“Popular” Dolls: A Discussion of the Wicked Movie Dolls in the Context of Wizard of Oz Merchandizing Culture
/This post is part of a themed series on toys that asked contributors to think about a toy/toys/toy company and explore how various cultures, groups, audiences, or companies find and make meaning (or money) through such play. The theme is purposefully open-ended, meant to be fun, and published throughout December to coincide with the holiday season.
In this final installment of the themed series on toys, Henry Jenkins and Lauren Sowa discuss how the many Wicked branded toys and dolls fit into the larger culture of dolls and collecting that has a long history with The Wizard of Oz transmedia property. From book, to stage, to screen, and back to book, and stage, and screen again, The Wizard of Oz has over a hundred years of cultural influence – with branded merchandising following its every step down the yellow brick road.
Lauren Sowa: I feel like there is a fascinating branding and franchising moment happening right now regarding the plethora of Wicked movie merchandise being sold. Specifically with the toys, there are items such a Wicked board game, a Wicked Bluetooth MP3 Karaoke with Light Show set, Fisher Price Little People Wicked characters (which does not include the munchkin Boq, because perhaps that’s a little too on the nose), multiple Lego versions, several Funko Pop variations, (my person favorite) the Glinda Squishmallow plush, and many, many Elphaba and Glinda dolls (singing dolls, fashion dolls, and more expensive collectable dolls) from Mattel. I am interested in how the Wicked IP (which has existed for 3 decades as a hit Broadway musical and a novel series) has exploded with this film. Previously, American Girl (which is owned by Mattel) had Glinda and Elphaba outfits that were a copy of the Broadway costumes, but generally the Broadway merchandising has not been nearly as pervasive as what we are seeing right now. I see this moment as the intersection of Ariana Grande fans with the Wicked Musical fandom, under the umbrella (rainbow?) of the The Wizard of Oz narrative taking hold on our culture and riding the coattails of last year’s hit musical and toy adaptation, Barbie (2022). What do you think this conjuncture is about?
Henry: I think, first of all, there's been merch around The Wizard of Oz all the way back to the origins of the book and particularly the original stage musicals that Baum produced around his book. It's often cited as one of the early merchandising successes that he's been making around pop culture alongside examples such as Felix the Cat or Mickey Mouse, or any number of early examples that someone like Ian Gordon has written about. From the beginning, it was a transmedia franchise; it's within a couple of years of writing the books that Baum produces film versions through his own film production company. It's one of the things that makes The Wizard of Oz books (all dozen plus of them) relatively incoherent. He drew on different media to seed them. For example, he drew on the film for some, he drew on Broadway for some, and there are even rival comic strips. Baum and his illustrators created different versions of the core Oz characters simultaneously, so there's a kind of process of incoherence or proliferation of Oz through time.
We could jump forward to the various film versions: there's a silent version with Oliver Hardy, there's the MGM musical with Judy Garland, and when I was growing up the key thing was the television showings of “Wizard of Oz,” which were annual at Thanksgiving. Everyone in my generation watched them once a year; we anticipated them at school for weeks ahead of time. We played things in the backyard – we didn't have a lot of figures to play with, but we used our bodies to embody those characters and that was very much part of it. The show on television was sponsored by Singer sewing machines. Obviously, they were appealing to mothers, and Singer would create merch that they gave away to customers who came into their stores. That stuff has become highly collectible because there was such a small percentage of it. Then, coming out of the showings of “Wizard of Oz,” several of the actors from the original film did voice acting for, I think it was a Hanna-Barbera animated series called “Here Comes the Wizard of Oz.” I used to own a board game that was based on “Here Comes the Wizard” or “Off to See the Wizard.” Basically, you follow the yellow brick road around the board with dice and play figurines and so forth. So, all of that has gone on for a long time.
The Wicked books revitalized interest in the stories yet again as did the Disney film Return to Oz (1985). Disney had long owned the rights to it and even produced a Mickey Mouse Club version in the 50's of “Wizard of Oz.” So, there's a lot of history there. The Wicked books do what good fan fiction does: it invites us to re-read these characters from a different point of view. In Textual Poachers (1992) I called it moral realignment. There, I was talking about telling Star Wars from the point of view of Darth Vader (which I guess to some degree we now have) but, you know, it was fanfic that was turning the villains into heroes and, in Wicked, Gregory McGuire's novel does exactly that: he marginalizes Dorothy to a few pages while really expanding outward the story of Glinda and Elphaba. The story from that point of view is a lot of backstory, it's a lot of missing scenes, it's a lot of character rewriting, so forth, which then leads to the Broadway musical. I think you can probably pick up the story from there better than I can.
