In this column, we’re looking back at the 1980s as their own particular age of fantasy movies—a legacy that largely disappeared in the ’90s only to resurface in the 2000s, though in many ways, the fantasy films of the ’80s are far weirder and less polished than what we got in the aughts. In each of these articles, we’ll explore a canonical fantasy movie released between 1980 and 1989 and discuss whatever enduring legacy the film has maintained in the decades since.
For a more in-depth introduction to this series of articles, you can find the first installment here, focusing on 1981’s Dragonslayer. As I mentioned last time, 1985 was a good year for creatures called Gumps—we ran into one slightly sinister, elven Gump in the highly sexual and unnerving Ridley Scott film, Legend. And now we are turning to a film featuring a Gump who is terrifying for entirely different reasons: Return to Oz.
I was never a huge Wizard of Oz person. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a brilliant and important film—nearly inescapable in American culture; it just was never a source of comfort for me. As a result, I didn’t see Return to Oz until I was in my early teens, though I was aware of some of its plot from my familiarity with L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) on which the film is partially based. That book, with its fluid understanding of gender (in it, Ozma, Princess of Oz begins the novel as a boy, Tip, under a witch’s curse), was destabilizing for me and, at the time, frightening. But that novella is pure whimsy compared to the nightmare of the film it inspired. I was just old enough on my first watch to find it baffling and maybe a little cool. I can imagine that, had I been a few years younger it would have either terrified me or become my whole personality (as, full disclosure, it did for one of my closest friends).
As stated above, the film mashes up two Baum sequel novellas, The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz (1907), eschewing Ozma/Tip (save as a MacGuffin) and using both novels’ villains in its plot. It marks the on-screen debut of ’90s cult-hit darling Fairuza Balk (The Craft, The Island of Doctor Moreau) as Dorothy Gale, whose Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, concerned by her ongoing and apparently delusional obsession with Oz, commit her to an asylum where she is scheduled to undergo electroshock therapy. When a storm knocks out the power, she escapes and makes her return to Oz (hence the title). Once there, however, she finds a strange, post-apocalyptic Oz where lovable characters from Baum’s novel/MGM’s classic film have been turned to stone and the kingdom is now ruled by the sinister Nome King and the terrifying Princess Mombi.
Dorothy puts together a quartet of companions—a clear parallel to the original group but far, far more unsettling (Jack Pumpkinhead, standing in for the Scarecrow; Tik-Tok, standing in for the Tin Man; the Gump, standing in for the Cowardly Lion; and Billina, standing in for Toto)—and sets out to restore the Scarecrow to his throne and return the Emerald City to its former glory. Along the way, she must avoid losing her head to Mombi, who wants to take it from her and wear it as her own when she comes of age, and outsmart the Nome King in guessing what ornaments he has transformed her friends into. The film is full of terrifying images: Dorothy and another little girl (who turns out to be Ozma) nearly drowning in a flash flood while frantically trying to escape the asylum; all of Mombi’s discarded heads screaming in unison while her headless body flails around; the whole tortured process of bringing the Gump (a green-furred, wall-mounted moose head chimerically fused to a sofa and some palm frond wings) to life by using an alchemical solution in order to escape Mombi’s clutches…
Return to Oz is a mixed bag. It is far and away Fairuza Balk’s best performance. She brings an earnestness and vulnerability to the role that keeps the entire production grounded. Famously, Dorothy’s starry-eyed wonder in the original film can be at least partly attributed to the fact that Judy Garland was being drugged with a studio-approved barrage of pep pills, diet pills, and sleeping pills. By contrast, Balk has a sharp, remarkable clarity and performs in a way that feels unmitigated by artifice. It’s almost disconcerting to watch how easily she sells the film’s dark fantasy. She has truly never been better (even if, in later films, she’s a lot more fun).
