- Source: Yellow brick road
The yellow brick road is a central element in the 1900 children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by American author L. Frank Baum. The road also appears in the several sequel Oz books such as The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) and The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913).
The road's most notable depiction is in the classic 1939 MGM musical film The Wizard of Oz, loosely based on Baum's first Oz book. In the novel's first edition, the road is mostly referred to as the "Road of Yellow Bricks". In the original story and in later films based on it such as The Wiz (1978), Dorothy Gale must find the road before embarking on her journey, as the tornado did not deposit her farmhouse directly in front of it as in the 1939 film.
Road's history
The following is an excerpt from the third chapter of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy sets off to see the Wizard:There were several roads nearby, but it did not take Dorothy long to find the one paved with yellow bricks. Within a short time, she was walking briskly toward the Emerald City; her Silver Shoes tinkling merrily on the hard, yellow roadbed.
The road is first introduced in the third chapter of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The road begins in the heart of the eastern quadrant called Munchkin Country in the Land of Oz. It functions as a guideline that leads all who follow it, to the road's ultimate destination—the imperial capital of Oz called Emerald City that is located in the exact center of the entire continent. In the book, the novel's main protagonist, Dorothy, is forced to search for the road before she can begin her quest to seek the Wizard. This is because the cyclone from Kansas did not release her farmhouse closely near it as it did in the various film adaptations. After the council with the native Munchkins and their dear friend the Good Witch of the North, Dorothy begins looking for it and sees many pathways and roads nearby, (all of which lead in various directions). Thankfully, it doesn't take her too long to spot the one paved with bright yellow bricks.
Later in the book, Dorothy and her companions, the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion discover that the road has fallen into disrepair in some parts of the land, having several broken chasms ending at dangerous cliffs with deadly drops. In the end of the book, we learn the road's history; unlike in the Disney prequel film Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), the Emerald City and yellow brick road did not exist prior to Oz's arrival. When Oscar Diggs arrived in Oz via hot-air balloon that had been swept away in a storm, the people of the land were convinced he was a great "Wizard" who had finally come to fulfil Oz's long-awaited prophecy. Since the recent fall of Oz's mortal King Pastoria, and the mysterious disappearance of his baby daughter Princess Ozma, Oscar immediately proclaimed himself as Oz's new dominant ruler and had his people build the road as well as the city in his honor.
In the second Oz book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Tip and his companion Jack Pumpkinhead, likewise follow a yellow brick road to reach Emerald City while traveling from Oz's northern quadrant, the Gillikin Country. In the book The Patchwork Girl of Oz, it is revealed that there are two yellow brick roads from Munchkin Country to the Emerald City: according to the Shaggy Man, Dorothy took the longer and more dangerous one in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
In the classic 1939 film, a red brick road can be seen starting at the same point as the yellow brick road and is entwined with it, despite seemingly going in a different direction. This version of the road does not exist in Baum's books. Also, at the cornfield where Dorothy meets and befriends the Scarecrow, there is a fork in the yellow brick road leading in different directions. Luckily, they choose the correct one of the three branches that leads to Emerald City.
In Disney's 1985 live action semi-sequel to the 1939 movie Return to Oz, Dorothy returns to Oz six months after being sent back home to Kansas from her first visit. Upon her second arrival she finds the yellow brick road in ruins by the hands of the evil Nome King who also conquered the Emerald City. In the end, it is presumed that after she defeats him and saves the city and its citizens, the road is restored as well.
There are various accounts of what inspired the yellow brick road. One account says it is a brick road in Peekskill, New York, where L. Frank Baum attended Peekskill Military Academy. Other accounts say it was inspired by a road paved with yellow bricks near Holland, Michigan, where Baum spent summers. Ithaca, New York, also makes a claim for being Frank Baum's inspiration. He opened a road tour of his musical, The Maid of Arran, in Ithaca, and he met his future wife Maud Gage Baum while she was attending Cornell University. At the time, yellow bricks paved local roads. Portions of U.S. Route 54 within the state of Kansas have been designated "the yellow brick road". Dallas, Texas makes a claim that Baum once stayed at a downtown hotel during his newspaper career (located near what is now the Triple Underpass) at a time when the streets were paved with wooden blocks of Bois D'Arc also known as Osage Orange. Supposedly, after a rainstorm the sun came out and he saw a bright yellow brick road from the window of his room.
Two direct, published references to the origin of the yellow brick road came from Baum's own descendants: his son Frank Joslyn Baum in To Please A Child and the other by Roger S. Baum, the great-grandson of L. Frank Baum who stated, "Most people don't realize that the Wizard of Oz was written in Chicago, and the Yellow Brick Road was named after winding cobblestone roads in Holland, Michigan, where great-grandfather spent vacations with his family."
The Vision Oz Fund was established in November 2009 to raise funds that will be used to help increase the awareness, enhancement, and further development of Oz-related attractions and assets in Wamego, Kansas. The first fundraiser is under way and includes selling personalized engraved yellow bricks, which will become part of the permanent walkway (aka "The Yellow Brick Road") in downtown Wamego.
In 2019, a commemorative yellow brick road was installed in Chicago's Humboldt Park at the site of L. Frank Baum's 1899 residence.
See also
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Political interpretations of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Notes
Further reading
Dighe, Ranjit S. ed. The Historian's Wizard of Oz: Reading L. Frank Baum's Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory (2002)
Hearn, Michael Patrick (ed). (2000, 1973) The Annotated Wizard of Oz. W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0-393-04992-2
Ritter, Gretchen. "Silver slippers and a golden cap: L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and historical memory in American politics." Journal of American Studies (August 1997) vol. 31, no. 2, 171–203. online at JSTOR
Rockoff, Hugh. "The 'Wizard of Oz' as a Monetary Allegory," Journal of Political Economy 98 (1990): 739-60 online at JSTOR- Source: YellowBrickRoad
YellowBrickRoad is a 2010 American horror film directed by Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton and starring Cassidy Freeman, Anessa Ramsey and Laura Heisler. It is about an expedition to discover the fate of an entire town that disappeared into the wilderness 70 years earlier. Although critical reception was mixed, it won best film at the New York City Horror Film Festival.
