose
>greenhouse, but there's no rose princess in the cast. Jo Files dances with
>Polychrome. That probably explains why Ozga has so little to do in the
>latter chapters.
 
I don't have much information about _The Tik-Tok Man of Oz_, either, but I
know that one of the songs in it is titled, "Tell Me, Pretty Flowers." That
sounds like one Ozga would sing at the point where she asks the flowers to
point them to the Nome King's dominion. But maybe Polychrome or Betsy sings
it in the play.
 
David Hulan

Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 17:19:21 -0500
From: Richard Bauman <RBauman at compuserve.com>
Subject: Today's Oz Growls
Sender: Richard Bauman <RBauman at compuserve.com>
 
>On page 151, the Long-Eared Hearer says he's 9,306 miles from the people in
the Tube. Since the Earth is only about 8,000 miles across, does this mean
he's hearing around corners?
 
I wonder if there was some confusion in Baum's day about this.  Nope.  I
went to the trouble of consulting an 1881 astronomy book.  The author gave
the diameter as roughly 7950 miles.  Actually IIRC someone in ancient times
used a well in Alexandria to measure the diameter of the earth. I guess it
was Baum's problem.
 
TTOO - p. 93 - In both the copies I have "gong" in paragraph 2 and "vast"
in paragraph 3 are damaged.  One of the copies I have is a first, the other
is a copy. I guess they used the same plates.
 
p. 109 Interesting typo - line 6 and 7 - "swords, which swung back and
forth during the swift journey and pommeled everyone..."  Ah ha!  Learn
something every day.  I thought he meant to say pummel.  Turns out to
pummel is defined as to pommel.  And pommel means to beat with the pommel
of a sword.
 
p. 131 "....Tititi Hoochoo.....had no heart.  ...he possessed a high degree
of Reason and Justice...he showed no mercy in his judgements he never
punished unjustly or without reason.....those who were innocent of evil had
nothing to fear from him."  
 
If only...... sigh.  
 
p. 138 Quox...is a young dragon who has not yet acquired the wisdom of his
race... he has been disrespectful toward his most ancient ancestor..."  
 
Pay attention you whippersnappers.  :)
 
p. "Grandpa.....insists on telling us stories of things that happened fifty
thousand years ago, which are of no interest at all to youngsters like
me..... He lives all together in the past, so I can't see any good reason
for his being alive to-day."
 
I think there are some who agree with Quox today.  :(
 
p. 211 The famous illustration.  At first I thought this was silly. 
However, the more I look at it......
 
p.272 Ozma tells Betsy if all those kids came to Oz they "would crowd us so
that we would have to move away."
 
If the silly Ehrlichs had been right when they first put out their theory
we would all be standing packed together covering the whole country.  Maybe
Ozma influenced them.  Despite being thoroughly discredited they are still
around here shoveling the same manure.  I will try to ask them if I get a
chance.  
 
Regards, Bear  (:<)

Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 05:39:07 -0800
From: Nathan Mulac DeHoff <vovat at geocities.com>
Subject: Ozzy Digest
 
J. L. Bell:
I would imagine that, after travelling for so long, Shaggy has learned to 
accept things as they are, and not to ask why.
 
I believe that Ozga did appear in the play, but that she was called
"Ozma."  Baum changed her name for the book, to avoid confusion with a
certain other character.
 
Regarding Rocs:
Note that these birds apparently do exist in Nonestica.  Captain Salt 
mentions to Tandy that he wants to find a Roc's egg.
 
Regarding Raks:
Upon first reading _Tik-Tok_, I thought that "Rak" might just be an 
alternate name for a dragon, or that Files' unripe book contained the 
word "Rak" instead of "Dragon."  Of course, once Quox and his kin were 
introduced, that shattered that theory.
--
Nathan Mulac DeHoff
vovat at geocities.com

"I don't want the world.  I just want your half."

Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 12:59:50 -0600
From: Gordon Birrell <gbirrell at post.cis.smu.edu>
Subject: Ozzy Digest
 
My compliments to all who have commented on _Tik-Tok_.  This has been a
particularly interesting and informative discussion.
 
_Tik-Tok_ was one of two Oz books that I actually owned when I was little,
and the first that I read.  For that reason, perhaps, it still doesn't seem
as derivative to me as it does to many of you.  It's true that any real Oz
aficionado is going to find it a pastiche of familiar material (other traces
of earlier works that haven't been mentioned:  trees bearing manufactured
goods, from _Ozma_; glass houses broken by falling objects and people from
_Dorothy and the Wizard_; a royal personage [Tubekins in _Tik-Tok_] who is
knocked down when people fall on him, from _Sky Island_), but it also works
very well as a stand-alone book.  And the feature which really captivated me
as a child--the hollow tube through the earth to the realm of
Ti-ti-ti-Hoochoo--is certainly unprecedented, as is the memorable figure of
Quox.  Like Ruth Berman, I can't help being fond of this book even though I
recognize its shortcomings.
 
When we were discussing _Ozma_, Joyce argued that Ozma's expedition to Ev
has imperialistic overtones--an assertion that met with considerable
resistance from other members of the Digest.  It's intriguing that Queen
Anne's expedition, which is clearly the counterpart to Ozma's (with the same
army of officers with one private), now has unmistakeably imperialistic
ambitions.
 
And in light of the fact that Anne is out to conquer Ruggedo as well as the
rest of the world:  I have to wonder about the Jinjin's highly praised sense
of justice.  Here is how he justifies sending Quox to punish Ruggedo:
"Because [Ruggedo] had unjustly kept the Shaggy Man's brother a prisoner,
this little band of honest people, consisting of both mortals and immortals,
determined to conquer Ruggedo and to punish him.  Fearing they might succeed
in this, the Nome King misled them so that they fell into the Tube" (p.
137).  This is not exactly true.  On p. 104, Ruggedo has said, "Well, Shaggy
Man may have his ugly brother, for all I care," and in fact Shaggy's brother
is as much a prisoner of his own vanity (his family's vanity, to judge from
Shaggy's remarks on p. 209) as he is a prisoner of Ruggedo.  On p. 105,
moreover, we see that Ruggedo's decision to send the invaders through the
Tube is motivated entirely by his rage against the Army of Oogaboo.  The
Hearer has told him, "The Army of Oogaboo is determined to capture all the
rich metals and rare jewels in your kingdom, and the officers and their
Queen have arranged to divide the spoils and carry them away."  In other
words, the Jinjin has badly misjudged the motivations of at least 18 of the
23 invaders, and he has equally misjudged Ruggedo's motivation in protecting
what is rightfully his property.  As far as I can see, the only unambiguous
infraction that Ruggedo has committed is his unauthorized use of the Tube to
dispose of unwanted visitors.
 
