Is Wicked based on the Wizard of Oz book? Only at three removes

Spoilers below for Wicked (2024) and Wicked: For Good (2025), including the second film's Tin Man reveal.

The honest answer to whether Wickedis based on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is that it is based on a book that is based on a film that is based on it. Four adaptations sit between L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel and the version currently in cinemas, and each one rewrote the story it inherited. By the time you reach Elphaba, almost nothing on screen comes from Baum except the shape of the world and the colour of a pair of shoes.

• ✅Baum's Wicked Witch of the West has no name. Elphaba was invented in 1995, ninety-five years later.
• ✅The witches are not sisters in the book. Baum states no relationship between any two of his four witches at all.
• ✅Baum's Wizard is not a tyrant. He is a frightened ventriloquist who calls himself a humbug the moment he is caught.
• ✅The silver shoes are the one thing that survives intact, and even that is partly a rights decision.

🔗 How is Wicked connected to the original book?

Through four separate adaptations, each of which changed the one before it. Baum publishes The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. MGM films it in 1939 and invents a great deal, including a green-skinned witch. In 1995 Gregory Maguire publishes Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. The Broadway musical opens in 2003 and simplifies Maguire heavily. The films arrive in 2024 and 2025.

The reason the connection feels confusing is that each link kept the previous version's most recognisable images while discarding its logic. The green skin everyone associates with the Wicked Witch is not in Baum. He gives her one eye, as powerful as a telescope, and an army of slaves, and he never once describes her complexion. That single visual, invented for the screen in 1939, is the thing Maguire built an entire novel on top of, which is how a detail with no textual basis became the emotional centre of the biggest musical of the century.

It is worth being clear about what Maguire was actually doing, because “fan fiction of a film” undersells it. His novel takes a character who exists in Baum purely as an obstacle, gives her a birth, a family, a university education and a set of political commitments, and then asks the reader to watch her acquire the reputation we already know she ends up with. The question the book is built on has nothing to do with whether she is evil. It asks who in Oz gets to decide what the word means, and what it takes to be labelled with it.

There is a second reason the musical feels closer to the film than to the book, and it is structural rather than legal. A stage show needs two leads with a relationship, and Baum does not supply one: his witches never meet, never speak, and never appear in the same chapter. Everything an audience loves about Elphaba and Glinda together had to be built from nothing, because in the source there is nothing there to adapt.

Baum could not have written that question, because his Oz has no press, no politics and no public opinion. The Witch of the West is wicked in the way weather is bad: as a fact about the world that the travellers route around. Maguire's Oz has newspapers and a government, and the whole novel happens in the gap between what someone does and what people say she did. Everything else in the chain, including two films and a decade of merchandise, grows out of that single structural change.

In the playable version you can walk into her castle as a prisoner, as one of the Winkies she has enslaved, or as somebody Baum never wrote, and decide what she actually is. Role-play The Wonderful Wizard of Oz →

👯 Are the two wicked witches sisters in the book?

No. Baum never states any relationship between them. The Witch of the East is dead under a house before Dorothy speaks to anybody, the Witch of the West wants Dorothy's shoes and her country left alone, and the book gives no family, no shared history and no grief. The West does not avenge the East. She is annoyed about a trespasser.

The sisters, and the name Elphaba, and the parents, and the brother, are all Maguire's 1995 inventions. So is Nessarose as a character with a wheelchair, a governorship and a temperament. In Baum there is nobody there to name: the Witch of the East exists as a pair of feet, a rumour about cruelty to Munchkins, and one earlier appearance in which she takes a bribe to enchant a woodcutter's axe.

That earlier appearance is worth putting next to the film, because both stories now explain the Tin Man and they explain him completely differently. Wicked: For Good makes him Boq, a Munchkin whose heart is shrinking under a spell Nessarose casts from the Grimmerie, whom Elphaba turns to tin in an attempt to save his life. In Baum he is Nick Chopper, a woodcutter whose fiancée's guardian pays the Witch of the East to break up the engagement, and the axe does the rest.

Both versions arrive at a man of tin with no heart. One gets there through a love triangle and a rescue that goes wrong; the other through a contract killing of a marriage, paid for in livestock. The film wants you to feel the tragedy of good intentions. Baum wants you to notice that somebody bought this outcome and got exactly what they paid for.

🎩 Is the Wizard a tyrant in the original?

Not remotely. The Wizard of the 1900 novel is a small, apologetic man from Omaha who arrived by runaway balloon, was mistaken for a sorcerer, and has been maintaining the mistake with stage props ever since. When the Scarecrow tells him he ought to be ashamed of himself, he agrees immediately and starts explaining how the tricks worked.

“I think you are a very bad man,” said Dorothy. “Oh, no, my dear; I’m really a very good man, but I’m a very bad Wizard, I must admit.”

The Grimmerie, the propaganda apparatus and the persecution of the talking Animals are all from Maguire and the musical built on him, where the Wizard is behind the suppression of the Animals and uses parlour tricks and lies to stay in power. Baum's Wizard uses the same parlour tricks for the opposite reason: not to hold a country down, but because he is embarrassed and cannot think of a way out. It is the single biggest departure in the whole chain, because it changes what kind of story Oz is. Baum wrote a country whose central authority is a fraud that nobody is much harmed by. Maguire wrote a country whose central authority is a fraud that everybody is harmed by, and asked who gets called wicked in a place like that.

Maguire's novel is also markedly darker than the stage version most people have seen, which is why readers who come to it after the musical are so regularly caught out. The show keeps the political premise and lightens almost everything around it. If Wicked is your entry point, the 1995 book is a genuinely different experience, and so, in the opposite direction, is Baum.

👠 Why does Wicked use silver shoes?

Because the ruby slippers never belonged to Baum. They were invented for the 1939 MGM film, which means they belong to that film's rights holder, while Baum's silver shoes are public domain and free for anyone to use. Universal's Wicked went back to the book, and director Jon M. Chu has said the production deliberately steered around the slippers, with one lighting nod as the only wink.

The joke, if you have read the novel, is that the most legally cautious decision in the production is also the most faithful one in the film. A rights problem sent a billion-dollar musical adaptation back to the 1900 text, and the shoes are silver again for the first time in most people's lifetimes.

The Winged Monkeys went the other way. In Wicked their wings are something done to them on screen. In Baum they already have wings and always did, and what was done to them is legal rather than surgical: a sorceress bound their entire band to a golden hat as punishment for a prank, so that whoever holds the hat owns three commands from them. Different machinery, same conclusion, which is that in every version of Oz somebody else decides what the monkeys are for.

Once you start looking for the seams, the pattern holds everywhere. Baum's Oz is a place where cruelty is ambient and unexplained, and the story is about crossing it. Every adaptation since has wanted the cruelty to have an author, someone whose fault it is, because that is what turns a journey into a drama. The green skin gets a cause. The monkeys get a surgeon. The Wizard gets a policy. Even the shoes get a rights lawyer.

Which of the two you prefer is a real question rather than a loyalty test. The modern version gives you motive, and motive is what most stories now run on. The 1900 version gives you a country where a woman with one eye owns a nation of slaves and nobody in the book thinks this needs accounting for, and the flatness of that is its own kind of unsettling.

Which is the argument for meeting the Witch of the West without either script in front of you. In Baum she is unnamed, one-eyed, terrified of water and of the dark, running a slave state she took with a magic hat, and nobody has yet written her a childhood.

The 1900 novel is free at Project Gutenberg. If you want the witches sorted out first, start with who's who in the book.