Why the Silver Slippers in the Wizard of Oz Became Ruby

The magical shoes known as the Silver Shoes appear in L. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by Frank Baum, is Dorothy Gale’s mode of transportation home. They were originally owned by the Wicked Witch of the East, but when Dorothy’s house lands on the Witch, they are given to her. On the other hand, what happened to Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers? Dorothy uses the shoes to return to Kansas at the end of the story, but when she arrives at her destination, she discovers that the shoes have fallen off the end route.

Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz have silver slippers, which are magical shoes. Since this movie involved magical and fancy stuff, sure there is jewelry worn in the Wizard of Oz.  The third season focuses on the search for them, culminating in their discovery in The Good, Wicked, and Silver. They’re based on the Silver Shoes from the original novel, but they’re named after the Ruby Slippers. Two kinds of slippers exist in the season and both are powerful.

When the Wicked Witch of the West captures them, she has complete control over the Quox and the silver army until Dorothy hits her with a ruby blast, breaking Glinda’s protective enchantment. They are still extremely powerful even without Glinda’s enchantment, amplifying the witch’s magical abilities. It’s possible that Dorothy’s victory was due to the witch’s inexperience with her abilities.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1990

The Silver Shoes, also known as the Silver Slippers, are fictional charming items from Oz. L is their first and only appearance. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Frank Baum’s first Oz book, was published in 1900. Despite this, and due to the widespread popularity of the 1939 MGM musical film The Wizard of Oz, most people believe Dorothy Gale’s shoes on her Oz adventure are ruby red. The shoes in Baum’s book, however, are not red, but silver, and are designed in an Arabian/Dutch style with sharp pointy toes and Mary Jane style buckles.

The only thing the ruby slippers and silver shoes have in common is that they were both once owned by Oz’s infamous Wicked Witch of the East, and their magic can only be activated by clicking the heels together three times in a row. Baum never explained how the Wicked Witch created or obtained them in the first place.

Even though the shoes are described as being made of real solid silver in the book, they are flexible, comfortable, and easy to move in because they are magic shoes in a magical realm. They will never wear out and are accustomed to shrinking or stretching to fit the current owner perfectly at the time they are worn.

Book Appearances of the Silver Shoes

1. The Wizard of Emerald City

The Wizard of the Emerald City

The Silver shoes, or Serebryaniye Bashmachki as they are known in the manuscript, are the source of Elly’s protection rather than the Good Witch’s kiss in Alexander Melentyevich Volkov’s The Wizard of the Emerald City (1939). She is thus attacked by an Ogre when she removes them, and she continues to wear them even when she sleeps. They aren’t taken from the Witch’s body, but rather from Toto’s hiding place in a dark cave. This could have been done to avoid the problem of a person wearing the shoes being impossible to harm, as the hurricane in that book was created by the Wicked Witch to destroy mankind and redirected upon her by the Good Witch of the North, who suffers no ill effects for harming her. The Witch is said to have only worn the shoes on rare occasions. They’ve gone missing, just like in Baum’s story.

2. Dorothy of Oz

Glinda recovers the silver shoes and presents them to Dorothy in Roger S. Baum’s Dorothy of Oz (1989). They still have enough power to transport Dorothy to Oz and back to Kansas.

3. Wicked:  The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

The silver shoes are a gift to Nessarose, the Wicked Witch of the East, before she and her sister, Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, start college in Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West 1995. Her father makes them with special glass beads that another man taught him to make, resulting in shoes that are gleaming and iridescent rather than true silver. Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, enchants them later to give Nessarose the necessary balance to walk. Elphaba is the one who enchants the shoes in the Broadway musical adaptation of the book. Her spell turns the silver shoes into ruby slippers by making them burn red hot.

Silver Shoes

  • Paul Miles Schneider’s 1910 novel

Synopsis:

  • For over a century, the Wizard of Oz has been dismissed as a simple American fairy tale. But Donald Gardner is about to discover that the Wizard of Oz story is true.

Donald Gardner openly cringes when his parents tell him they are going on an exciting road trip through Kansas. He is certain that his summer vacation will be tedious. However, they are approached by a poor woman offering to sell an unusual item—an antique shoe made of solid silver—at one of their final roadside stops on the way home. While Donald’s mother is initially hesitant, she eventually becomes enamored with the shoe and purchases it.

Donald is skeptical that the shoe is anything more than a relic, but he brings it in for show-and-tell to impress his classmates when the new school year begins. His friends compare it to something from The Wizard of Oz, and his teacher agrees that the idea is plausible given author L. Frank Baum’s work. Frank Baum wrote about “silver shoes,” not the ruby slippers featured in the film. However, when he accepts a dare from his two best friends to try it on, strange and terrifying things start to happen. Strange animals scream in the middle of the night. In the distance, dark, shadowy shapes lurk. Outside his bedroom window, scratching sounds can be heard. And when Donald meets George Clarke, a reclusive man who has been hiding and on the run for many years, he discovers that there is a lot more to Baum’s story than he realizes and that the Silver Shoes are the same pair that a little farm girl named Dorothy wore during a fateful journey to another dimension known as Oz over a century ago.