Speaking of the Tube:  has it struck anyone else that this device apparently
runs diametrically through the earth, but people who fall through it don't
go into free-fall but slide along its inside surface?  This would make the
Tube . . . what?  A secant? (It's been a long time since I had solid
geometry.)  In any event, the implication is that the travelers have come
out on the opposite side of the earth, and I find it intriguing that this
region is so clearly marked with Oriental characteristics:  the Jinjin, the
dragon motif, the name Ti-ti-ti-Hoochoo (which sounds like a Chinese
sneeze).  When I was little, people used to say, "If you dug down straight
through the earth you would come out in China."  This of course is not quite
accurate, but it was at least a popular misconception.  The implication for
_Tik-Tok_ is that Oz is somehow in our own geographical space, a fairyland
that relates to us the way the Jinjin's realm relates to China.  (Thompson
was doing something similar in _Royal Book_.)
 
I was very impressed with John Bell's comments on the themes of desire and
governance, though it seems to me that the issue of good governance is
scarcely new with _Tik-Tok_. Baum took it up again and again, beginning with
_The Wonderful Wizard_ and ending with _Glinda_.  Another motif that strikes
me as being pervasive in _Tik-Tok_ is the motif of *falling*:  Betsy and
Hank fall off the ship, Shaggy falls through the roof of the greenhouse,
Tik-Tok falls down the well (after being pushed), the travelers fall down
(and then up) the Tube, Anne falls onto Tubekins, Anne and her army fall
into the pit.  There may be some other examples.  I'm not certain what sort
of thematic significance attaches to this motif of falling, but perhaps it
relates to what John said about the loss of control that is associated with
desire.
 
On p. 141 there is a bit of dialogue that puzzles me.  Tubekins says, "Quox
tires me dreadfully, and I prefer his room to his company."  Is this a joke?
Is Tubekins saying that he likes the huge amount of space that Quox occupies
but not Quox himself?
 
Thanks, Robin, for your good remarks on the theatrical elements of
_Tik-Tok_.  One thing I've wondered about is whether the Hollow Tube, which
is so essential to the action of the book, was part of the play.  If so, how
on earth was it represented on stage?  (Related question:  is the script
still extant?)
 
One final comment:  the approach of the Rak can detected by a tell-tale
aroma of salt and pepper (p. 33).  This I find interesting, since salt--at
least the table salt NaCl that is associated with pepper--is a colorless and
odorless compound, as Baum must surely have known.
 
--Gordon Birrell

Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 01:18:42 +0000 (GMT)
From: David Hulan <davidhulan at ntsource.com>
Subject: Re: Ozzy Digest, 01-17-97
 
J.L.:
>  In RINKITINK Dorothy tells Kaliko, "You must be more wicked than I
>thought you were," which implies a prior acquaintance. If that encounter
>was recorded in the Oz books, it can only be when Dorothy met the Chief
>Steward in OZMA. But in RINKITINK there are hints that Dorothy has
>interfered in Kaliko's royal doings already, implying some unrecorded
>meeting.
 
Dorothy may not have personally encountered Kaliko; she'd presumably have
heard from both Betsy and Tik-Tok (from the LWS) ["Little Wizard Stories",
in case anyone is in doubt about this abbreviation.  -- Dave] that Kaliko 
was pretty much of a Good Guy, and have been basing her favorable opinion of 
him on those tales.
 
I think _Tik-Tok_ was the first Neill-illustrated book since _Land_ where
the color plates were "colorized" by the printer. _Ozma_ and _PG_ didn't
have color plates, but had color added to the illustrations in the text;
_DotWiz_ and _EC_ had watercolors as the basis for the color plates, and
_Road_ had no color illustrations at all. _Tik-Tok_, OTOH, started a
process that was continued through _Wishing Horse_ of having the printer
colorize black-and-white drawings by Neill.
 
Tzvi:
>Last night I got around to reading the end of the book.  It all came back to
>me.  I remember reading it as a child (somewhere between ages 7-10) and
>being insulted by Ozmas' statement about "the army of children" overrunning
>Oz.  I didn't think it was fair that Betsy Bobbin gets to stay in Oz, and I
>don't even get to visit.
 
Hear! Hear!
 
Bear:
As Dave remarked, Eratosthenes was the Greek (from Alexandria, IIRC) who
calculated the diameter of the Earth from shadows. (Syene happens to lie
exactly on the Tropic of Cancer, so that at noon on Midsummer's Day the sun
illuminates the whole interior of a deep well.) He came quite close; I
think he was off by less than a percent, which given the measuring
instruments of the day was excellent.
 
Have you actually looked at what the Ehrlichs said, as opposed to what some
of the right-wing media have said they said? Population _has_ exploded in
the last 3 decades; my recollection is that their estimates of how much it
would increase in that time was roughly correct. Their estimates of the
_effects_ of the population increase were exaggerated - generally speaking,
any extrapolation into the future of the effects of a given action are
highly exaggerated in the direction the extrapolater wants to emphasize.
After all, I can remember Republican economists warning that the 1993 tax
increases were going to put the economy into the tank, and that the
increase in the minimum wage last year was going to hike unemployment by a
couple of percent, and that the restrictions on sulfur emissions to combat
acid rain were going to coast $15,000 a ton, and put the economy into the
tank again (in fact, it cost $150 a ton,, and the economy didn't notice
it), and none of these actually happened. It works the same way in either
direction; there's a good deal of negative feedback for any action, so that
whatever is done is never either as bad or as good as those who oppose or
advocate the action predict.
 
Nathan:
Welcome back!
 
Raks can eat a dragon for breakfast and have room for some mince pie. I
know, because the Glass Cat says so in the October 1997 issue of the
_Emerald City Mirror_.
 
