Hamish Steele
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DOROTHY Part 6 - Cécile Carre Emerald City Design
🕑 Added 2025-12-08 14:00:10 +0000 UTCNow, let's move onto some concept art for the WORLD of Oz.
Right from the off, I needed to figure out a way to make the Emerald City as huge and impressive and GREEN as people want it to be, while maintaining the reveal in the books that the whole city is actually NOT green, but an illusion. In the books, everyone who enters the city is given green tinted glasses - but this element has almost never been adapted. Oddly in the broadway version of Wicked, the characters do wear the tinted specs during the Emerald City song, but they don't comment on it.
So while it is very obviously stealing the idea from Doctor Who a little bit, the idea of a glass dome protecting the truth to the outside world made sense. Here is the first concept are we commissioned from the talented Cécile Carre.
Comments
Hamish Steele
Yes, our plan was to keep the goggles but also dramatically smash the glass ceiling (heh) when the Wizard leaves in his balloon, to make the Emerald City more vibrant than ever, just not all green.
Ian Gazzotti
I imagine that almost all adaptations skip it because they're riffing more on the movie than on the books, but it always makes me sad because it's such a little clever plot device - and it's especially baffling, as you say, that it's not used more by adaptations that lean heavily on the Wizard-as-a-scammer angle, like Wicked or Oz The Great and Powerful. A bubble is a nice visual compromise on the original goggles, since it keeps the same Technicolor impact of seeing the city shining green from afar, and you don't have to switch to first-person view inside the City in order to keep the illusion a little longer.
Hamish Steele
Yeah, it's the first big give-away that the Wizard is a con-man and Dorothy can see right through it straight away. It shows how gullible and naive Ozians are and how Dorothy, despite being a child, is still a little more mature than everyone around her
Tori Williams
That's so interesting!! I've never read the original books so it's cool to learn about how different it was than any adaptation has really shown.
