The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has become an established part of multiple cultures, spreading from its early young American readership to becoming known throughout the world. It has been translated or adapted into nearly every major language, at times being modified in local variations.[72] For instance, in some abridged Indian editions, the Tin Woodman was replaced with a horse.[74] In Russia, a translation by Alexander Melentyevich Volkov produced six books, The Wizard of the Emerald City series, which became progressively distanced from the Baum version, as Ellie and her dog Totoshka travel throughout the Magic Land. The 1939 film adaptation has become a classic of popular culture, shown annually on American television from 1959 to 1998 and then several times a year every year beginning in 1999.[75]
In 1974, the story was re-envisioned as The Wiz, a Tony Award winning musical featuring an all-Black cast and set in the context of modern African-American culture.[76][77] This musical was adapted in 1978 as the feature film The Wiz, a musical adventure fantasy produced by Universal Pictures and Motown Productions.
There were several Hebrew translations published in Israel. As established in the first translation and kept in later ones, the book's Land of Oz was rendered in Hebrew as Eretz Uz (ארץ עוץ)—i.e. the same as the original Hebrew name of the Biblical Land of Uz, homeland of Job. Thus, for Hebrew readers, this translators' choice added a layer of Biblical connotations absent from the English original.
In 2018, "The Lost Art of Oz" project was initiated to locate and catalogue the surviving original artwork John R. Neill, W. W. Denslow, Frank Kramer, Richard "Dirk" Gringhuis, and Dick Martin that was created to illustrate the Oz book series.[78] In 2020, an Esperanto translation of the novel was used by a team of scientists to demonstrate a new method for encoding text in DNA that remains readable after repeated copying.[79]