David Hulan

Date: Mon, 19 Jan 1998 23:00:29 -0500
From: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
Subject: Oz openings, Oz closed off
Sender: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
 
About Ozma's fear of children overrunning Oz, Bear wrote:
<<If the silly Ehrlichs had been right when they first put out their theory
we would all be standing packed together covering the whole country.  Maybe
Ozma influenced them.  Despite being thoroughly discredited they are still
around here shoveling the same manure.  I will try to ask them if I get a
chance.>>
 
I suspect most people read Ozma's policy as about immigration, not
population control. And studying that connection makes more sense than
asking Paul and Anne Ehrlich what they read fifty years ago. After all,
Baum wrote TIK-TOK during the period that US policy, under pressure from
California (his new home), limited Chinese (1882-) and Japanese (1907-)
immigrants and forbade almost all of them from becoming citizens. 

  This is the second time in as many Oz-book readings, Bear, that you've
plucked out a passage, posited that it's the source of a postwar idea you
dislike, and then took the opportunity to call the idea "manure" or
"nutty."
 
About the 1913 musical THE TIK-TOK MAN OF OZ, Nathan DeHoff wrote:
<<I believe that Ozga did appear in the play, but that she was called
"Ozma."  Baum changed her name for the book, to avoid confusion with a
certain other character.>>
 
And Dave Hulan wrote:
<<one of the songs in it is titled, "Tell Me, Pretty Flowers." That sounds
like one Ozga would sing at the point where she asks the flowers to point
them to the Nome King's dominion. But maybe Polychrome or Betsy sings it in
the play.>>
 
If Ozma appeared in THE WOGGLE-BUG, Baum's adaptation of LAND, he sold the
stage rights to her before TIK-TOK MAN. I don't see Ozma or Ozga mentioned
in the only two sources I have on TIK-TOK MAN: the poster reproduced in
ANNOTATED WIZARD and the items pictured in OZ SCRAPBOOK. But maybe she's a
minor character who doesn't go on the adventure to the Nomes.

  One of those items is a cover of sheet music from the musical. The song
titles it lists:
* "Ask the Flowers to Tell You" [Since this line appears in the book, I
assume Files sang it to his stage fairy love, Polychrome.] 
* "The Magnet of Love"
* "When In Trouble Come to Papa" [an oddity--TIK-TOK the book has nothing
but absent fathers: Ann's lights out for the territory, the other
Oogabooans march away, the Rainbow leaves Polychrome behind.]
* "The Waltz Scream"
* "Dear Old Hank"
* "So Do I"
* "The Clockwork Man"
* "Oh My Bow" [probably based on the beau/bow pun]

In addition, according to the poster in ANNOTATED WIZARD, Tik-Tok, Betsy,
Poly, and Shaggy performed "Isn't Folly Jolly," and there was a ballet
interlude for a wood-nymph and a satyr in Ruggedo's Metal Forest. Since Ann
was played by Charlotte Greenwood (later Aunt Eller in the movie
OKLAHOMA!), there should have been a comic dance number using her. 

  I bet that's not a complete list, though. Musicals of the time used to
shuffle songs and comic interludes in and out depending on the available
talent and the audience responses. Numbers didn't need to be tightly tied
to either character or plot--talk about your IE's! 
 
About Betsy Bobbin, Dave Hulan wrote: 
<<I think you're right that Betsy is more upper-class than Dorothy or Trot,
guess it depends on how you define "rich" - in 1913, someone with an income
equivalent to $60,000 a year or so today would certainly have servants,
probably even live-in servants, but I don't consider that "rich." . . . I
conceive of her as a sweet-natured, rather shy and naive little girl, not
nearly as strong as Dorothy or even Trot; she's popular with the other
residents of the palace, but isn't fond of adventures and isn't often
called on to _do_ anything. Even her biggest adventure after _Tik-Tok_, in
_Hungry Tiger_, is one that she gets into entirely by accident...And she
does nothing much but follow Carter and Reddy and the tiger around>>
 
And Ruth Berman wrote:
<<She doesn't strike me as a poor little rich girl, though -- doesn't, for
instance, have the rich clothing of poor-little-rich-boy Button Bright.  I
wonder if her knowledge of the custom of announcing guests and her presence
on an ocean-cruiser might mean that she was an orphan who had been hired as
a servant by a well-to-do family, rather than that she was a member of such
a family.>>
 
It's true Baum says little about Betsy's clothing, just as he says little
about other details around her. Since he does make a point of
Button-Bright's velvet, I guess he didn't want to portray Betsy as much
different from the norm.

  My suggestion that Betsy came from a rich household derives from two
details Baum didn't make a point of: (1) her travel (though it's not clear
what class of ship she's on--it's carrying a bony mule, after all); (2) her
knowledge that servants were supposed to announce guests--which in turn
implies a household staff larger than a cook in the kitchen. But, as Dave
points out, that doesn't necessarily mean the highest strata of society.
And, as Ruth points out, that doesn't mean Betsy was on the receiving end
of the servants' attention--the notion that she was somebody's maid or paid
companion has a certain Gothic intrigue. 

  The main attraction of the rich-Betsy theory to me is, frankly, that it
would make *one* interesting difference between Betsy and Dorothy.

  Dave, I'd assumed from the opening of GLASS CAT that Betsy was a more
prominent character in your book, but obviously I'll have to read farther.
I, too, dislike Betsy's passivity throughout HUNGRY TIGER, and especially
how she cowers during Reddy's final battle. Dorothy would never have sat
by! (At least Baum's Dorothy.)

  One of the ideas in the back of my hard drive is a story for Betsy in
which she wrestles with her jealousy of Dorothy for having all the good
adventures, all the while realizing that she really likes Dorothy and that
she doesn't want to brave those sorts of tribulations.
 
Speaking of Oz-book openings, Dave Hulan wrote:
<<books that include parallel plots and a child from America coming to the
Oz universe almost invariably begin in the Oz universe and pick up the
American child later.>>
 
I wasn't addressing whether TIK-TOK started with the inside-Oz or the
outside-Oz plot, but with how long the book takes to bring on a child with
whom readers can identify. In every previous Oz book but one that child
appears in the first chapter; in the one exception, EMERALD CITY, the
second chapter starts, "Dorothy Gale..." Baum stuck to that pattern--even
in MAGIC, Kiki (a child *antagonist*) appears in the first chapter. The
long wait for Betsy in TIK-TOK foreshadows how little she affects the main
plot.

  (One could argue that, like Kiki, Ann Soforth is a youngish and childish
person with whom readers might feel a pang of empathy--but it's quickly
clear that she's older, she's on the wrong side of the Ozian law, and we
should root against her.) 

