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But Oz is a different case: the movie is VERY different from the books, and I love both. I also love the book "Wicked" (which is very VERY different from the original Oz, and yet clearly written by someone who knew his Oz lore inside and out) and even sort of like the musical "Wicked," which is much watered down from the book "Wicked" and which takes the movie Oz, not the book Oz, as its reference.
I also like the Oz books not just by L. Frank Baum, but also by Ruth Plumly Thompson, and even some of the later writers, of whom there is an abundance. Golly -- even I wrote an Oz book, during a dull summer spent studying Latin in graduate school.
The difference between Oz and Middle Earth is that Oz became, almost from the get-go, a place where all sorts of contradictory versions of itself could cohabit, whereas Middle Earth has been much more consistently the property of JRRT (even if his own versions of things are not always internally consistent or changed over time).
There's an odd sort of legitimacy in Oz-worlds about what in other places is called fanfiction, because the core of the canon is already made up of a multiplicity of versions/fictions, created by many different people, and containing all sorts of inconsistencies (even down to the basics, like "Is Munchkinland on the East or the West side of the map?").
I think Oz fans describe the situation as Oz being a real place, the histories of which have varied according to the convictions of its historians.
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