The doomed, demented attempts to build a Wizard of Oz theme park

Imagine that you are L Frank Baum, creator of The Wizard of Oz and countless other novels, short stories, poems and scripts, and that it is 1905. You are no longer satisfied merely with the financial success that your books have brought you and so you decide to purchase nothing less than your own private island, which you will then turn into a real-life Land of Oz. This would then be ruled over by your very own Dorothy, complete with an all-child ruling council. And Prospero-like, you’d cast away yourself on the island.

Written down, it sounds barking mad. But then the whole idea of the Wizard of Oz – a perennially popular children’s narrative that dares to touch on ideas of depression, mental illness and split personality and does so with ahead-of-its-time verve – has always been a story that defies conventional expectation. As the latest spin-off picture, the musical prequel Wicked, opens in cinemas this weekend, it might not live up to the seminal 1939 film The Wizard of Oz – this newspaper’s Robbie Collin sighed that the new picture has “all the buoyancy of a grand piano being heaved off the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral” – but, thanks to its being based on a long-running show, it will undoubtedly be a huge box office hit.

Assuming that it has the success that its makers anticipate (and given that part two is coming next year, it had better be), there will inevitably be talk about spin-offs that can further monetise the Oz brand. Somewhere in this talk will be discussion about a potential theme park, putting Baum’s Land of Oz idea into the realm of reality. It might work. But potential investors would be wise to heed the fate of past attempts to conjure Oz on earth.

When Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900, it not only made him both wealthy and successful, but it also licensed him to pursue avenues and ideas that few other writers would have dared to contemplate. The concept of the Land of Oz was particularly bold and innovative. Five decades before Disneyland would open in California, Baum had anticipated a popular desire for a souped-up fairground attraction, and his would be dedicated wholly to the products of his literary imagination.

In an interview with a Chicago newspaper, Baum expounded on his scheme with gusto. The island he had in mind, Pedloe Island, was situated off the coast of California. Once the purchase was completed, Baum would turn it into “a fairy paradise for children”. It would be decorated with statues of the characters from his books, including the Scarecrow, the Tin Man (or Tin Woodman as Baum referred to him) and Jack Pumpkinhead, who didn’t appear in the film of The Wizard of Oz. (Pumpkinhead would have to wait until 1969’s The Wonderful Land of Oz for his moment in the sun.)

From there, Baum’s plans became increasingly grandiose. Not only did he announce his intention of living on his island full-time when it had been turned into his fairy paradise – several steps further than Walt Disney ever went – but he had even found his successor to his bit of exile real estate. This real-life Dorothy would be the 11-year old Miss Talbot of San Francisco, who was expected to become the island’s queen when it opened on 1 March 1906.

Such was Baum’s enthusiasm that he even proposed to build an enormous palace in which Dorothy Talbot herself would live, presumably with the quid pro quo that she would have to make herself available to be gawped at by the legions of tourists who Baum anticipated visiting this particular Kubla Khan. Then one of his other Oz-related projects, the 1905 musical The Woggle-Bug, proved a conspicuous failure, and Baum abandoned the idea, turning his attention to more attainable goals.

There were numerous flaws in Baum’s plan. Firstly, “Pedloe Island” does not exist, and secondly no records were ever found of ‘Dorothy Talbot’, which suggested that Baum had invented her, too. In fact, it is likely that the whole scheme was either wishful thinking, or that he was enjoying toying with gullible reporters. He was a fascinatingly strange man, someone who anticipated everything from the invention of the laptop to the existence of augmented reality. Although he only lived to the age of 62, he was endlessly active, constantly searching for new ways to entertain or provoke. 

Baum died in 1919, his grand scheme still unbuilt and apparently buried with him. However, the success of the film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz two decades later meant that the idea of Oz-themed attractions was far from over.

In 1965, the brothers Harry and Grover Robbins began work on a Wizard of Oz theme park at Beech Mountain, a ski resort in North Carolina. Their plans for what they grandiloquently called the ‘Land of Oz’ were no less impressive than Baum’s. Grover had experience in opening the nearby Tweetsie Railroad, a Wild West-themed attraction, and so was prepared for a challenge that included everything from glazing 44,000 individual bricks yellow to commissioning original songs that could be sung by performers at the attraction.

