The Sporting Life in Oz
Mar. 31st, 2009 07:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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rockinlibrarian! You probably won't be interested in the rest of this post, but these first two sentences are just for you! {g}
In The Emerald City of Oz, we get our first detailed description of the Royal Athletic College run by Professor Wogglebug. The field in back of the college building is described as follows:
In one place they played football, in another baseball. Some played tennis, some golf; some were swimming in a big pool. Upon a river which wound through the grounds several crews in racing boats were rowing with great enthusiasm. Other groups of students played basketball and cricket, while in one place a ring was roped in to permit boxing and wrestling by the energetic youths. All the collegians seemed busy and there was much laughter and shouting.
What's interesting is that a few of these sports are distinctly American, while I don't think cricket ever caught on in this country. Also, when young baseball pitcher Peter Brown visits Oz in the Ruth Plumly Thompson books, none of the natives seem to be familiar with the sport. But then, there's no indication that he visited the college, and the Wogglebug might well have wanted to introduce sports largely unknown in Oz, in order to show off his worldly knowledge. There are references to other sports and games scattered throughout the series as well. The Scarecrow shows Jack Pumpkinhead how to play quoits in Land. Prince Pompadore, Peg Amy, and Wag play hopscotch in Kabumpo. Scalawagons has the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman starting to play a weird form of squash involving ripe bananas. In Lucky Bucky, there's an entire community devoted to games, inhabited by hop-scotching grasshoppers, leap-frogging frogs, cricket-playing crickets, croquet-obsessed crows, live playing cards, and a teapot king whose greatest passion is playing checkers. But we don't see too many games that are specific to Oz. Forbidden Fountain mentions ozball courts in the palace grounds, but there's no indication as to how it's played. And Grampa makes reference to a game called scrum, which has elements in common with chess, checkers, and parchesi.
Several fans have invented, or at least mentioned, Ozzy versions of existing games, including Ozingo, Scrozzle, and Ozopoly. I find the last one particularly intriguing, but also somewhat out of place for Oz. Isn't it supposed to be a land without economic competition? Then again, that's not always consistent from one book to another, and it's not like Monopoly is all that realistic in the mundane world either. The spirit of people wanting to bankrupt each other might be, but when in Lurline's name do people buy entire streets, and why would you have to own three particular ones before building anything on them? I do have to wonder what the properties would be in an Ozopoly game. If they were Emerald City streets, then they would presumably all be green, and that wouldn't do for the color set rule. Maybe they would be landmarks from throughout the country, or the crazy villages that adventurers stumble into from time to time. Also, I have to think an Oz version of Risk, perhaps including Nome armies, would be pretty cool.
rockinlibrarian! You probably won't be interested in the rest of this post, but these first two sentences are just for you! {g}In The Emerald City of Oz, we get our first detailed description of the Royal Athletic College run by Professor Wogglebug. The field in back of the college building is described as follows:
In one place they played football, in another baseball. Some played tennis, some golf; some were swimming in a big pool. Upon a river which wound through the grounds several crews in racing boats were rowing with great enthusiasm. Other groups of students played basketball and cricket, while in one place a ring was roped in to permit boxing and wrestling by the energetic youths. All the collegians seemed busy and there was much laughter and shouting.
What's interesting is that a few of these sports are distinctly American, while I don't think cricket ever caught on in this country. Also, when young baseball pitcher Peter Brown visits Oz in the Ruth Plumly Thompson books, none of the natives seem to be familiar with the sport. But then, there's no indication that he visited the college, and the Wogglebug might well have wanted to introduce sports largely unknown in Oz, in order to show off his worldly knowledge. There are references to other sports and games scattered throughout the series as well. The Scarecrow shows Jack Pumpkinhead how to play quoits in Land. Prince Pompadore, Peg Amy, and Wag play hopscotch in Kabumpo. Scalawagons has the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman starting to play a weird form of squash involving ripe bananas. In Lucky Bucky, there's an entire community devoted to games, inhabited by hop-scotching grasshoppers, leap-frogging frogs, cricket-playing crickets, croquet-obsessed crows, live playing cards, and a teapot king whose greatest passion is playing checkers. But we don't see too many games that are specific to Oz. Forbidden Fountain mentions ozball courts in the palace grounds, but there's no indication as to how it's played. And Grampa makes reference to a game called scrum, which has elements in common with chess, checkers, and parchesi.
Several fans have invented, or at least mentioned, Ozzy versions of existing games, including Ozingo, Scrozzle, and Ozopoly. I find the last one particularly intriguing, but also somewhat out of place for Oz. Isn't it supposed to be a land without economic competition? Then again, that's not always consistent from one book to another, and it's not like Monopoly is all that realistic in the mundane world either. The spirit of people wanting to bankrupt each other might be, but when in Lurline's name do people buy entire streets, and why would you have to own three particular ones before building anything on them? I do have to wonder what the properties would be in an Ozopoly game. If they were Emerald City streets, then they would presumably all be green, and that wouldn't do for the color set rule. Maybe they would be landmarks from throughout the country, or the crazy villages that adventurers stumble into from time to time. Also, I have to think an Oz version of Risk, perhaps including Nome armies, would be pretty cool.
