#locasta

Avaric is from Gilikin country.

The witch of the north is the witch of GILIKIN COUNTRY.

"Sala-gadoola-menchicka-boo-la bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!"

Oh, wrong movie. But this was the song I listened to when designing my Good Witch of the North, aka Locasta if we go by Baum's 1902 play.

Now the Good Witch of the North has often been erroneously attributed to Glinda thanks to the MGM movie and it's not helped by Wicked making Galinda hailing from the north. But in actuality, the Good Witch of the North is a separate character from Glinda, and is described to be a short, old kindly woman, with illustrations depicting her with purple eyes, white dress, and a golden magical wand with an N to signify her as the ruler of the North, Gillikin Country.

Now, it would be simple to just be super faithful to the original illustration, but I wanted to give my own spin on the interpretation and what Locasta came across to me. I used the original illustration as the basis, and began searching for other characters that fit her archetype. This included the Fairy Godmother from Disney's Cinderella, the Three Fairies from Disney's Sleeping Beauty, Mama Odie from Disney's The Princess and the Frog, Impa from The Legend of Zelda, Mrs. Claus from Rankin Bass holiday specials, and Miss One from The Wiz. Miss One in particular was a major influence to the final design because The Wiz was one of the few Oz-related works that remembered that there are two good witches and not just one (that and I happened to like Thelma Carpenter's performance as Miss One).

Oz-tober, Day 3- Locasta

Just learned about this character, the original Good Witch of the North that sets Dorothy on the path to Oz, so it makes sense to cast Franklin Lieste, AKA Tinfoilhat in the role.

And now let's look at a handful of remaining apparitions of the two Good Witches of Oz, as directly adapted from Baum's novels.

Japan never had much of an MGM influence and so they preserved the structure of there being two Good Witches in "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz".

In the famous anime series "Ozu no Maho(u)tsukai", you have the Good Witch of the North appearing as this chubby clumsy but kind "Disney's Fairy Godmother" type of character. They tried to say close to Denslow's design while making it their own character - the same type of dress, again with a pointy hat, the N-ornated staff which becomes a N-ornated wand... but her colors are somehow changed to orange? And while Glinda remains generally faithful to how Baum described her (royal youthful sorceress), she is also given a different color palette making her more otherwordly, with turquoise hair, a pale lavender dress, and a very, very pale skin.

Before this animated series (1986) we had an animated movie (1982), and in it we do see the predecessors of the design choices for the series. Again, the Good Witches are influenced by the illustrations of the novel but sometimes in quite strange ways - for example their Glinda is clearly more influenced by Ozma's designs than Glinda's apparitions in the old illustrations. We also do find here a Glinda with a color palette of lavenders and turquoises. Given in this version the Wicked Witch was colored in dark blue and violet, and that the Good Witch of the North also has pink and indigo in her clothes, my guess is that they settled for having all three Witches be part of a same pink/blue/purple color spectrum, to clearly identify them as part of a same "group".

Speaking of purple-themed Glinda, we have another one in her incarnation in the Polish animated show "W krainie czarnoksieznika Oza", which I talked about previously in my Wicked Witch of the West posts. In it we also have both the Good Witch of the North (little granny in white cloak covered in stars, as in the novel, with touches of blue) and the Good Witch of the South - with Glinda's traditional red hair, and a pinkish-purple dress, matching the flowers in her hair.

It is also quite interesting that here the designers of the puppets did something that is sometimes used in Oz adaptations (it was notably done by Skottie Young in his comic book adaptation of the Oz novels): have the Good Witches match, design-wise, the Wicked Witches. For this show, two tall, slender, more "youthful" witches ; and two small, older ones.

I cannot do a post about incarnations of the Good Witch of the North without talked about her appearance in The Muppets' Wizard of Oz, where she is played as a more youthful and glamorous version of her book-self by Miss Piggy. The movie did the very interesting choice of naming her Tattypoo, after the identity Ruth Plumly Thompson gave to the Good Witch in her Oz novels (see "The Giant Horse of Oz"). We also have a Glinda who is once again associated with purple (what is it with giving Glinda purple shades of all sorts?), though to be fair in this movie the character is less a Glinda adaptation and more of a Miss Piggy copy. (Unlike the Muppet-Tattypoo who is really more of a Good Witch adaptation)

Of course I have to mention the incarnation of the Good Witches in my favorite Oz RPG, "Oz: Dark and Terrible". For the South, young Lady Glinda fon Ozcot, and for the North Locasta fon Shiz.

To complete this post I will mention the Good Witches as they appear in the mini-series "The Witches of Oz". And while I enjoy greatly their depictions of Langwidere and the Wicked Witch of the West, their Good Witches take is all over the place... Glinda is still the big good here, but she is associated with the color blue as a friend of the Munchkins, and she is blond, and her war outfit is vaguely Valkyrie-inspired... So Glinda is basically the Good Witch of the North here, just like in the MGM movie, and they do include in a flashback the Good Witch of the South, who is here just... just for one scene.

And her color motif is red, and she is also blond, I guess they are meant to be sisters? So she technically fills the role of the novels' Glinda, yet despite not being the actual Glinda, who is in truth the Northern Witch here... And gues what is the name of this southern witch in the credits? Locasta. Of course X) I don't know if they tried to be clever by switching up the cardinal directions, or if they just wanted to do an MGM variation and padded it up with book references...