It was a hugely ambitious, costly endeavour – the Grovers spent the equivalent of $40 million on the Land of Oz. Visitors to the park found themselves on a tour that began in Dorothy’s home town of Kansas before being transported by ski-lift operated balloon to Oz, where they could walk down the yellow brick road and finally enter the Emerald City, as well as experience the tornado that shook Dorothy’s home to its foundations. There was an on-site museum, featuring one of Judy Garland’s Dorothy dresses, and actors conducted tours in character, which necessitated the casting of nine Dorothys, five cowardly lions, four wicked witches and heaven knows how many Totos. It was not quite as overblown as Baum’s original vision, but it was firmly geared towards a family audience who wanted to be entertained and awed.

When it was finally ready to be opened in 1970, Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher cut the cord on June 15 that year, before four thousand eager patrons entered, keen to see what had been achieved. In the first year of its operation, it attracted no fewer than 400,000 visitors, who turned it into the busiest attraction in the East Coast of the United States. A jealous Disney – who had bought the rights to Baum’s books in 1953 – even sent a spy to attempt to fathom how a park with only one ride could be so successful. Yet Grover Robbins, the park’s presiding genius, died shortly before it opened and, without his vision, the early stardust soon fell away.

The park filed for bankruptcy in 1975, before a fire destroyed large sections of it at the end of that year, including the Emerald City Amphitheatre, offices and technical departments and the all-important gift shops. Suspicions that the fire had been started deliberately were exacerbated by a theft of many of the valuable items from the museum at the same time, including the Dorothy dress, which was scornfully described by the attraction’s PR representative as “that $1,000 piece of gingham”. Although the park would limp on until 1980 under new management, it was never the same, and it then shut down, falling into haunted disrepair.

Under normal circumstances, that would have been the end of that particular yellow brick road, and it was initially intended to be bulldozed and a gated community constructed in its stead. However, the Land of Oz has gone on to have a strange afterlife that, in a curious way, fits its subject far more aptly than a more conventional theme park would ever have done. Beginning in 1991, the attraction was opened on a one-off basis on July 4, allowing the curious to see what could have been. Despite the years of neglect and abandonment, enough of the original park survived, and so an annual festival, the Autumn of Oz, was proposed, which continues to this day. Every September, the Land of Oz reopens for three weekends, and thousands of people flock to it, fascinated to see what might have been.

It is unlikely ever to open full-time again. But there was an abortive attempt to create a wholly new Oz-themed attraction in Kansas itself three decades ago, The Wonderful World of Oz, conceived on a scale that would have made both Baum’s original conception and the Land of Oz seem relatively trifling. The idea was to build a $500 million theme park with six themed areas, as well as a hotel, golf course and, naturally, a shopping district. Yet the budget soared to a staggering $861 million. And then another, rather more elemental problem was discovered.

In order for the theme park to be built, some of the land that had been earmarked for it would have to be purchased from the Osage Nation who did not take kindly to the idea of their ancestral homeland being desecrated in the memory of a man who had detested them. It transpired that, although Baum had undoubtedly been ahead of his time when it came to proto-feminism, his other social views had been antediluvian, even by the standards of the day. When he had been a journalist in the 1880s, editing the South Dakota newspaper the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, he had published an incendiary editorial on January 3, 1891, calling for the annihilation of all Native Americans. His piece was precipitated by the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 1890, when nearly three hundred Lakota people were killed by the US army.

Baum decried the cowardice of the Lakota victims, “The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them.”

He also praised white supremacy – “The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilisation, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians” – and concluded “Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.”

When Baum’s remarks resurfaced in the early 2000s, they caused uproar, and in 2006, his descendants issued a public apology for his statements. By that stage, the plans for the Wonderful World of Oz had fallen to pieces. Since then, there have been occasional attempts to build another Wizard of Oz-themed attraction, but, as yet, nothing has come to fruition.

It will be fascinating to see whether the inevitable commercial success of Wicked will lead to renewed interest in creating an enormously expensive theme park, defying a century of bad karma and failed attempts, or whether this is a fairytale that ought to remain in our imaginations.

Wicked is in cinemas now