Clark and I finished the original fourteen Oz books a few weeks back, so I'm awfully behind on keeping you updated. Since then we've finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (The movie made me forget: Charlie never did anything bad on the tour.) And now we're halfway through the first Harry Potter book.
As promised, let's get to what has to be the weirdest corner Baum ever wrote himself into. BOOK 12!
The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918)
One of the key utopian ingredients to Baum's Oz is that nobody ever dies. Seems pretty basic for a fairy tale universe designed as adventurous comfort for children at the turn of the last century. Baum, however, didn't really get into that notion until several books in. After he had already established the Tin Woodman's origin.
Multiple times, Baum points out that Ozites can't be killed (this protection does not apply to immigrants such as Dorothy or the Wizard) but they can be cut into little pieces and every one of those little pieces would still be alive. Characters typically refer to this as being "destroyed," and this loophole leads Baum into a very gross bit of retconning for the Woodman.
Because we already know that he became tin after his enchanted axe started cutting parts of his body off. So now, many books later, Baum has been telling us that such parts would remain alive... so if, eventually, Nick Chopper became wholly of tin, what became of his castoff meat bits? In "Tin Woodman," Baum directly tackles that philosophical paradox.
Because we meet another tin man, Captain Fyter the Tin Soldier. He is found in the exact same way as we first met Nick Chopper the Tin Woodman: rusted to paralysis in a Munchkinlander forest. Fyter's story is identical in that he also fell in love with Nimmie Amee, the girl servant to one of Oz's witches, and the witch removed Fyter from the equation in the same way she tackled Chopper. Both men, separated by years, fell in love with the same girl, were cursed by the same witch, and gradually turned into bionic tin creatures by the same tinsmith. Who, naturally, thanks to Baum's new status quo re: death, has kept their living body parts in cupboards and barrels all these years.
Without ever directly mentioning anything about souls or anything pseudo-religious, Baum introduces a new problem. The tinsmith, Ku-Klip, took parts from both men and stitched together a new individual named Chopfyt. Chopfyt does not have the same sunny personality associated with our Tin Woodman, nor does he act like the Tin Soldier. Chopfyt is his own unique person, but he is kind of an ass, and the characters assume that something inside him has spoiled. Nevertheless, he managed to marry Nimmie Amee.
Ku-Klip only created one man, as some of Chopper and Fyter's parts were deemed too mangled to re-use (or maybe a Kalidah ate some of them, and by Baum's logic there they would be, alive, sitting in the Kalidah's stomach.) So the remaining parts - including an extra, talking head - are still in Ku-Klip's care.
"Tin Woodman" might end up being my favorite in the run just due to all the awkward realizations that the characters have to face during the Chopfyt chapters. Although the rest of the adventure is normal Oz fare. There's a heretofore undiscovered village of eccentrically created people (balloon people!), and there's a major crisis with an evil, magic-using witch (Baum uses the term yookoohoo to re-define a witch and still get around Ozma's ban on witches). I like whenever the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow are pitched in a buddy comedy like this; it's almost a Hope/Crosby "Road to" movie. Plus Plus they pick up Polychrome the Rainbow's Daughter along the way. They are joined by Woot the Wanderer, a boy adventurer whom Baum never uses again as he is functionally identical to half a dozen other young kids in his books. The only bit we're missing is The Slightly-Creepy Elder Man Who Always Accompanies Young Kids.
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