Lauren: yeah absolutely. I think one of the things that was interesting is that, when Stephen Schwartz read the book Wicked, he knew he wanted to make it a musical. He got the rights to it – I think in the mid-90s – and developed it for a long time before it premiered on Halloween 2003. But, the musical itself also kind of takes on its own narrative and a life of its own because it is quite different from the books that Maguire wrote. Schwartz wanted to focus on the relationship between the two witches, Glinda and Elphaba. He took a dive into that story and their journey together. He created the love triangle with Fiyero and other plot points that actually don't exist in the books. So that narrative then that is more broadly accepted culturally as “Wicked” is a variation from the books that Maguire was writing. The interesting thing I'm seeing since the movie came out, and along with all the other merchandise for the film, is they're putting the movie cover on the Maguire book! But it's not the story of the Broadway show or the movie.
Furthermore, the movie has also taken on its own variation of the story by dividing what is the Broadway production into two parts – two films. I was really skeptical at first; I thought, okay, this feels like a money grab. The Broadway show is obviously done in one night, do we really need to do two parts for this film? And having seen it, I think it was actually very successfully done because they've added more layers and they've expanded the story and dialogue. So, it's interesting, again picking up the story where you left off, to see what has happened from McGregor's books to the Broadway musical and now to the movie version-that's great!
Henry: And I think it's almost preordained that Wicked would become a musical because the original Baum productions on the stage were musicals, right? According to the convention of what a musical was in the early 20th century, which is a series of spectacles and acts strung together by a fairly simple plot. For example, The Wizard in the original musical is an Irishman because he lives in an Emerald City – so, Broadway clichés about Irish people and layering them onto the version that was constructed by the books. And then the Wizard has a song which is actually a product placement where he sings “Budweiser, a friend of mine.” So, he's singing about the pleasure he takes in drinking and drinking a particular brand of beer.
Lauren: It seems some of that merchandising is just inescapable and is such an integral part to what The Wizard of Oz cultural narrative is for consumers. Especially as you had mentioned, there were those specials that came out around Thanksgiving. Obviously, that's when this movie was released. It is the perfect timing to bring out these toys right in time for the Christmas shopping season!
I grew up with a bunch of ‘Wizard of Oz’ items: Dorothy, Glinda, and Wicked Witch costumes, and many dolls and figurines. I had these small little figurines that I would play with. One thing that I was thinking about more is that I had a Wizard of Oz Barbie – a Dorothy Barbie who actually looked like Barbie but was dressed as Dorothy – and then I also had another Wizard of Oz Barbie doll, but it looked like Judy Garland. So I think there is something interesting going on with the imagery of the actor as a Barbie doll versus Barbie being the character of Dorothy. Currently, with the dolls that I've seen being released from the Wicked movie, they are mostly just Cynthia and Ariana as Glinda and Elphaba. So, Mattel has created these dolls after the actors’ images rather than just the characters.
Henry: If we go back to Baum’s idea that these books will be instantly turned into films and musicals, you realize that almost all of the characters that are non-human in the books could have been performed by humans. They don't have bodies that are so radically different from the humanoid – that the human body wouldn't fit into the costume and perform them on stage. So, we can picture how a scarecrow or a tin man or a cowardly lion could be played by a human being and become part of a stage show.
Lauren: And I think that’s where that sort of idea is really strong in Maguire’s writing of Wicked because he discusses where the Tin Man and Scarecrow come from. They are people first, and Elphaba is the one who (spoiler alert) ends up transforming them into these different humanoid characters.
Henry: Yes, and that lends itself to dolls, right? So, if you have these characters that are humanoid already, then they can become dolls more readily than – I don't know – we could imagine a squid function in the world of The Wizard of Oz. What would it do, how would it move down the yellow brick road, how would it operate in that universe? We can have the cowardly lion, you can have the hungry tiger who's ethically torn because he needs to eat other beings to survive and yet really doesn't want to; or, you can have someone like King Dough who has to sprinkle flour and sugar everywhere he sits because otherwise he's going to stick to everything and leave a trace where he's been. These kinds of characters are still humanoid so you could, in theory, make them into dolls or other kinds of toys in a way that would have been suitable for the manufacturing capacity of the late industrial age. Even though a lot of these things never made it to toys, they could have been in theory.
Lauren: That's really interesting to think about that and how they are already set up for that kind of performance by humans on stage, in films, and now to be packaged as these dolls.
