Characters and incidents difficult to stage are left out, including the
Sawhorse, the river crossing, the Jackdaws, the Wishing Pills, the Sunflowers, and the
Griffin. The
Field Mice are represented by a single white rat who does not speak.
The Gump appears but its screen time is minimal. The
Soldier with the Green Whiskers and the
Guardian of the Gates are combined into a single unnamed character. This conflation was originally done by
Jack Snow in the novel
The Magical Mimics in Oz (1946), in which case it was a continuity error, and has been done deliberately by some more recent film adaptations, including
Oz the Great and Powerful. In an apparent plot hole, Jack Pumpkinhead, speaking shortly after his "birth," knows that although Mombi enlivened him, Tip built him, and thus he considers Tip his father. By this point in the story, neither Tip nor Mombi had told him about his origin. The Emerald City appears to have a population of exactly three (The Scarecrow, Omby Amby, and Jellia Jamb) prior to Jack Pumpkinhead's arrival. The younger female characters, such as Jinjur and Jellia Jamb, wear 1960s miniskirts and go-go boots, and have then-fashionable haircuts. The "girlish" grievances of the Army of Revolt, set in the context of
suffragettes in the 1904 novel, have been updated to include "homework" and "babysitting," and they are played as typical "rebellious teenage" stock characters of 1969. The most radical departure comes at the end, when Tip's spiritual essence flies away to dwell in all the boys in the land, leaving an amnesiac Ozma who has no memory of the whole adventure. The idea that Tip and Ozma could exist as separate entities originated in Jack Snow's short piece "A Murder in Oz," published posthumously in 1958, and has been recycled by other authors. ==Production==