  Thompson seems to have started most of her books with either (a) poor
child from the Ozian provinces, (b) familiar celebrity in the Emerald City,
or (c) villain. We readers instinctively root for (a) and (b) and against
(c), so her openings still grab us. PIRATES has several chapters of Ruggedo
and Samuel Salt before Peter Brown climbs aboard, almost as an
afterthought. [Without looking, how many of us can remember how he got to
the Nonestic that time?] 

  Does GLASS CAT fit Thompson opening (b) above: Emerald City celebrity
leaves on adventure?
  
Appropriately, I close with a note on closings: TIK-TOK is the second
straight Oz book in which a character "reforms" at the end, only to return
in later books to the more interesting, less likable personality. In
PATCHWORK GIRL, the Glass Cat lost its pink brains; in TIK-TOK Ruggedo's
accepts his fate. Thank goodness their sticky goodness doesn't last.
 
J. L. Bell                            JnoLBell at compuserve.com

Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 10:04:40 -0600 (CST)
From: Ruth Berman <berma005 at maroon.tc.umn.edu>
Subject: ozzy digest
 
J.L. Bell: You had guessed from the absence of Ozga in the "Tik-Tok"
play cast that Baum invented the character for the book "Tik-Tok."  No,
only the name.  The character of the exiled Rose Princess is in the
play, but there named Ozma (as Nathan DeHoff suggested -- must
have been confusing for audience members who'd read Baum's books,
but that's how he did it).
 
Mark Anthony Donajkowski: The "Tik-Tok" play wasn't published, but
the "Bugle" has printed a couple of songs from it, and a couple of
detailed articles on it by Dan Mannix.  Presumably someone has a
copy of the script, as Marc Lewis and John Frick and Robin Olderman
headed an Ozmapolitan-convention-production of it one year.
 
David Hulan: Places where Betsy could have ridden a subway -- if
whatever got her on a sea-voyage in the first place was a round-the-
world journey, she could have perhaps been on the London
Underground or Paris Metro?
 
Robin Olderman: I thought you probably meant Imogene, but saying
that the Cowardly Lion influenced the portrayal of Hank was probably
true, too, since the Lion was a popular character in the play, too.  (And
Fred Woodward, who played Hank in "Tik-Tok" and similar animal roles
in the Oz Company movies Baum produced, had also played both the
Lion and Imogene in "Wizard" companies.)
 
Ruth Berman

Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 12:04:43 -0500
From: Richard Randolph <dixnam at worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Ozzy Digest 1-18/19-98
 
Bear: I have a post-1935 Tik-Tok (no color plates)
and it has the print problem you mentioned, plus,
on page 22, second paragraph, line 2 the word
"said" and, line 3 the word "But" show the same
damage, as does the word "Somewhere" on the top
line of page 43. 
 
Your comment regarding the difference between the 
Long-Eared Hearer's 9,306 miles through the tube
and the 8,000 mile diameter of the Earth assumes
Baumgea is on our planet? 
 
Dick

Date: Tue, 20 Jan 98 11:32:28 (PST)
From: Dave Hardenbrook <DaveH47 at delphi.com>
Subject: Ozzy Things
 
THE TUBE:
Gordon Birrell wrote:
>Speaking of the Tube:  has it struck anyone else that this device apparently
>runs diametrically through the earth, but people who fall through it don't
>go into free-fall but slide along its inside surface?  This would make the
>Tube . . . what?  A secant? (It's been a long time since I had solid
>geometry.)
 
For the sake of arguement, I think either "secant" or "chord" could be used
to describe the tube.
 
BTW, the Tube is mentioned by Martin Gardner in _The Annotated Alice_ in
his note about Alice speculating on whether she will fall *through* the
Earth.  He describes it as "an effective plot gimmick".
 
                             -- Dave

Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 17:57:34 -0500 (EST)
From: Ozmama <Ozmama at aol.com>
Subject: Re: Ozzy Digest, 01-20-98
 
Tik-Tok Play:  It's been too long--13 years--and I don't remember it all, esp.
since I played all the female roles in one of the productions...they all run
together.  I think it was Files and Ozga (Fricke and me, anyway) who sang "Ask
the Flowers to Tell You."  And I think it was Ann who danced "Waltz Scream"
with Shaggy (Rob-Roy).  We ended up on our b*tts by the end of that one, then
sprawled out on the floor!  I do not recall anything at all about a Hollow
Tube in the play. I don't recall that Quox or Tititihoochoo were in it,
either.  Marc may well have missed or cut out a bunch of stuff.  He had pieced
together quite a lot of it, though.  --Robin

Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 21:24:22 -0500
From: Tyler Jones <tnj at compuserve.com>
Subject: Oz
Sender: Tyler Jones <tnj at compuserve.com>
 
Gordon:
The Hollow Tube would be a chord, actually, a line segment that touches two
points of a circle/sphere but does not go through the center.
 
Tyler Jones

Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 21:54:23 -0500
From: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
Subject: Ozma and the tube
Sender: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
 
Thanks to Ruth Berman for confirming that a Rose Princess named Ozma
appears in TIK-TOK MAN. My apologies to Nathan DeHoff for doubting a more
recent winner of the Munchkin quiz. I still wonder how prominent Ozma is in
the play, and whether an Ozma appears in THE WOGGLE-BUG. Robin Olderman, if
you indeed performed a version of TTM at Yosemite one year, do you remember
the script?
 
Gordon Birrell wrote:
<<the feature which really captivated me as a child--the hollow tube
through the earth to the realm of Ti-ti-ti-Hoochoo--is certainly
unprecedented...has it struck anyone else that this device apparently runs
diametrically through the earth, but people who fall through it don't go
into free-fall but slide along its inside surface?>>
 
Dave Hardenbrook has mentioned Martin Gardner's allusion to this Tube in
ANNOTATED ALICE. His note points us to a couple of precedents for Baum's
Tube. Most directly, there are Alice's ruminations: 

   "I wonder how many miles I've fallen by this 
   time?" she said aloud. "I must be getting 
   somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let 
   me see: that would be four thousand miles 
   down, I think . . . I wonder if I shall fall right 
   *through* the earth! How funny it'll seem to 
   come out among the people that walk with 
   their heads downwards! The Antipathies, I 
   think--"

This passage could also have been Baum's inspiration for the Duchess
Bredenbutta's plunge into Turvyland in MO. I like your suggestion that he
was also inspired by the American notion of digging one's way to China.

