Pop culture is always busy creating myths about itself, with a big assist from its fans. Most of us don’t care whether the legends that grow up around famous figures or events stand up to fact checking. If you love The Wizard of Oz, you probably don’t want to learn that the film received mixed reviews when it came out, failed to make money on its first run and never would have achieved its current sacred status if it hadn’t begun to be regularly shown on television a generation later. Several other unforeseeable elements also played a role in this mythos, including the nostalgia and awe we now feel over the so-called golden age of Hollywood moviemaking, something audiences of 1939 knew nothing of. Add in the special feelings Judy Garland’s diehard fans have about the highs and lows of her career. No one wants to think about the parallel universe where Wizard wound up as one more forgotten extravaganza from the moviemaking assembly line. That doesn’t organize the chaos and contingencies into a satisfying story. It’s an anti-story; nothing happened, so there’s nothing to tell.
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