The recent Disney film, Oz The Great and Powerful has been doing brisk business at the box office. The story is a prequel to the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz written by Frank Baum in 1900. Though not the author’s work, the screenplay uses the Baum’s characters to create the magical Land of Oz on screen.

If you have read the book, you will know that it is revealed only in the end that the wizard has no magical capabilities. He is actually a conman. The movie tries to narrate how the conman became the wizard and ruled the kingdom.

A movie made on the book in 1939, by MGM The Wizard of Oz. This film remains a classic.
Here are some interesting facts about the book, the author and the 1939 classic.

1. The name OZ came to author L Frank Baum while looking at his file cabinets, organized A-N and O-Z.

2. As a child, author L. Frank Baum had a recurring dream where he was being chased by a scarecrow. He has used scarecrow as a character in his book.

3. After the success of the book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum wrote 13 sequels to it.

4. Baum’s first book was called The Book of the Hamburgs: A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs. It was written when he was 30 and was a study on the breeding of a rare fancy chicken called the Hamburg.

5. While filming the 1939 film, the costumers got a few old jackets from an old thrift store for the character Professor Marvel. During the filming of the movie, they noticed a nametag inside the jacket that was being used. It read L Frank Baum. When the film makers checked with the author’s widow, they found it was genuinely the author’s coat.