The ideas of encoding and decoding can be seen in the 2024 film Wicked and the stage production of Wicked the musical on Broadway and in the West End. There is quite a lot of narrative coding that is used within the story that takes place within the first Wicked movie and also in the first act of Wicked the musical, a few of these codes include Animal rights allegory, Good vs Evil, Discrimination, Defying Gravity and Individuality, and Fascism and Propaganda. These narrative codes can be seen quite clearly as the main character Elphaba is born with green skin and from the moment she was born she was discriminated against by her parents, and as she grew up she was also picked on and bullied and discriminated against by the munchkin children.
Along with Elphaba the talking animals that had been a big part of Oz have started to be discriminated against and having their rights to live in Oz and to teach in the university taken away and they are being forced into cages in a room within the emerald city.
Two examples of this are the characters of Dr Dilamon who is dragged out of his own lecture by two emerald city guards who pull him by his horns and the young lion cub who was trapped in a cage so that he would not grow up and be able to talk, and this also goes alone with the narrative code of Propaganda as the Wizard of Oz and Madame Morrible have created the common enemy of the animals especially the ones that can talk. They also use things like the big mechanical head to make the wizard seem more intimidating to the civilians of Oz and to make it seem like he is a very powerful wizard but in reality he does not have any power.
Unlike Elphaba and Madame Morrible who are the only two characters in the musical and movie to be having powers. And this leads to the last two narrative codes of Good vs Evil and Individuality, these can be seen throughout the film like when Elphaba casted a spell that put her whole class and the new teacher to sleep excerpted for both Elphaba and Fiyero who come together to save the lion cub from the cage to to set him free in the nearby forest. These codes come up again towards the ending on act one in the musical and the end of the first movie, where Elphaba and Glinda go to meet the wizard but then they learn that the wizard has no really power and that he just wants to use Elphaba for her power but she refuses to join him in his plan to stop the animals. And so she takes the grimmerie and runs. But while Glinda and the emerald city guards try to get her to go back, Madame Morrible announces to the people of Oz that they should look out for Elphaba and that she has defied the wizard and her ‘wickedness’ is shown through her green skin. This ends with Elphaba flying off after she sings Defying Gravity about how she does not need anyone with her and she flies to the ‘Western skys’ and she in then labeled by the people of Oz as the Wicked witch of the west and Glinda who stays behind becomes Glinda the Good.
