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The Difficulty in Deciphering the "Dreams That You Dare to Dream": Adaptive Dissonance in Wizard of Oz Films
- Children's Literature Association Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 42, Number 2, Summer 2017
- pp. 185-204
- 10.1353/chq.2017.0016
- Article
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Abstract:
This essay departs from a focus on fidelity in the study of adapted film by coining the term adaptive dissonance to describe a trend existing in instances of multiple films made from a single source. Meeusen uses the representative example of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and four of its film adaptations to posit that when films are added to this kind of adaptation web, they consistently have a greater degree of ideological tension than do their source texts, and that this adaptive dissonance has profound implications, such as troubling depictions of race and gender.