We should also give special attention to Nicol Williamson (Sherlock Holmes in The Seven Percent Solution, and Merlin in Excalibur) who plays the villainous dual roles of the Nome King and Dr. Worley, the head alienist at the sanitorium. He conveys an imperious, detached amusement as the former, gaslighting Dorothy from the comfort of his stony throne. He is also more than a little pleasingly queer-coded (I am coming to realize that, perhaps, every fantasy villain of the 1980s was queer-coded) as he daintily lifts his shale skirt to show Dorothy that he is wearing the ruby slippers. It’s a perfect performance of comfortable, masculine malice—happy to use children in his megalomaniacal schemes while employing a tone of voice that proclaims his every action as normal and correct.
Other performances are less convincing. Sean Barrett’s voicework as Tik-Tok, the mechanical, one-man army of Oz, has the plodding, staid quality of a stale gag used too many times. Denise Bryer’s vocal performance as the talking chicken, Billina, is, well, very chicken-y and her endless stream of fourth-wall breaking gag lines seem to have been added in post-production to try and lighten the oppressive mood.
From a production design standpoint, it has moments of feeling cheap. In particular, the costume for the Scarecrow—with its immobile, painted-on eyes staring out at nothing—and the equally stiff and soulless Cowardly Lion who bumps up against Dorothy in the final scene, seem like they are from a much less cash-flush production. Elsewhere, however, there is a richness to the production design that feels thoroughly enveloping. The head-swapping sorceress, Mombi (played to the seething, campy hilt by Willow’s Jean Marsh, who, alas, passed away between my Willow article and this one) is bedecked in an art nouveau gown covered in jutting spines of metal that make her look like a glam-rock porcupine. When she spends much of the second half of the film whipping a chariot drawn by “wheelers”—quadrupedal monsters with wheels for hands and feet, and otherwise dressed like Droog rejects with just a touch of The Warriors-inspired, post-apocalyptic, gangland fashion—the ultimate effect can only be fêted with a chef’s kiss.
The visual effects for the film feel like they might have been magical in the hands of ILM or the Jim Henson Company (and Brian Henson does lend his voice to Jack Pumpkinhead) but while the effects are not unimpressive, there is something off about all of the movement. The eyes of the Gump open too wide and suggest a sort of madness. Tik-Tok’s violent swings back and forth as he lopes about bring to mind a machine on the verge of explosion. Everything shudders and reels, feeling less alive than it should. It’s far more Brothers Quay than Pixar or Rankin/Bass.
These are not effects that feel like they could have been fixed with more money… they just feel unsettling. Take, for example, the way that the Nome King moves between a stop-motion stone face in a cave wall and Nicol Williamson, on set, covered in faux-stone makeup. It rides the line of the uncanny valley with unrelenting gusto. Perhaps that’s intentional. Everything else about the film has a dispiriting uncanniness; the VFX are, perhaps, no exception.
Throughout, there is a real, inescapable question of who this film is for, and that might make for my deepest misgivings. Some of the film is scary in a way that feels appropriate for children. The performances are nuanced, even when painted with the broad palette of melodrama. Balk’s Dorothy is brave in the face of fear and despair in a way that feels laudable and fitting for a younger audience.
At the same time, there is something off about its central themes… The movie is obsessed with existential horrors. Tik-Tok continually asserts that he is not alive and much the better for it. Both Jack and the Gump have been created as homunculi through magic and are distressed by their current state of existence. Jack longs for a mother since his creator, Ozma, is missing, while the Gump ponders whether or not he is alive since he remembers his previous life before being shot, stuffed, and mounted. It’s all very disconcerting.
The film also has an irresponsible quality in suggesting that Oz is some kind of fever dream. The original MGM film does this as well, but it doesn’t subject Dorothy to the medical gaze. Oz can be a pleasant fantasy in that film; in this one it’s a sickness that needs to be purged. And, even if Dr. Worley is ultimately a bad guy (and explicitly killed, off-screen), one can’t shake off the fact that Auntie Em willingly left Dorothy with him, which leads to the feeling that the adults in the film can never be trusted to keep her safe—not just the venal ones, but the “good” ones too. That feels like such a resoundingly adult read of Baum’s material—so deeply unwhimsical—that I would be loath to show it to any child who loved the original or did not feel extremely secure in their relationship with their own parents. I’m glad the film exists, and I’m equally glad I didn’t see it until I had matured a little.
