[Image above] Andrew Zagorski, owner of Oz Saferooms in Del City, Okla., talks about the pride he feels in inheriting yellow bricks (seen in background) that originally came from the birthplace of Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum in an interview with KOCO 5 News. Credit: KOCO 5 News, YouTube
Despite several controversies leading up to the release date (here and here), the film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical Wicked drew in the crowds over Thanksgiving weekend and set the record for highest-grossing Broadway musical adaptation of all time at the domestic box office.
For those unfamiliar with the award-winning show, Wicked is a retelling of the Wizard of Oz that explores the complex friendship between Elphaba (who becomes the Wicked Witch of the West) and Galinda (who becomes Glinda the Good). The original Broadway production runs for 2 hours and 45 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission. The directors of the new film, however, decided to split the story into two parts, and the first part alone runs for 2 hours and 40 minutes.
With the film version of Wicked now on track to tell the story in double the amount of time, there is space to dive more deeply into certain parts of the world’s lore. That includes little winks and nods to iconic features of the original Wizard of Oz film and book series, such as the yellow brick road.
In the Wizard of Oz, the “Road of Yellow Bricks,” as it is called in the novel’s first edition, functions as a guideline that leads all who follow it to the road’s ultimate destination—Emerald City, the imperial capital of Oz. In the new film, viewers are given a “behind the curtain” look at how the Wizard of Oz decided on this unique color for the essential road.
In real life, there are several accounts claiming that the yellow brick road was inspired by a specific road paved with yellow bricks in either New York, Michigan, or Kansas. Regardless of which road actually inspired the author, many towns and cities have since installed yellow brick roads in honor of this famous piece of media.
One such town is Chittenango, New York, where the author L. Frank Baum was born and raised. The community laid down a yellow brick road in the early 1900s, and some of the cast members of the original Wizard of Oz film reportedly walked on them. But the bricks eventually started to degrade, so they were pulled up and put in storage until this year, when the mayor found them a new home—all the way over in Oklahoma.
Andrew Zagorski is the owner of Oz Saferooms in Del City, Okla. The name of his business, plus the fact that Zagorski is originally from New York, made him the perfect choice to inherit the yellow bricks, as explained in an interview with KOCO 5 News. Zagorski plans to install the bricks in front of his new main office, which (ironically) sells monolithic, concrete shelters that can withstand an F5 tornado.
“We’re going to take great pride in laying these [just under 10,000 bricks] down and putting them in for our new main office,” Zagorski says in the interview, which can be watched below.