  Gardner reports that Plutarch, Bacon, and Voltaire all speculated on what
would happen if one fell through the earth. Galileo "gave the correct
answer," he writes (though we can ask how Gardner knows for sure): Tik-Tok
should fall faster and faster until he passes the center, then slower and
slower until he stops at (in a frictionless world) or near (in the world
with air) the other opening, and then he would fall back the way he came.
He would end up either oscillating endlessly from one end of the earth to
the other or hovering in the middle. This is, of course, quite different
from shooting out and hitting a star or fairy king. 

  As for a tunnel built as a chord, Lewis Carroll wrote in SYLVIE AND BRUNO
(1889) of a train that ran on a perfectly straight tube through a section
of the earth. It was to be pulled down by gravity for the first half of
every journey, then (in a frictionless world) carried up by momentum.
Gardner reports that the time it would take any such train to run and the
time it would take to fall straight through the middle of the earth is
exactly the same.

  The number of minutes required for either journey: 42. 
 
Gordon Birrell also wrote:
<<On p. 141 there is a bit of dialogue that puzzles me.  Tubekins says,
"Quox tires me dreadfully, and I prefer his room to his company."  Is this
a joke? Is Tubekins saying that he likes the huge amount of space that Quox
occupies but not Quox himself?>>
 
I read this as meaning, "If I had the choice between Quox's presence and
the breathing room I would gain by his absence, I would quickly choose the
latter."
 
And Gordon Birrell wrote:
<<When we were discussing _Ozma_, Joyce argued that Ozma's expedition to Ev
has imperialistic overtones--an assertion that met with considerable
resistance from other members of the Digest.>>
 
I woulda been wid ya, Joyce! (Much imperialism, especially the Teddy
Roosevelt variety at play when Baum wrote OZMA, was as well motivated as
Ozma was when she thrust herself into the Ev/Nome relationship. We can
distinguish between that and the type exemplified in CAPTAIN SALT.)
 
Dave Hulan wrote:
<<I think _Tik-Tok_ was the first Neill-illustrated book since _Land_ where
the color plates were "colorized" by the printer.>>
 
Thanks for this intelligence, Dave. That explains the qualitative
difference between these plates and the magnificent artwork in EMERALD
CITY. 

  In recent digests I described how the "white cover" edition of DOROTHY &
THE WIZARD included redrawn color plates, with pages renumbered to
accommodate them. It's a shame that Reilly & Lee didn't insert the artwork
Neill had already created in black-and-white for TIK-TOK and later books
into the corresponding "white cover" editions. I have to assume that the
company was more willing to spend money on D&W. It's a relatively weak
book, but it has a bankable title. 
 
Dick Randolph wrote to Bear:
<<Your comment regarding the difference between the Long-Eared Hearer's
9,306 miles through the tube and the 8,000 mile diameter of the Earth
assumes Baumgea is on our planet? >>
 
I made the original comment, and indeed I start from the assumption that
the land mass where Betsy and the Shaggy Man's brother end up is on the
same planet as Oklahoma and Colorado. I'd need to be convinced by textual
evidence otherwise. (I haven't gotten used to "Baumgea," either.)

  My own explanation for the Long-Eared Hearer's measurement is that he's
hearing the conversation echoing off various surfaces, and that the
distance the sound had to travel to his ears totals 9,306 miles. Hence his
warning that his estimate is "as nearly as I can judge by the sound of
their voices" (pp. 151-2).
 
J. L. Bell                            JnoLBell at compuserve.com

Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 09:51:44 -0600 (CST)
From: Ruth Berman <berma005 at maroon.tc.umn.edu>
Subject: ozzy digest
 
Some further thoughts about how Baum got from Ozma to Ozga.
Obviously, starting from "Ozma of Oz," when he began the "Tik-Tok"
musical, he had a Princess Ozma who was both the ruler of Oz and the
head of a comic army trying to conquer the Nome King.  Somewhere in
there, he decided the head of a comic army had better be a comic
character herself, and as such was not the same person as the ruler of
Oz.  At that point he probably made her the queen of Oogaboo, but
may have gone on calling her Ozma.  In the process of making her a
comic character, he wound up with something close to the standard
stage Dame, the old or middle-aged woman played by a man in
English pantomimes, or by the contralto in Gilbert&Sullivan.  (When he
got round to making the play into the book "Tik-Tok," Queen Ann got
younger and prettier, but the stage Ann, as far as I can make out from
copies of photos I've seen, was older, more of a Dame type.)  Then
two things happened, probably together.  One was that he
remembered that he needed a romantic couple (it's a musical, after all),
and although the boy could well be the army's Private, the girl could
not be a middle-aged comic.  The girl couldn't be Betsy/Dorothy,
either, who was too young.  (Polychrome might have done, if he had
her in the plot-line by then, but she would have had to be someone
very different from her Oz-book version to do something as earthy as
falling in love, even the extremely-chaste-falling-in-love of Young Lovers
in musical comedies, so he would still have been stuck making more
changes.)  The other was that he wanted an excuse to get in a chorus
of flowers, to try to repeat the stage-success of the Sunflower scene
from the stage "Wizard."  So the Queen of Oogaboo got split into two
characters, one the Dame-like Queen now re-named Ann, and the other
a Princess Ozma who was now to be an exiled Rose Princess.  And he
went on calling her Ozma, thinking that since obviously stage-musical-
adaptations never assumed that anyone had read the original book, it
didn't much matter if she was an entirely different character who
happened to have the same name.  When he got back to making an
Oz book of the play, of course, he assumed that the readers would
have read (or would read) other Oz books, and Ozma the exiled Rose
Princess became Ozga.
 
Gordon Birrell: Interesting comments on the Jinjin's invalid basis for
making his judgments.  You're maybe over-emphasizing the degree to
which Ruggedo is protecting what is "rightfully" his.  The question of
whether Nomes "rightfully" own all the underground mineral wealth, or
whether surface dwellers who uncover some of it can "rightfully" take it
away is the issue that goes back to the earliest account of
Gnome/Human relations (Paracelsus, 16th century).  And Ruggedo had
captured Shaggy's Brother in the first place because he objected to
Brother's mining activities.  Apparently the Jinjin is to some extent
claiming that Ruggedo really doesn't have any right to say, "All mines
are mine."  But the narrative as a whole clearly implies there's
something unjust about Ann's plan of conquering the world in general
and Ruggedo in particular.  I'm not sure if the famously just Jinjin's
failure to object to Ann simply represents narrative inconsistency, or if
Baum intended readers to suspect that the Jinjin wasn't as totally
reliable a judge as he and his people thought he was.

