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because in both cases the real inventiveness lies in Harburg’s lyrics. In Dorothy’s intro to “Ding, Dong,” Harburg embarks on a pyrotechnic display of A-A-A rhyming (
the wind began to switch / the house to pitch;
until at length we meet the
witch, to satisfy an itch / Went flying on her broomstick thumbing for a hitch;
and
what happened then was rich . . .
). As with a vaudeville barker’s alliterations, we cheer each new rhyme as a sort of gymnastic triumph. Verbal play continues to characterize both songs. In “Ding, Dong,” Harburg invents punning word-concertinas:
    Ding, Dong, the witch is dead!
    —
Whicholwitch?
    —The wicked witch!
    This technique found much fuller expression in “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” becoming the real “hook” of the song:
    We’re off to see the Wizard,
    The wonderful
Wizzardavoz,
    We hear he is a
Whizzavawiz,
    If ever a
whizztherwoz.
    If
everoever a whizztherwoz
    The
Wizzardavoz
is one because . . .
    Is it too fanciful to suggest that Harburg’s use throughout the film of internal rhymes and assonances is a conscious echo of the “rhyming” of the plot itself, the paralleling of characters in Kansas with those in Oz, the echoes of themes bouncing back and forth between the monochrome and Technicolor worlds?
    Few of the Munchkins could actually sing their lines, as they mostly didn’t speak English. They weren’t required to do much in the movie, but they made up for this by their activities off-camera. Some film historians try to play down the stories of sexual shenanigans, knife-play, and general mayhem, but the legend of the Munchkin hordes cutting a swathe through Hollywood is not easily dispelled. In Angela Carter’s novel
Wise Children
there is an account of a fictitious version of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
that owes much to the Munchkins’ antics and, indeed, to Munchkinland:
    The concept of this wood was scaled to the size of fairy folk, so all was twice as large as life. Larger. Daisies big as your head and white as spooks, foxgloves as tall as the tower of Pisa that chimed like bells if shook. . . . Even the wee folk were real; the studio scoured the country for dwarfs. Soon, true or not, wild tales began to circulate—how one poor chap fell into the toilet and splashed around for half an hour before someone dashed in for a piss and fished him out of the bowl; another one got offered a high chair in the Brown Derby when he went out for a hamburger.
    Amidst all this Munchkining we are given two very different portraits of grown-ups. The Good Witch Glinda is pretty in pink (well, prettyish, even if Dorothy is moved to call her “beautiful”). She has a high, cooing voice, and a smile that seems to have jammed. She has one excellent gag-line. After Dorothy disclaims witchy status, Glinda inquires, pointing at Toto:
Well, then, is
that
the witch?
This joke apart, she spends the scene simpering and looking vaguely benevolent and loving and rather too heavily powdered. It is interesting that though she is the Good Witch, the goodness of Oz does not inhere in her. The people of Oz are naturally good, unless they are under the power of the Wicked Witch (as is shown by the improved behavior of her soldiers after she melts). In the moral universe of the film, only evil is external, dwelling solely in the dual devil-figure of Miss Gulch / Wicked Witch.
    (A parenthetical worry about Munchkinland: is it not altogether too pretty, too kempt, too sweetly sweet for a place that was, until Dorothy’s arrival, under the absolute power of the Wicked Witch of the East? How is it that this squashed Witch had no castle? How could her despotism have left so little mark upon the land? Why are the Munchkins so relatively unafraid, hiding only briefly before they emerge, and giggling while they hide? The heretical thought occurs: maybe the Witch of the East
wasn’t as bad as all that
—she certainly kept the streets clean, the houses painted and in good repair, and, no