The film was released as part of the Bloody Disgusting Selects line.
Plot
In 1940 the entire town of Friar, 572 people, abandoned their town and walked into the wilderness with only the clothes on their backs after a viewing of The Wizard of Oz, a film the entire town was obsessed with. No one has ever been able to explain why they did this. Only 300 of the townspeople's bodies were recovered: some had frozen to death in the elements, while others were killed in horrific and bloody ways. The remaining 272 citizens were never found, and the government designated the trail that the townspeople took as classified. Despite this, the town was eventually repopulated, although the townspeople are cautious of the town's history.
In the present day, the trail's coordinates have been declassified, and a film crew has arrived to travel the trail to learn about the disappearances and deaths, as well as what lies at the end of the trail. Crew leader Teddy found the trail's coordinates via Friar's movie theatre. The crew (including Teddy's wife Melissa, their collaborator Walter, sibling cartographers Daryl and Erin Luger, forestry expert Cy, and intern Jill) soon befriends Liv, a townsperson who works at the theatre and agrees to accompany them on their trip.
The journey goes well initially, but soon the crew is terrorized by loud and jarring music that appears to come out of nowhere. Daryl brutally murders his sister Erin over a petty argument and flees; Teddy and Cy locate and subdue him, and return him to the group. Now calm, he explains to Teddy that "the land is like liquid" and declares that he and Erin managed to determine the coordinates of the end of the road: the source of the music.
Ultimately the crew reverses direction, battered by deafening feedback, but discover Erin's body dressed like a scarecrow, propped up in a grotesque diorama, and a massive deadfall which Teddy attempts to climb. While Cy is distracted, Daryl steals his machete, frees himself, and flees again with the only vehicle and food supply. The group realizes that they are still traveling north, and are no closer to home than before.
Cy refuses to travel south with the others and becomes aggressive, kidnapping Liv at knifepoint in hopes that he can cross over into Vermont and save her life. Teddy and Melissa have sex that same night, but he abandons her before dawn to climb the deadfall and solve the mystery of Friar, leaving only Melissa, Walter, and Jill.
After miles of walking west alone, Liv and Cy consume hallucinogenic berries, and in a moment of clarity, Cy reveals to Liv that he has been thinking about doing "unspeakable things" to her for hours. He recommends that she bind and kill him before he can do so; once tied up he has second thoughts, but despite his pleas, she breaks his neck.
Overnight, Jill eats the remaining food. When she attempts to apologize the next morning, she is ignored, and immediately walks off a cliff to her death. Walter, preferring to die sane and at peace, commits suicide on camera. Upon viewing the video, Melissa is attacked by Daryl, and he chases her down, killing her with Cy's machete. Liv, high and delusional, finds Daryl and stabs him in the neck with a pocketknife. She then lies down in the grass and continues to consume the poisonous berries.
A weary and visibly shaken Teddy crawls to the final portion of the trail, where the music finally stops. He finds himself at what appears to be the theatre from the beginning of the film. There he meets a sinister Usher who forces him to sit in a theatre empty except for a brief glimpse of smiling theatregoers implied to be the spirits of the dead townspeople. On the screen is footage of his wife, who has been transported by the Usher into a hellish landscape. Horrified, Teddy begins to scream.
Cast
Analysis
Bernice M. Murphy finds similarities between this film and The Blair Witch Project (1999). In both films the horror lies in the "desperate fear of losing oneself in the wilderness". In both films the characters stray from "civilization" and go in search of something intangible, something lurking within the forests of the United States. In both, the characters also stray away from their own rationality.
Murphy says that both films belong to a tradition of "Rural Gothic" horror fiction that can be traced back to "Young Goodman Brown" (1835) by Nathaniel Hawthorne. She says that American narratives of horror fiction and Gothic fiction often take place in the forests, the same forests confronted by the settlers and explorers of the Colonial history of the United States. She argues that "Rural Gothic" is an important subgenre of the wider American Gothic tradition.
Murphy further places the film within a type of "Rural Gothic" narratives, where bad things happen to those who willingly venture into the wilderness. Such stories tend to feature the loss of a civilized way of life. She cites as other examples Edgar Huntly (1799), The Shining (1977) and its film adaptation (1980). She also cites the historical Donner Party (1846–1847) as fitting well with this trope.
Reception
Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, reports that 50% of 18 surveyed critics gave the film a positive review; the average rating was 5.2 out of 10. In a negative review, G. Allen Johnson of San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "Yellowbrickroad is without personality. It's competently made, but the cast and direction are just bland." Horror review site Life After Undeath gave the film a largely negative review and stated that the ending "reeks of an overzealous attempt at providing a clever twist to something that may as well have remained unexplained." Meet in the Lobby offered more praise, calling it "a psychologically haunting film that leaves a rather disquieting feeling that is slow to fade even days after seeing the movie." Dennis Harvey of Variety called it "a well-crafted horror-mystery" that may frustrate audiences that look for explanations.
= Awards
=
In 2010, YellowBrickRoad won best film at the New York City Horror Film Festival.
References
= Sources
=
Murphy, Bernice M. (2013), "Introduction:We're Not Out of the Woods Yet", The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness, Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN 978-1137353726
External links
YellowBrickRoad at IMDb
YellowBrickRoad at Rotten Tomatoes
Kata Kunci Pencarian:
4.7
5.268
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