The Cowardly Lion is a character in the fictional Land of Oz created by American author L. Frank Baum.Jack Snow, Who's Who in Oz, Chicago, Reilly & Lee, 1954; New York, Peter Bedrick Books, 1988; p. 46. He is depicted as an African lion, and like all animals in Oz, he can speak.
Although he often doubts himself, the Cowardly Lion nonetheless often demonstrates bravery in the face of danger. Since lions are supposed to be "The King of Beasts", the Cowardly Lion worries his own fear makes him inadequate, failing to understand that courage is not a lack of fear, but acting in the face of fear. His fear is alleviated only in the aftermath of the Wizard's gift, when he is under the influence of a liquid substance the Wizard orders him to drink. He argues that the courage from the Wizard is only temporary, though he continues to do brave deeds.
Books
The Cowardly Lion makes his first appearance in the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He is the last of the companions Dorothy befriends on her way to the Emerald City where he ambushes her, Toto, Scarecrow, and Tin Woodman. When he tries to bite Toto, Dorothy slaps him. She calls the Lion a coward and the Lion admits that he is. The Cowardly Lion joins her so that he can ask the Wizard for courage, ashamed that he is not brave enough to play his cultural role of the King of the Beasts.L. Frank Baum,The Annotated Wizard of Oz, Michael Patrick Hearn, ed., New York, Crown, 1976; p. 148. Despite outward evidence that he is unreasonably fearful, the Cowardly Lion displays great bravery along the way. During the journey, he leaps across a chasm on the road of yellow brick multiple times, each time with a companion on his back and then leaps back to get the next one. When they come into another, wider chasm, the Cowardly Lion holds off two Kalidahs while the Tin Woodman cuts a tall tree to cross it. In spite of his fears, he still goes off to hunt for his food and he even offers to kill a deer for Dorothy to eat, but the idea makes her uncomfortable.
The Wizard gives the Lion a dish of unknown liquid, telling him it is "courage" to drink. In the remainder of the book, he becomes aggressive and ready to fight. He accompanies Dorothy on her journey to see Glinda, and allows his friends to stand on his back in order to escape the Dainty China Country.
The Lion's favored companion is the Hungry Tiger. This may well be the "Biggest of the Tigers" he and his friends encounter in the Forest of Wild Beasts in the Quadling CountrySnow, p. 99. In this forest, all of the lions and many of the other animals have been eaten by a Giant Spider. The Lion finds the Giant Spider asleep and decapitates it. The Tiger and the other animals bow to him and ask him to be their king, and he promises to do so upon his return from accompanying Dorothy to Glinda. Glinda orders the Winged Monkeys to carry him back to the Forest once Dorothy has returned home.
In the rest of Baum's Oz series, the Lion never again played a major role. In later books, the Lion often accompanies Dorothy on her adventures. He is Princess Ozma's chief guardian on state occasions and he and the Hungry Tiger pull Ozma's chariot. In subsequent Oz books by Baum, the Lion was shown to have continued being courageous and loyal, although still considering himself a coward and regularly frightened, even by Aunt Em. He befriended the Hungry Tiger in Ozma of Oz, if this was not the earlier Tiger, which The Patchwork Girl of Oz implies that it is by calling both Lion and Tiger "largest of their kind", and the two have become Ozma's personal guards. In Glinda of Oz he is on Ozma's board of advisers.
In "The Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger" in Little Wizard Stories of Oz, the Lion begins with cowardly bravado, intending to find a man to tear apart and the Tiger a fat baby to devour. Instead, they find a small child, bigger than a baby and return it to its mother.
In a later book in the Oz series, The Cowardly Lion of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, Mustafa of Mudge, a wealthy sultan at the southern tip of the Munchkin Country, kidnaps the Lion for his large collection of lions that he feels would be incomplete without Oz's most famous lion. He was turned to stone by the giant Crunch, but rescued by American circus clown Notta Bit More and orphan Bobbie Downs, whom the clown prefers to call by the more optimistic-sounding Bob Up.
For the most part in later Oz books, though, the Lion is a cameo appearance, instead of a major character. His other significant appearances include Ojo in Oz, where he is turned into a clock by Mooj and saved by Ozma and the Wizard. He assisted against the Stratovanians in Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz, Terp the Terrible in The Hidden Valley of Oz, and accompanied Dorothy and Prince Gules of Halidom in Merry Go Round in Oz. John R. Neill portrayed him primarily as a beast of burden in his three Oz books. In all, the only three books in which the Lion does not rate at least a mention are The Tin Woodman of Oz, Grampa in Oz and The Silver Princess in Oz.
