Emerald City is an American fantasy television series. Let’s see some amazing facts and trivia about it!
1.It is based on the Land of Oz book series.
2. A 10-episode first season was ordered straight to series by NBC in April 2015, which premiered on January 6, 2016
3. The series was created by Matthew Arnold who pitched an alternate telling, a dark, edgy version of The Wizard of Oz to Universal Television.
4. Arnold wrote the pilot script, which then received a 10 episode direct-to-series order on NBC. Josh Friedman was brought on as showrunner.
5. The series was originally slated to air in 2015, with filming scheduled to begin in 2014. However, it was cancelled before entering production due to creative differences between Friedman and the studio.
6. On April 15, 2015, NBC reversed course and decided to go ahead with the series.
7. On July 14, 2015, it was announced that Tarsem Singh would direct all ten episodes of the first season, with David Schulner as new showrunner, replacing Josh Friedman, and Shaun Cassidy coming on board as executive producer.
8. The Emerald City opening two episodes have received mixed response from critics. The first season has a 38% approval rating based on 39 critics on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, with an average score of 5.2 out of 10.
9. The site’s consensus reads “Dark and brooding, but also confusing and contrived, Emerald City is the Game of Thrones/Wizard of Oz mashup nobody asked for.”
10. On Metacritic, the first season has a score of 47 out of 100 based on 31 reviews, indicating “mixed or average reviews”.
11. L. Frank Baum wrote 2 dozen books about Oz.
12.The Oz books form a book series that begins with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and relate the fictional history of the Land of Oz.
13. Oz was created by author L. Frank Baum, who went on to write fourteen full-length Oz books. All of Baum written books are in the public domain in the United States
14. Even while he was alive, Baum was styled as “the Royal Historian of Oz” to emphasize the concept that Oz is an actual place. The illusion created was that characters such as Dorothy and Princess Ozma related their adventures in Oz to Baum themselves, by means of wireless telegraph.
15. Though Baum did not intend for his first Oz book to have any sequels, it achieved a greater popularity than any of the other fairylands he created, such as the land of Merryland in Baum’s children’s novel Dot and Tot in Merryland, written only one year after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Due to Oz’s worldwide success, Baum decided to return to it four years after his first Oz book was published.
16. For the next two decades, he described and expanded upon the land in the Oz Books,[2] a series which introduced several fictional characters and creatures having adventures in a world where real magic exists, and marvelous things are possible. Baum’s intention to end the series with the sixth Oz book The Emerald City of Oz (1910), in which Oz is forever sealed off and made invisible to the outside world, did not sit well with fans, and he quickly disregarded this attempt by writing more successful Oz books, even naming himself the “Royal Historian of Oz”
17. Baum’s creation of the Emerald City may have been inspired by the White City of the World Columbian Exposition, which he visited frequently. Its quick building, in less than a year, may have been an element in the quick construction of the Emerald City in the first book.
18. Schematically, Oz is much like the United States, with the Emerald City taking the place of Chicago: to the East, mixed forest and farmland; to the West, treeless plains and fields of wheat; to the South, warmth and lush growth, and red earth.
19. Ruth Plumly Thompson took a different direction with her Oz books, introducing European elements such as the title character of The Yellow Knight of Oz, a knight straight out of Arthurian Legend.
20. Fiona Shaw who plays in “Harry Potter” (2001) as Harry’s Aunt Petunia, a muggle, here is a sorcerous charged with protecting her charge.
Got anything to add?