Dorothy Gale
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Dorothy Gale is a fictional character, the protagonist of most of the Oz novels by American author L. Frank Baum. Dorothy first appears in Baum's classic children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and reappears in many of its sequels. She also is the main character in the classic 1939 movie adaptation of the book. Most recognize Dorothy's iconic appearance, wearing a blue and white checked gingham dress and her hair in pigtails.
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[edit] The classic books
In The Oz Books, Dorothy is an orphan raised by her aunt and uncle in the bleak landscape of a Kansas farm. She has a little dog named Toto. Dorothy and Toto are swept away by a cyclone to the Land of Oz and, much like Alice of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, they enter a lively alternative world filled with talking creatures. In most of the Oz books, Dorothy is the main hero of the stories. She is often seen with her best friend and the ruler of Oz, Princess Ozma. Dorothy's surname, Gale, is first mentioned in Ozma of Oz.
People who know the Land of Oz only from the 1939 film or from Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz often claim that the main message in Dorothy's experiences can be summed up in the popular sentiment "There's no place like home." However, in the sixth Oz book by Baum, The Emerald City of Oz (1910), Dorothy moves to Oz and takes her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em with her. She then becomes a princess of Oz and lives there with no apparent inclination to return to Kansas.
Dorothy is a standard character in the fourteen Oz books written by L. Frank Baum and is at least a frequent figure in the nineteen that followed by author Ruth Plumly Thompson. A cottage industry of Oz books has continued since Thompson's last book, Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz (1939), written in the same year as the 1939 movie. Scores of books by mostly amateur authors and small publishing houses have been made in which Princess Dorothy of Oz lives on even to our present day.
[edit] The 1910 and 1914 movies
In 1910 L. Frank Baum adapted his novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz into a motion picture short. The film was the first motion picture to feature the character Dorothy Gale, who was portrayed by actress Bebe Daniels. Baum subsequently adapted The Patchwork Girl of Oz into a 1914 motion picture directed by J. Farrell MacDonald with thirteen year old actress Mildred Harris taking over the role of Dorothy.
[edit] The 1939 movie
In the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy was played by Judy Garland. Given her popularity at the time and her physical resemblance to the character as depicted in illustrator W. W. Denslow's artwork, Shirley Temple had been an early choice of the filmmakers, but it now seems hard for most people to imagine anyone other than the young Garland playing the role of the innocent and inquisitive farm girl. Garland received a Special Juvenile Academy Award for her performance.
[edit] Modern works
Geoff Ryman's haunting evocation of Dorothy's childhood in Kansas is the central thread of his dark novel Was. His Dorothy (her surname spelled Gael) is given into the care of her aunt and uncle, Henry and Emma Gulch in Zeandale, Manhattan in 1875. Years of deprivation and abuse at their hands turn her into a disturbed young adult, retreating into a fantasy of her own past: the land of "Was". She encounters - and subsequently inspires - L. Frank Baum in a Kansas schoolroom. Alongside this theme are scenes from the life of Judy Garland before, during and after her portrayal of the character in the 1939 movie, and the story of a contemporary man's investigation of the life of the "real" Dorothy.
While not exactly a villain, Dorothy is clearly not the hero in Gregory Maguire's revisionist 1995 novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. She is only involved in the drama towards the end of the novel and her innocence and unyielding desire to return back home to Kansas result in much trouble for the main character of the book, Elphaba.
In both Baum's original book and Maguire's revision, Dorothy spends her first night in Oz at the house of a munchkin farmer named Boq. In the latter, it is revealed that the two discussed the etymology of Dorothy's name. Boq finds it interesting that Dorothy's name is the reverse of her land's "King" Theodore—which means "gift of the gods"—and that Dorothy means "goddess of gifts."
While Dorothy is present in the popular Broadway musical Wicked (based on Maguire's book), she is never actually seen; when the main characters interact with her, they speak into direction of the wings, as if she is sitting offstage and out of the view of the audience. Dorothy does appear on the stage during a pivotal scene, but the audience only sees her silhouette. In the original Broadway cast, voice actress Melissa Fahn provided the silhouette.
Dorothy features somewhat more prominently in Son of a Witch, Maguire's 2005 sequel to Wicked. In that novel, Elphaba's (possible) son Liir is briefly infatuated with Dorothy, and joins her party on their return to the Emerald City. Maguire portrays Dorothy as good-natured, practical, single-minded and slightly boring.
Dorothy, along with Alice Liddell from Lewis Carroll's (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) and J. M. Barrie's Wendy Darling (from Peter Pan), is a featured character in the adult comic book Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, whilst Dorothy, Alice, Wendy and C. S. Lewis' Susan Pevensie (or maybe it's Lucy Pevensie) (from The Chronicles of Narnia) feature in the comic The Oz/Wonderland Chronicles #0, set in 2005. By January 2006, the rip between Oz and Wonderland reaches a point where Gale and Liddell return to Oz with Jack Pumpkinhead(The Oz/Wonderland Chronicles #1).
Todd McFarlane's action figure of Dorothy for his "Twisted Land of Oz" line shows her in bondage gear, being attacked and bound by two deformed versions of Munchkins. In the accompanying story, she is an eighteen-year-old girl with a lot of teenage angst, and ends up in Oz by way of a magic corset. She meets the Scarecrow, the Lion and the Tin Woodman, and goes to the Emerald City, where the Wizard uses her to unleash 'Ozmic power', which transforms the characters into grotesque distortions of themselves.
Philip José Farmer's 1982 science-fiction novel A Barnstormer in Oz tells the story of hotshot aviator Henry "Hank" Stover — who isn't at all surprised one beautiful spring day in 1923 when he flies his Curtiss Jenny biplane through a strange green cloud and finds himself in a land populated by small people where animals talk and magic works. Hank knows right away that he is in Oz because his mother, Dorothy Gale-Stover, had been there back in 1890 and later told him (and L. Frank Baum) of her experiences. Farmer premise is that Dorothy only visited Oz once and told her story to a journalist called Frank Baum. This journalist would later create a series of books from Dorothy's only adventure in Oz. Like many Oz novels for adults, Farmer's Oz is a darker, more threatening place and in this case it is on the brink of both a civil war and an invasion by the United States Army.
Also, in the 2005 made-for-television movie "The Muppets' Wizard of Oz" Dorothy was portrayed as a gifted teenage singer (Ashanti) who wanted nothing more than to get out of Kansas and sing with the Muppets Star Hunt tour.
In 1985, Walter Murch directed the movie Return to Oz distributed by Walt Disney Pictures starring Fairuza Balk at the time, age eleven or so at the time as Dorothy; the plot was a combination of Ozma of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz. The film did not have high perception in 1985, and still does not today, but still remains a cult classic by fans of the book and families across America.
In the 1980s Japanese animated-version of the Wizard of Oz (Oz no Mahoutsukai), Dorothy is depicted with reddish-brown hair, much like the movie, but does not have pig-tails. Though her blue and white farm dress slightly differ, and her anime design makes her appear younger, Dorothy's purple shoes that she wears in the movies remain intact.