In terms of the movie’s legacy, beyond its cult following, there are a number of (perhaps dubious) bits of inspiration that feel like they flow from Return to Oz. While, obviously, the character of Jack Pumpkinhead is originally Baum’s creation, the spindly limbed, elegantly garbed figure towering over everyone else in this film is a far cry from the illustrations in the original books and far closer to the design of Tim Burton and Harry Selick’s Jack Skellington, ’90s goth icon and protagonist of their 1995 film, The Nightmare Before Christmas.
There is now a long legacy of horror mixed with childhood nostalgia: Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023), Steamboat Willie: Blood on the Water (2024), and Bambi: The Reckoning (2025) may all be soulless cash grabs predicated on mixing name recognition with recent public domain acquisitions, but they are just the latest in a long trend that includes everything from American McGee’s Alice (2000) to Todd McFarlane action figures, to about half of Hot Topic’s output over the last forty years. The genre is mostly risible, only entertaining in its shock value, but one must imagine that whatever aspirations these conglomerations might have had for lasting art take inspiration from Return to Oz, a movie which never sought to be horror but achieved it anyway.
And one must also look to the current moment when, through the 2024 Wicked film (and its upcoming sequel), Baum-mania is ascendant once again. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Witch of the West, the 1995 Gregory Maguire novel which served as the basis for Stephen Schwartz’s 2003 musical feels like, in addition to Maguire’s stated influences (Dickens, Jean Rhys, and the real life murder of James Bulger), it must have taken some inspiration from Return to Oz in cutting through the lighter, more magical gloss of the MGM film to reengage with the underlying darkness lurking in Baum’s works. (It’s also interesting to note that Maguire was primarily a children’s author before he dove into Wicked and much of the rest of his career became an exercise in writing adult takes on classic children’s tales). And, if Schwartz’s musical is definitively lighter and less overtly political than Maguire’s novel, some of the returning darkness in John Chu’s film also feels like it might be borrowed from Return to Oz; would we have gotten the deadly desert showing up at the edges of the frame in Wicked if Return to Oz hadn’t so effectively brought it to life forty years earlier?
But what do you think? Is Return to Oz a beloved memory from your childhood or the origin of a monstrous pall cast over your young mind? If you are a fan of Baum’s writing, how does it compare to his original works? How great are Jean Marsh’s towering shoulder pads when she plays Dr. Worley’s nurse?! Also be sure to join us next time when we take on the origin of why no one knows what a glaive is, Krull.
Ozma of Oz was and is my favorite of the Oz books, so I have always appreciated this film for its overall fidelity to it, as well as to The Land of Oz. (Losing the General Jinjur plot of book 2 in favor of the Nome King plot from book 3 was probably a smart move… it’s hard to know exactly what points, if any, Baum is making about women’s suffrage and women’s rights with Jinjur and her army; and who knows how well they may or may not have aged if Return to Oz had focused on them?)
I did not see this in the theaters (or have no memory of having done so), but saw it not long thereafter, and have never found it as traumatizing and scary as most in my generation seem to have found it. Your point about the adults not being able to keep Dorothy safe is a valid one. Of course, that’s how the world is, unfortunately, and there is something to be said for children’s tales that acknowledge that truth and help children process it.
Your objection to Jack Pumpkinhead as being radically different from John R. Neill’s book illustrations… I don’t see that. It looks like a pretty faithful translation to the screen to me. Ditto the Scarecrow, whose eyes in the books are explicitly said to be painted on, with one larger than the other, no less (at least in The Wizard of Oz). He is not “supposed to” have a human face like Ray Bolger’s. And Return to Oz‘s Tin Woodman is also very on-point from the book illustrations. I agree that the Cowardly Lion is not well-realized, though.
I think Return to Oz probably suffered and still suffers most from trying to be a dark(er), non-musical sequel to the light(er), musical 1939 film — though Margaret Hamilton’s Witch is still infinitely more disturbing and terrifying than anything in Return to Oz. But, boy, I think it’s a strong and compelling movie, and I’m glad to see people revisiting and reconsidering it. Tnanks for your enjoyable article!