   Preferring someone's room to his company -- yes, that's a way of
saying, "I have better uses for that space than having you around in
it."  An already existing idiom for being politely rude, I think, although I
don't offhand recall other examples.  I think the Hollow Tube and Quox
and all the other-side-of-the-world material were added to the book,
and were not in the play.
 
J.L. Bell: You might want to get in touch with me privately about getting
copies of additional material dealing with the "Tik-Tok" play.  I don't
have a script, but do have the "Bugle" articles by Dan Mannix and
copies of some contemporary reviews.  The reviews do refer to a
character in the play named "Ozma" who is an exiled Rose Princess.
 
Ruth Berman

Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 17:00:06 +0000 (GMT)
From: David Hulan <davidhulan at ntsource.com>
Subject: Re: Ozzy Digest, 01-20-98
 
Gordon:
We had a discussion about the Tube back a year or so ago, and concluded
that it probably didn't go through the center of the Earth (or the world Oz
is on, if that's not the same). In fact, it more nearly resembles a tunnel
from somewhere in the US to somewhere in China. It also clearly had a
magical acceleration force somehow; those who fall through it not only
overcome friction, but pick up enough extra kinetic energy to rise up in
the air some distance at the exit end. Hiergargo evidently picked up enough
to reach escape velocity, or thereabouts, since he hit a star. It appears
that while the accelerating force works in both directions, it's stronger
in the Evward direction; Ann and company seem to have risen only a few feet
above ground level when they exited in Tubekins' garden, but Quox flew high
enough to pass over the Nome army and land on a mountaintop some distance
away, and that was also the direction Hiergargo was going when he hit the
star. (Possibly the amount of additional momentum the magic can add is
fixed, so the great mass of Quox didn't gain as much increased velocity as
Hiergargo's much lesser mass?)
 
>On p. 141 there is a bit of dialogue that puzzles me.  Tubekins says, "Quox
>tires me dreadfully, and I prefer his room to his company."  Is this a joke?
>Is Tubekins saying that he likes the huge amount of space that Quox occupies
>but not Quox himself?
 
To "prefer someone's room to his company" is an expression I've run across
fairly often in British books, though less so in American; it means to
prefer his absence to his presence.
 
J.L.:
A planned party for Betsy is what gets _Glass Cat_ started, and the last
chapter comprises the party, and is told from Betsy's POV, but she doesn't
appear in the rest of the book; Trot, Button-Bright, and Cap'n Bill are the
main familiar Oz mortals in it. (You mean you started reading _Glass Cat_
and didn't finish it? *Sniffle*.)
 
>  Does GLASS CAT fit Thompson opening (b) above: Emerald City celebrity
>leaves on adventure?
 
Yes, more or less.
 
Ruth:
>David Hulan: Places where Betsy could have ridden a subway -- if
>whatever got her on a sea-voyage in the first place was a round-the-
>world journey, she could have perhaps been on the London
>Underground or Paris Metro?
 
Could be, but those aren't called "subways". In London a "subway" is what
we call a pedestrian undercrossing here.
 
David Hulan

Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 22:52:01 -0500
From: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
Subject: TIK-TOK OF OZ once more into the hole...
Sender: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
 
Yet another final comment on TIK-TOK: In this book Baum seems to make a big
deal about Ozians being different from other humans. Not simply very, very
lucky to have been born in Oz, but endowed with powers and abilities beyond
those of mortal men. 

  On pp. 32-33, Files explains how he and his fellow Ozians would continue
to live after being chewed up by a Rak. This parallels Kaliko's description
on page 156 of how a Nome can survive being torn up by a dragon. Nomes are
definitely magical creatures, like ryls and fairies, so this hints there's
something inherently magical about Ozians as well.

  On page 107, Baum writes that Ozians "cannot be deceived by such common
magic as the Nome King could command," though of course they are fooled
before the end of that very paragraph. This ability may derive from Ozians'
having witnessed more magic, but again there's a hint that they're somehow
special. (Shaggy is not ascribed this power, even though he's traveled
around Oz for years.)

  Alas, Ann doesn't participate in the experimental kissing of Shaggy's
brother in Chapter 22, so we don't know whether she should be classified as
mortal maid, fairy, or something else.
 
Ruth Berman wrote of Ann Soforth:
<<In the process of making her a comic character, he wound up with
something close to the standard stage Dame, the old or middle-aged woman
played by a man in English pantomimes, or by the contralto in
Gilbert&Sullivan.  (When he got round to making the play into the book
"Tik-Tok," Queen Ann got younger and prettier, but the stage Ann, as far as
I can make out from copies of photos I've seen, was older, more of a Dame
type.)>>
 
Ann was played by Charlotte Greenwood at the age of 23. Her physiognomy let
her (or forced her to) play older than she was through most of her career,
but her real age might have been one influence on Baum when he made Ann a
huffy teenager instead of a puffy dame.
 
Dave Hulan wrote:
<<You mean you started reading _Glass Cat_ and didn't finish it?
*Sniffle*.>>
 
I'm sorry, Dave! I confess an near-allergic reaction to lack of curly
quotation marks in a book. I had to take a breather and come back to the
Emerald City Press collection in my local Borders when I have more
strength. (Peter G. is right about increased bookstore presence in the past
year.)
 
J. L. Bell                            JnoLBell at compuserve.com

Date: Thu, 22 Jan 1998 00:03:52 -0500
From: "Melody G. Keller" <harmonyarts at compuserve.com>
Subject: Ozzy Digest, 01-17-97
Sender: "Melody G. Keller" <harmonyarts at compuserve.com>
 
Bob Spark:
 
> On thing that really struck me was the
absence of the flowers on either side of her face, but she seems more
mature also.<
 
In the text, Baum says that Ozma is at least half a head taller than
Dorothy or Betsy--so Neill probably assumed Ozma was more mature as well.
 