Alternate stories The Lion appears in Gregory Maguire's revisionist series The Wicked Years, starting with Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995). He is one of many human-like Animals possessing the ability to talk, and was taken from his mother as a cub for use in an experiment on the nature of Animals. Elphaba, the future Wicked Witch of the West, saves the Lion Cub; they encounter each other near the novel's end, as the Lion joins Dorothy in the hunt for the Witch. After a minor role in the second novel Son of a Witch (2005), The Lion becomes the central character in the third novel, A Lion Among Men (2008), where he is given the name Brrr. He appears in the final novel, Out of Oz (2011), where he ascends to Throne Minister of Oz. In Danielle Paige's Dorothy Must Die (2014), the Lion has become a giant, brutal warrior who walks on his hind legs, draining the fear from others to increase his own strength. In the sequel The Wicked Will Rise (2015), protagonist Amy Gumm is able to take the Lion's courage by cutting off his tail, realizing it has been sewn onto his hindquarters, but Amy spares the Lion despite being tempted to kill him. The Lion is subsequently bound and forced to fight for Dorothy despite his fear, forcing Amy to kill him despite her past actions.
Film portrayals His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz In the 1914 film His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz, the Lion was played by Fred Woodward.
The Wizard of Oz (1925) In the 1925 silent film The Wizard of Oz, directed by and starring Larry Semon, the Lion was played in disguise by Curtis McHenry.
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
In the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, the Lion was a humanoid biped and played by Bert Lahr, a popular vaudeville and Broadway star, with many of Lahr's trademark mannerisms deliberately worked into the film. In this version, the liquid courage given to him by the Wizard is replaced with a medal marked "Courage". Bert Lahr's biography, written by his son John Lahr, is entitled Notes on a Cowardly Lion.
In the film, the Lion walks on his hind legs instead of all four, except when he is first seen bounding out of the forest to attack Dorothy's friends. After roaring fiercely at them on all fours, he does stand up on his hind legs.
Lahr also portrayed the Lion's Kansas counterpart, Zeke, one of Aunt Em and Uncle Henry's farmworkers. Screenwriter Noel Langley created this character for the film. Zeke helps Hickory, Tin Man's alter ego, lower a bed into its place on a wagon at the farm. He then moves the hogs into the pig pen and pours feed into their trough. When Dorothy falls off the railing that encircles the pen, Zeke jumps in and rescues her. With Dorothy safe, Zeke sits down beside the pen, breathing heavily and seemingly about to faint. The others realize that he had been afraid of the pigs, and playfully mock him. Zeke wears his hat throughout the entire film because he does not struggle to open the cellar when the tornado approaches the farm. Hunk, Scarecrow's alter-ego, closes and locks the cellar with him when Dorothy arrives at the farmhouse. Zeke and Professor Marvel, the Wizard's alter-ego, are the only men wearing hats when Dorothy awakens from being unconscious.
Cowardly Lion Courage Medal
The original Courage Medal prop from the 1939 film, a cross-shaped medal made of poly-chromed metal and measuring 7.5 × 7.5" (19.1 × 19.1 cm), features a lion in profile above a crown and a knight's helmet and the word "Courage" in raised blue scroll lettering. In the late 1950s, Mal Caplan, the head of the costume department at MGM was in a life-threatening automobile accident, and spent months in the hospital before returning to work. For sometime he was unable to sit upright and had to work from a chaise longue. In recognition of his courage, his colleagues and the management at MGM presented him with the Lion's Courage Medal. He was also given the Tin Man's "heart", but he gave that to "someone who needed it", a man in the same hospital who was having open heart surgery. The current whereabouts of the heart clock are unknown. The Courage Medal remained in the Caplan family until it was consigned to a Sotheby's Entertainment Memorabilia auction in May 1997.Sotheby's Auction Catalog – May 21, 1997Sotheby's Entertainment & Memorabilia Auction Beverly Hills, CA – May 21, 1997 The medal was purchased by a New Jersey collector, and in November 2010 was featured on episode 7 of the TV show Hollywood Treasure.
Cowardly Lion costumes An original Cowardly Lion costume from The Wizard of Oz was packed away after filming and forgotten for decades. It was found barely in time to be included in the landmark 1970 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer auction, where it sold for $2,400 to a California chiropractor. In 1985, sculptor Bill Mack acquired it; he could not recall the exact price, but stated, "It was several thousand dollars, instead of several hundred thousand". He had it restored by a taxidermist and "recreated the headpiece with a lifelike sculpture of Lahr". In December 2006, he sold it for $826,000.
Another costume currently resides in the Comisar Collection, the largest collection of television artifacts in the world. Curator James Comisar acquired the costume, after verifying to his satisfaction that it had been worn in the film, and set about restoring it. The major challenge was the weight of the tail caused rips across the back of the costume that needed to be patched, which was done by Cara Varnell, a textile conservation expert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Cowardly Lion's original facial appliances had been glued directly to Bert Lahr's face and did not survive the production, so Comisar asked Lahr's son, Herbert, to model for another face cast, as he had an uncanny resemblance to his father. Herbert Lahr remarked: The Lion's suit was very interesting. It was a real lion skin, and it weighed 60 lbs. My dad had to be in it all day, he couldn't eat because of the way the mask was, so he had to eat his lunch through a straw. The Cowardly Lion's mane was re-created from human hair imported from Italy at a cost of $22,000, and more than twenty-one artisans worked for two years completing the conservation.