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And Your Little Dog, Too
The Dark Tower series contains many references: to King’s other novels and short stories, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, etc. But there is one reference which is more obvious than any other: The Wizard of Oz. I didn’t catch it the first time through but after reading the series the second time, it seemed so obvious that I couldn’t believe I’d missed it.
In the second novel, The Drawing of the Three, our protagonist gets 3 fellow travelers on his journey. And a little dog, too. In the movie that probably every kid in the world has seen, his name is Toto. In King’s version, it’s Oy. Instead of drawing the scarecrow, the tinman and the cowardly lion, Roland is paired up with Eddie, Susannah and Jake. This is the first obvious reference to Wizard of Oz.
The first novel, The Gunslinger, contains little obvious references. The protagonist is in conflict with a bad person – the man in black, or Miss Gulch, the mean old lady who’s also The Wicked Witch. It’s like the black and white part of Wizard of Oz - we’re introduced to the characters, some relatively insignificant things happen and then boom - the house falls, Jake falls, and we’re in color. Our three travelers are on a journey to some sort of epic final destination that they don’t seem to want or need to go on but are incapable of preventing it. In the movie, they’re on the Yellow Brick Road. In the book, they’re following the beam.
While the references aren’t as obvious in the next book, The Waste Lands, King really drives the point home in the fourth novel – Wizard and Glass. Here we meet the wicked witch – Rhea of Coos, or The Wicked Witch. The end of the novel contains outright mentions of Wizard of Oz lore – Emerald City, etc. By this point there’s no way I should have missed the Wizard of Oz parallel. In the next novel, our travelers finally meet The Wizard of Oz, the man behind the curtain. But in the books, the wizard is Stephen King himself. He’s inexplicably drawn into his own story. He’s the guy running the show, the man behind the curtain.
But meeting the Wizard isn’t the end of the movie, and it’s not the end of the books. Here in the series reality itself seems to unravel for our characters as they approach their destination, I’m sure you’ve all read them so I won’t retell it. But in the end of the movie, there’s a relatively large plot twist. When Dorothy finally leaves Oz, she wakes up in her bed. Her family tells her everything was just a dream. The audience of course believes it wasn’t really, but it’s still a surprise to consider that maybe Dorothy had just been in some kind of coma from the tornado. The books end with a kind of big twist too and while it’s not the same as The Wizard of Oz, it has that same sort of downer twist of an ending.