And ooh, ooh, can I go on at length about the feminist implications of The Marvelous Land of Oz, please? This is one of my pet rants!
A couple things to keep in mind: Baum was a staunch supporter of women’s suffrage, in part due to the influence of his mother-in-law, noted radical suffragist Matilda Gage, to whom he as reportedly quite devoted), and made a point of almost always using strong, active female protagonists. And yet, General Jinjur’s army definitely reads like a satire on suffragettes: All these girls are dissatisfied with their menial lives, rise up and take over, fighting with knitting needles, enslave the men, and rule terribly, being more concerned with frivolities like pretty jewels and caramels. But who deposes them? Glinda, and her all-women army, who are disciplined, organized, and fight with real weapons. And they don’t restore a man (or, uh, straw-man) to power, but a young woman.
So what’s going on here? Okay, first, Baum was distinctly writing this book with the intent of adapting it for the stage, after the smash hit that was his musical adaptation of the first book (notably, it’s a lot jokier and “schtickier” than most of his other books.) For instance, the Tip/Ozma reveal was facilitated by the then-common stage convention of having young boys played by women allowed the same actor to play both Tip and Ozma without telegraphing the twist ahead of time. Meanwhile, Jinjur and Glinda’s respective armies were good reasons to have large choruses of showgirls. So on the whole, Baum was most likely primarily trying to tell a fun story with elements that lent themselves to certain stage conventions, and further interpretations might not accurately reflect his intentions as a writer.
HOWEVER.
My personal interpretation is that Baum was not satirizing the suffrage movement, but was satirizing the satires. Anti-feminists, then and now, portray them as not actually wanting equality but complete dominance over men, while being interested in this power for purely shallow, frivolous reasons. But Jinjur’s Army of Revolt, made up of these “straw-feminists,” aren’t put in their place by men, or by anti-feminist women, and they don’t restore a man to power. Instead, Glinda’s army show’s more what real suffragettes (and feminists) were like: still distinctly women, but just as capable and sensible as any man (and more than most men we meet in the series, for that matter). And then of course Ozma is placed on the throne, a girl who has literally been on both sides of the gender divide and seems to be more interested in equality and fairness than in taking or keeping power.
That being said, of course, Baum’s portrayal is not without problems. Everyone is a product of their time, and as I said I think Baum was probably most interested in making the story something that would play well and be funny onstage rather than in making an overt political point. We do still see Jinjur’s army “sent home to their mothers,” and the men all completely inept at housework, and the women glad to taking the domestic sphere back over from them. There can be a real underlying air of condescension when men talk about how strong and tough women are at doing those things that are completely beneath them, and that comes across some here. I’m certain, too, that there are other problematic aspects that, even as a feminist in 2025, my male privilege makes me overlook or dismiss.
Anyway, that’s my interpretation. Thank you for joining me on one of my favorite Oz rants.
Coming back to this-
This post made me think of a couple of fanworks by a writer I follow, which focus respectively on Jinjur and Glinda (the latter also featuring Trot) in ways that seem to me to resonate with parts of your discussion. Let’s see if I can make the link feature work properly this time…
Four Views of General Jinjur
The Solitary Sorceress of Oz
I like your interpretation! Thanks for sharing it here!
Yeah, I didn’t get at all how “the spindly limbed, elegantly garbed figure towering over everyone else in this film is a far cry from the illustrations in the original books.” In The Marvelous Land of Oz, Jack is described as “remarkably tall, even for a full-grown man” (and this was before he even had his head!), and the illustrations show him nearly twice the height of Tip. And is the character in the movie really “elegantly garbed?” Seems not far off from the book’s description of his clothes as “purple trousers, a red shirt and a pink vest which was dotted with white spots.”
Yay, we finally get to Krull!
