The Wicked Witch is Dead | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: The Wicked Witch is Dead | Previous Challenge Entry
By Tom Parsons
05/23/13
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A song written for a 1939 film, a song running less than one minute, suddenly found itself seventy-four years later near the top of the charts in the United Kingdom. This was the result of a social media campaign to have the song played on radio stations to boost it into tenth place in the pop music charts.

The music was written by Harold Arlen, the lyrics by E. Y. Harburg. The song was written for one of the most popular films of all time. It was sung by the inhabitants of a strange place that for many years had lived under the curse of a wicked witch. Suddenly one day, a house dropped out of the sky, killing Glinda, the Wicked Witch of the East. The residents were jubilant, and sang the song in celebration.

The film, of course, was “The Wizard of Oz” and the house that fell on Glinda was the house of Dorothy carried to Oz by a Kansas tornado. As it turned out, Glinda apparently has a story the film did not tell. Her story of how she became the Wicked Witch is now being told in a musical play titled “Wicked.” Even wicked witches have a backstory.

For the followers of Jesus Christ there is a day of rejoicing coming, when the enemy of God and His people is forever cast into the Lake of Fire as described in Revelation 20:7-10: “When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth – Gog and Magog – and to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand on the seashore. They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of God’s people, the city he loves. But fire came down from heaven and devoured them. And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.” (NIV)

Will the saints sing for joy at this fall of the enemy? The Bible does not say directly, but it does say that forever we will sing the praises of the Lamb, focusing on Jesus instead of on the enemy.

However, in this world, people sometimes do sing when someone they perceived to be their enemy dies. On April 14, 2013, just six days after the death of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and the result of a frantic social media campaign led by liberal groups who greatly opposed Thatcher’s conservative policies, the song sung by the Munchkins as their enemy lay dead beneath a house that had fallen on her reached number ten on the pop charts in the UK. Radio stations became alive with the ditty “Ding-dong! The witch is dead!”

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