Melody Grandy

Date: Thu, 22 Jan 1998 12:49:41 -0600 (CST)
From: Ruth Berman <berma005 at maroon.tc.umn.edu>
Subject: ozzy digest
 
J.L. Bell: Yes, the Tip plot (including Ozma) was in "The Wogglebug."  (I
was at the Ozcon the year that Robin and the usual suspects gave a
performance of it.  The most amusing character, though, is Prissy the
soldier-girl, original to the musical.)  You were commenting earlier that
in using Ozma in "Wogglebug" Baum would have lost the rights to use
her again in another play.  That doesn't really follow.  It would depend
on the specifics of the individual contract -- and he did use Ozma again
in the Oz movies.

   Like you, I don't care for the "Baumgea" name.
 
Gordon Birrell: I checked in the OED, and there are several citations for
preferring someone's room to someone's company, going back as far
as 1557.
 
Dave Hardenbrook: No, I don't mean that having marriages between
fairies and mortals is necessarily a no-no, but that it necessarily
involves difficulties.  In "Iolanthe," the background plot specifies that
fairies are able to marry mortals, and Gilbert solves the difficulties by
having the peers tired of politics anyway and gallantly glad to become
fairies themselves.  They all sprout wings and happily fly off to live with
their fairy wives in fairyland.  In Oz, it isn't clear if fairies could marry
mortals in the first place -- most of Baum's fairies are, like Polychrome,
personifications of natural forces, and while Baum might have decided
to have it be possible if he'd wanted to write such a plot, it's hard to
see how one could seriously marry a rainbow (or electricity, or a forest,
or the like).  But even if it's physically possible for Polychrome to marry
a mortal, I can't see someone like Files or Shaggy willing to go live
permanently "up in the sky, ever so high," dancing up and down the
colors of the Rainbow for a primary (oogh!) occupation, or Polychrome
as willing to abandon her Rainbow.  (A compromise arrangement of
six-months-here-and-six-months-there might be possible, but it would
be very clumsy narratively.  And there would still probably be some
kind of basic physical incompatibility between someone who eats
apples and solid food and someone who eats mistcakes and dew.)
 
Ruth Berman

Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 15:42:21 +0000 (GMT)
From: David Hulan <davidhulan at ntsource.com>
Subject: Re: Ozzy Digest, 01-22-98
 
Jeremy:
>Endless falling:
>Yikes!  I'd not want to fall through a tube if I were going to be
>trapped like that.  But if one would do that forever, how is it
>possible to start such a fate?  What I mean is, if that is perpetual
>motion, shouldn't some law of physics say it is impossible to _start_
>oscillating like that?
 
You'd oscillate forever in a frictionless world, but in a frictionless
world perpetual motion _is_ possible. Once friction comes into play the
oscillations will gradually damp down until you hover at the exact center
of the Earth. (Actually, if there really _were_ a tunnel through the center
of the Earth filled with air you'd probably stop a very short distance from
the center the first time through. Friction from the air balances the
acceleration due to gravity rather quickly; there's a distance beyond which
you don't fall any faster no matter how much higher you start, and I think
it's only on the order of a couple of hundred feet. That's why people have
survived jumping out of airplanes and having their parachute fail to open.)
 
David Hulan

Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 09:46:45 -0600 (CST)
From: Ruth Berman <berma005 at maroon.tc.umn.edu>
Subject: ozzy digest
 
Jeremy Steadman: Perpetual motion as such is easy if you don't have
to allow for friction.  As Newton said, "An object in motion continues in
motion."  The planets keep going around the sun perpetually.  But the
term "perpetual motion" doesn't just mean staying on the go -- it means
also getting energy out of that motion to use for other purposes, for
instance, enough energy to keep going out the other end of the Tube
and smash into a star.  As David Hulan commented, there must be
some magic at work to make that possible.  But just falling in and
bopping back and forth forever, or until you stop discounting friction
and come to rest in the center, is easy enough.  (Avoiding that fate,
you should loudly at each end, "Help!" and hope that someone throws
you a rope before the friction you didn't get to discount slows you
down so much that you're out of reach of an easy way to be pulled
out.)
 
Bear: It isn't so much a problem of disparaging any particular icons,
but of dragging in a political reference that isn't particularly relevant to
talking about Oz books.  The Ehrlichs' ideas about population growth
don't have much to do with Ozma's ideas about too-many-immigrants.
(If you want to wait until "Captain Salt" comes up for discussion, maybe
a complaint about fears of over-population as meaningless would be
relevant.  But meantime, as J.L. said, it looks as if you are using an
improbable "did they get this idea from Oz" lead-in to try to make a
complaint about recent political ideas you dislike relevant to a
discussion of Oz books, and in the process boring those of us who
may be willing to discuss the political ideas in the Oz books, but are
not interested in politics as such.  This isn't the forum for it.)
 
J.L. Bell: So Charlotte Greenwood was only 23 when she played Ann?
She sounds like an interesting actress -- do you know of any
biographical articles on her?
 
Ruth Berman

Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 11:35:57 -0400
From: jwkenne at ibm.net
Subject: Re: Ozzy Digest, 01-22-98
 
>What I mean is, if that is perpetual
>motion, shouldn't some law of physics say it is impossible to _start_
>oscillating like that?
 
No.  There are two kinds of perpetual-motion machines that are impossible,
but this is neither.  One depends on getting energy from nowhere; that
is not the case here -- energy is being converted from gravitational
potential energy to kinetic energy and back again, but never created.
The other depends on extracting heat from something already at ambient
temperature (like a ship that pulls in seawater, pulls the heat out of
it in order to boil part of it to run the ship's engines, and tosses
ice cubes out the back); this is obviously not the case.
 
The perpetual-bounce-through-the-center-of-the-earth is no more impossible
than the perpetual-fall-around-the-earth trick that the moon has been
successfully performing for billions of years.
 
// John W Kennedy

Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 22:05:46 -0500 (EST)
From: Ozmama <Ozmama at aol.com>
Subject: Re: Ozzy Digest, 01-22-98
 
John Bell:<<Alas, Ann doesn't participate in the experimental kissing of Shaggy's
brother in Chapter 22, so we don't know whether she should be classified as
mortal maid, fairy, or something else.>>
 
Ann?  No question about it.  Ann was definitely "somethin' else"!
 