I haven’t seen Return to Oz more than a couple of times, and not recently, but I liked and respected it for its far greater fidelity to the books than its more famous predecessor had, though I didn’t care for it borrowing the Garland film’s pretense of Oz as a dreamland rather than an unambiguously real place. The creature effects were a respectable effort for their day. Unfortunately, its differences from the more famous movie worked against it at the box office, since a movie faithful to the original books felt wrong to audiences that only knew the movie.
I do recall appreciating that Fairuza Balk performed under her own name. If she’d been around in an earlier generation, she would’ve been pressured to adopt a more conventional-sounding stage name — like, say, how Francis Ethel Gumm performed under the name Judy Garland. I think maybe that was specifically mentioned in one of the Starlog articles I read about the film. As with a lot of movies, I was aware of it mainly through magazine coverage before I finally saw it years later on TV.
I didn’t care for it borrowing the Garland film’s pretense of Oz as a dreamland rather than an unambiguously real place.
Hear, hear! As a kid I used to tell anyone who’d listen that the MGM movie got that wrong, that Aunt Em and Uncle Henry ultimately end up living in the Emerald City with Dorothy.
I am glad that, for all the (wonderful) homages to the 1939 classic that Wicked makes, on stage and on screen (and even more so on screen), it treats Oz as a real place with its own existence apart from Dorothy’s bump on the head :)
I’ve never actually seen this film, but I have some fairly deep memories of it all the same because the actor actually in the TikTok suit was a man by the name of Michael Sundin who, at the time, was also a presenter on a UK children’s show called Blue Peter*. As a result, Blue Peter covered the making of the film and (I think) probably had some of the other cast actually on the show. I’m fairly sure they had the wheelers in/on set at one point, which immediately rendered them Not Actually Scary. The whole process fascinated me but there was never enough of the story to make me want to go and actually WATCH the film…and at this point, I’m almost afraid to!
*Closest equivalent I can think of in the US would be something like GMA, but aimed at (mainly) primary school kids, with less emphasis on current affairs and using vastly more stickyback plastic!
I only know about Blue Peter because it seems to have done a lot of Doctor Who promotion back in the day, so I’ve seen clips and so forth.
Your comment also reminds me that, I think (unless I am making up a false memory), there was a making-of segment about Return to Oz on Lights, Camera, Action!, a making-of series (read “studio-provided publicity material,” generally) hosted by Leonard Nimoy on Nickelodeon back in the 80s.
The Wheelers certainly turned out great in the film, imo! Very effective!
As a young kid in the early 80’s I loved the Oz books – devoured all of the ones I could find.
I LOVED Return to Oz when it came out. 10 Year old me loved that it was closer to the source material than the original Wizard of Oz movie, I attribute my love of this movie, to my love of Fairuza Balk in the Craft (though, really the Craft stands enough on it’s own 0 lol)
I was about 13 when I saw the film, either in the theatres or as a VHS release. I”m a total wuss with horror movies, but I remember liking the movie. FWIW, I find the original Baum books whimsical with creepy bits as well. Early in the movie it goes from cool trees that have filled lunch boxes as fruit, to the frightening Wheelers, which is much like the books’ way of mixing scary and whimsical.
Baum’s Oz is a far richer world than the world of the 1939 movie (which, don’t get me wrong, I have adored my whole life). It’s also a real place (in-universe!) — Aunt Em and Uncle Henry go there to live with Dorothy in book six! :)
I watched this movie really young – maybe 4 or 5 on VHS and I was obsessed with it. The wheelers and mombi scared me the most but it wasn’t so scary that I couldn’t sleep at night (Edward scissorhands though was somehow always in my nightmares). Hesitant to show it to my 6 year old twins who love wicked and the wizard of oz, but we will see. Agree that Marsh and Balk were so great in this!
Six years old may, in fact, be too young for this, so I think you’re wise to wait. It’ll still be there when they’re older! Certainly glad to hear you’re raising the next generation of Ozophiles!
I remember that Harlan Ellison gave “Return to Oz” a rave review in his column in F&SF when it first came out. When I saw the film on its original run, at a Saturday matinee in a suburban multiplex, there were exactly five other people in the audience. My impression was, it was a labor of love by longtime Oz fans, for other longtime Oz fans, but which left the vast majority of the audience, for whom “Oz” was no more and no less than the MGM film, totally bemused, confused, and left cold.