One of the other interesting things that I think we would be remise to not mention is the controversial moment of the mispackaging of the Wicked dolls. The website on the box version of wickedmovie.com that actually lead to a porn site. So, I think that this is an interesting moment. Obviously, these dolls with this packaging were recalled immediately. Mattel profusely apologized. Target and Amazon took them out of circulation. But now these boxes and these toys are being sold for hundreds and hundreds of dollars. They're limited editions now in their own right and way. So, I think that this PR fiasco actually speaks to some other really odd and interesting moments with the movie and the dolls and the culture of collecting, as well as what it is to have dolls for children and play. And then, of course, this happens to be a porn site. You couldn't write a better disaster if you tried.
Henry: I mean, I'm reminded of the problem Barbie got into when they had the lavender vest. Some years back, where they created (consciously or not, there's a lot of debate) a gay icon that became a top seller for adult collectors, but was quickly swept off the market when parents protested that it was an inappropriate image, particularly in the 70s and 80s for a children's toy. But it's sort of like we're getting that some of the ambiguities around adult collectors and adult fans, right? Because Mattel caters actively to adult collectors now. And, in some ways, the Barbie movie was as much about serving the interest of those adult collectors as it was about bringing new children into the franchise. But adult toys carry different connotations in another context, right? So, the wicked packaging suggested an adult toy, rather than an adult toy. So, the toy was a collector of action figures and dolls. We go back to the fact Barbie was based on an eroticized toy in Europe that was tamed down to be a fashion toy in America. So, the connection of eroticism and toys, particularly dolls, just continues.
Continuing to think about dolls, the silent feature version of Wizard of Oz (1925), the one with Oliver Hardy and Larry Semon, opens with a toy maker. He has made doll versions of the characters from Baum's book. And the camera looms in on them. And that becomes our point of entry into the story, much as you might imagine Disney saying in a book on the table and you flip it open, and then you enter through the book. But there you enter through the dolls, and it suggests that dolls are associated with Wizard of Oz almost from the very beginning, leaving me wanting to know more about what was actually manufactured when the book first came out.
Lauren: Well, I think it is really interesting then to see that, yes, while there is this current merchandise explosion for the Wicked movie, it really is just following the tradition of what the Wizard of Oz has always been doing for all this time in terms of dolls, collecting and toys. So maybe we are not in such a unique moment of commercialization.
Henry That's for sure. Not at all.
Lauren: It's just all is coming together right around Christmas time, and we're seeing it everywhere in a way that, as a Broadway fan, I'm excited to see how it has sort of proliferated the general broader culture more than, say, other past movie musicals have. We weren't necessarily having this sort of level of dolls for Steven Spielberg's West Side Story or even Les Miz, or the box office success, Mamma Mia! We weren't celebrating in quite the same merchandising way. But Wicked falls into that Wizard of Oz tradition where that has been part of its history.
Henry: I can imagine dolls for The Color Purple would not be necessarily a top seller at Christmas time.
Lauren: Oh, I know me and some of my friends would absolutely be getting some The Color Purple dolls.
Henry: Yes, I understand that. But maybe not for kids.
Lauren: Perhaps not. Actually, that is when I fell in love with Cynthia Erivo as a performer. Her performance at the Tony Awards for the 2015 revival of The Color Purple. Her “I'm Here” was brilliant and I actually showed it as an example of intersectional feminism in doctoral seminar. So when I heard that she was going to be Elphaba in the Wicked movie, I was very excited and celebrating that casting choice.
Henry: As a film musical fan who wishes I could see more stage musicals, I'm excited that this is finally the musical that's taken off after sort of false starts around In the Heights, West Side Story, and The Color Purple, none of which lived up to their box office potential. This one seems to be right. And that's exciting for the future potential of musicals. We need some every handful of decades at least to keep them in production.
Lauren: Yes, absolutely. I agree. And I'm sure the next big one will most likely be Hamilton. At least, that’s my guess.
Henry: Well, that would be so much fun to see as a fan of 1776, which was a success, Hamilton would come full circle, right?
Lauren: Yes, absolutely. And I wish they would have made a Bill Daniels as John Adams doll!
Biographies
Lauren Alexandra Sowa is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication at Pepperdine University. She recently received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on intersectional feminism and representation within production cultures, television, and popular culture. These interests stem from her several-decade career in the entertainment industry as member of SAG/AFTRA and AEA. Lauren is a proud Disneyland Magic Key holder and enthusiast of many fandoms.
Henry Jenkins is the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending more than a decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twenty books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture, and By Any Media Necessary: The New Youth Activism. His most recent books are Participatory Culture: Interviews (based on material originally published on this blog), Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, and Comics and Stuff. He is currently writing a book on changes in children’s culture and media during the post-World War II era. He has written for Technology Review, Computer Games, Salon, and The Huffington Post.