<<Ann was played by Charlotte Greenwood at the age of 23. Her physiognomy let
her (or forced her to) play older than she was through most of her career,
but her real age might have been one influence on Baum when he made Ann a
huffy teenager instead of a puffy dame.>>
 
If someone has mentioned this before and I've just missed it 'cause I've been
skimming, then I apologize:  Charlotte Greenwood was a comical gal with
extraordinary kicking ability.  Her legs seemed to be hinged to her armpits.
When I was a very little girl...probably in the late '40s or early, early
'50s, my grandmother took me to see her at the Chicago Theatre.  The old pro
could still swing those legs around in a truly amazing manner.  Subsequently,
I've seen her kicking her way through several old movies.  Surely she must've
been a heckuva high-kicker in her youth. Makes me wonder how Baum utilized her
special talent.  Poor Files or whoever it was that caught *her* foot on his
rearmost extremity! (Just think of the momentum it would have picked up on its
extremely long pendulum arc...).
 
--Robin

Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 22:48:48 -0500
From: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
Subject: You say Ozma, I say Ozga...
Sender: "J. L. Bell" <JnoLBell at compuserve.com>
 
Jeremy Steadman, other folks have well and ably answered your question
about Tik-Tok oscillating in the middle of the earth. I'll add only that
perpetual motion is legal under Newton's laws of motion--just not under the
laws of thermodynamics. 
 
Ruth Berman wrote:
<<You were commenting earlier that in using Ozma in "Wogglebug" Baum would
have lost the rights to use her again in another play.  That doesn't really
follow.  It would depend on the specifics of the individual contract -- and
he did use Ozma again in the Oz movies.>>
 
You're right that the contract specifics mattered. I bet Baum's stage
contracts didn't include movie rights because that medium was so young--and
he could thus film and refilm his stories. 

  On the stage rights to OZMA, however, I relied on a note by Peter
Glassman in his edition of TIK-TOK: "When L. Frank Baum decided to wrote a
stage musical play based on his third Oz book, OZMA OF OZ, he found that he
couldn't use many of the main characters, as he had sold the rights to them
for stage versions of his first two Oz books. So Baum created Betsy Bobbin
to replace Dorothy and Queen Ann to replace Ozma..." If Baum did indeed
sell stage rights to Princess Ozma for WOGGLE-BUG, then created another
princess named Ozma for TIK-TOK, that might have led to legal problems--or
he might have deliberately differentiated the characters. Alternatively,
Peter's note could be mistaken. 

  I wonder if one reason the Ozma character doesn't appear in the poster of
TIK-TOK MAN in ANNOTATED WIZARD, or in the reviews reprinted in OZ
SCRAPBOOK, is that she was a singing part rather than a dancing part. These
roles used to be more differentiated on the musical stage. 

  Does any of THE TIK-TOK MAN OF OZ actually take place in Oz? Do Ann and
her army come from Oz, for instance? Do the characters end up there at the
end? If not, the "Oz" label may have been thrown in to give the play more
box-office oomph.
 
Ruth Berman wrote:
<<So Charlotte Greenwood was only 23 when she played Ann? She sounds like
an interesting actress -- do you know of any biographical articles on
her?>>
 
I looked her up in my movie reference books. Those with the most info are
QUINLAN'S FILM COMEDY ACTORS and COMIC SUPPORT: SECOND BANANAS IN THE
MOVIES. Here are the highlights:

  Greenwood was born in Philadelphia in 1890, made her stage debut at 15,
and hit Broadway in 1912. At 5'9" and able to swing her feet over her head
(one at a time), she usually worked with short partners. From 1915 to 1940,
off and on, she played a character named Letty in a popular series of
plays. "She was not the ingenue, not with her long body, long face, and
long nose, but even in her later support roles in film comedies she was far
from the stereotyped homely man-chaser." (COMIC SUPPORT)

  Greenwood signed with Fox in 1940 and appeared as the heroine's
wisecracking pal in several musicals: DOWN ARGENTINE WAY, MOON OVER MIAMI,
SPRINGTIME IN THE ROCKIES, THE GANG'S ALL HERE, and so on. Earlier she'd
made a few scattered features and several shorts, including (if I put the
pieces together right) work with Bert Lahr. Greenwood's performance as Aunt
Eller in OKLAHOMA! is probably the easiest to find on videotape. 

  Once, according to COMIC SUPPORT, Greenwood did a comic dance in front of
Eleanor Roosevelt, swinging her feet over her head as usual. Groucho Marx
turned to the First Lady and said, "That's what you could do if you just
put your mind to it."

  A Christian Scientist, Greenwood died in 1978. Her 1947 autobiography was
titled NEVER TOO TALL. It would be interesting to check in that if Ann
Soforth was anything more than another journeywoman role for her. 
 
Melody Grandy wrote:
<<Mr. Spock, Dr. Who, and Sherlock Holmes are all 'good guys' who are much
more interesting than their wicked enemies.  Their writers cared enough
about them to *make* them interesting.>>
 
Indeed. When I wrote that Ruggedo and the Glass Cat reverted to a "more
interesting, less likable personality" after their last-minute
reformations, that doesn't demand that characters grate to be interesting.
But if the Glass Cat *weren't* vain about its pink brains, it would have a
thin personality to entertain us with. And a Ruggedo who doesn't nurse a
grudge against Oz? He might as well be a cactus. Imagine MAGIC with the
Glass Cat as humble as it is at the end of PATCHWORK GIRL, and Ruggedo as
contrite as he is at the end of TIK-TOK. **Bo**ring!

  What makes the heroes you mention so interesting to me is their
combination of great virtues with small flaws or quirks or hobby horses. I
look for those same chinks in Ozma and Dorothy and other heroes of Oz
because it gives them more interest. Kabumpo wouldn't be as much fun if he
wasn't so vain about his robes. And would Tik-Tok be as enjoyable if he
were powered by a perpetual-motion machine?
 
Richard Bauman wrote:
<<Golly J. L. Bell did I disparage another of your icons.  Stick around for
my comments on Gore.  Clinton is beyond comment.>>
 
Once again, Bear, you didn't quote a word of mine--odd for someone who's
complained about being quoted out of context. I'll repeat my comment so
folks can judge whether you read it accurately:

     <<I suspect most people read Ozma's policy as about 
     immigration, not population control. And studying 
     that connection makes more sense than asking Paul 
     and Anne Ehrlich what they read fifty years ago. 
     After all, Baum wrote TIK-TOK during the period 
     th