MFAWG: teto85: Dude, The Wizard of Oz books were written in the 1890s - 1900s, but the Gold vs Silver debates were going on at that time.

This is actually really old news. I remember talking about this in high school, and you don't even want to know how long ago that was.

And it's pretty obvious, at that.

Baum did not offer any conclusive proof that he intended his novel to be a political allegory. Historian Ranjit S. Dighe wrote that for sixty years after the book's publication, "virtually nobody" had such an interpretation until Henry Littlefield, a high school teacher.[31] In his 1964 American Quarterly article, "The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism",[32] Littlefield posited that the book contained an allegory of the late 19th-century bimetallism debate regarding monetary policy.[33] At the beginning of the novel, Dorothy is swept from her farm to Oz by a cyclone, which was frequently compared to the Free Silver movement in Baum's time.[32] The Yellow Brick Road represents the gold standard and the Silver Shoes which enable Dorothy to travel more comfortably symbolizes the Populist Party's desire to construct a bimetallic standard of both gold and silver in place of the gold standard. She learns that to return home, she must reach the Emerald City, Oz's political center, to speak to the Wizard, representing the President of the United States.[32] While journeying to the Emerald City, she encounters a scarecrow, who represents a farmer; a woodman made of tin, who represents a worker dehumanized by industrialization; and a cowardly lion, who represents William Jennings Bryan, a prominent leader of the Silverite movement.[34] The villains of the story, the Wicked Witch of the West and the Wicked Witch of the East, represent the wealthy railroad and oil barons of the American West and the financial and banking interests of the eastern U.S. respectively. Both these groups opposed Populist efforts to move the U.S. to a bimetallic monetary standard since this would have devalued the dollar and made investments less valuable. Workers and poor farmers supported the move away from the gold standard as this would have lessened their crushing debt burdens. The Populist party sought to build a coalition of southern and midwestern tenant farmers and northern industrial workers. These groups are represented in the book by the Good Witches of the North and South. "Oz" is the abbreviated form of ounce, a standard measure of gold.[35]

Littlefield's thesis achieved some popular interest and elaboration[36] but is not taken seriously by literary historians.[citation needed] Littlefield's argument was taken seriously by the 1980s by many political scientists but has since been refuted.

GungFu: True Facts:

1. The Cowardly Lion was based on Frank L. Baum's cat, Tiddles.
2. Somewhere Over the Rainbow was a late addition to the film and was based on a LSD trip as told to the song writers by Judy Garland.
3. The Munchkins were so horny and farking all over the place, the set builders actually made a large house for them to fark in. The same house that fell on the wicked witch of the west. Or was it East?
4. If you sync the opening 20 minutes of the film to Michael Jackson's Thriller, it's a very good masturbation aid.

By the time filming was over, Garland had seen enough of the Munchkins' unsavoury amorous antics to go right off the idea of anything like a relationship.

She said: "They were drunks. They got smashed every night and the police used to scoop them up in butterfly nets."