That’s kind of like how I feel when a movie or show gets the science right and people insist it’s wrong because it’s not the nonsense they’re used to seeing in movies/TV.
In the department of things that could have gone disastrously wrong but didn’t, Del Rey (which was publishing mass market editions of the Oz books at the time – not just Baum but much of Thompson’s authorized follow-up material as well) brought out a novelization of Return to Oz by none other than Joan D. Vinge.
Like many others here, I came to the Baum canon very early – I had Reilly & Lee hardcover editions of the full Baum canon by the time I finished grade school – and I was very, very skeptical when I saw the Vinge book at my then-local bookshop. But to my surprise, she pulled off the adaptation unusually well – it was to my mind both a good translation of the film and a well-executed homage to the original source material. Definitely recommended if you can find a copy on the used market.
Greetings – long reader of this column new poster. Found the legend article especially interesting (may go back and comment on it) I missed a LOT of the subtlety in that movie evidently …
I do not know when I saw the bits and pieces of return to Oz that I remember or if I saw the whole movie. I remember the much greyer dress on Dorthy, TickTock, and a general darker tone and thinking wait this isn’t Oz. I didn’t remember the flood and an asylum. I also doubt I saw this when it came out as I was seven … I saw Dark Crystal (thankfully not at 82 when I was 4) and I have vid memories of being scared by that. I also think I saw Gremlins maybe in theatres and that didn’t scare me so…*shrug*
The fact the books, I assume even Wizard of Oz, are much darker than the movies is fascinating! People taking dark fantasy and making happy movies out it is always interesting. I remember when I first read the original German fairy tales in high school in German class and thought I couldn’t possibly be translating this correctly (a reaction my teacher never got tired of evidently). Are the books worth reading to someone who loves epic fantasy of Jordan and such – but found the first movie kind of silly?
So, the wicked book is more politically pointed than the play? Interesting … maybe it is because I saw it within the past few years, but I thought the play was pretty politically pointed. Putting the talking animals in cages so they wouldn’t learn to talk and having the ones talking now losing their ability to talk – pretty on the nose in a very important way. I may have to check the book out.
Also the studio was drugging up Judy Garland during filming of Wizard of Oz..more info please. I always thought Judy Garland, like Shirley Temple (and seemingly the Fanning’s today) was one of the few Hollywood child actors not to have been destroyed.
As Christopher says, Baum’s Oz books are not dark fantasy in the modern sense; they are early 20th century fairy tales, and there are a few elements that haven’t aged well (mostly involving racial stereotyping).
OTOH, Maguire’s Wicked (the novel as opposed to the stage musical and the film(s)), is absolutely dark fantasy, which I regard as an original novel with Ozian serial numbers grafted onto it. I am an outlier in this viewpoint, but I literally threw the book very carefully across my living room when I finished it purely so I could say that I’d done so, and then went and sold it back to Powell’s.
Hear, hear! I love Wicked the musical, but had a very hard time finishing the novel it was based on. I found some of the historical and political backstory he gave Oz interesting, but found the book’s (in my opinion) preoccupation with purient subject matter offputting.
I don’t know if I’d say the Oz books are dark, particularly, but they’re definitely extremely different from the 1939 movie. But I haven’t read them since my teens, probably.
Thanks all for the replies! So, this movie then is a little darker than the original Oz books? More along the lines of Neverending Story maybe – which is dark, but I wouldn’t call it a horror movie. I may have to go back and read these then.
Will definitely have to go back and read Wicked. Any book that creates the amount of abject love and abject disgust as it evidently has – will at least be interesting!
You do the books a disservice by calling them novellas instead of children’s books! There is a difference!
“Novella” is only a word describing length. If some quick Googling can be trusted, The Wonderul Wizard of Oz clocks in at around 40,000 words, which seems to be the upper word limit of a novella. I can’t speak for the author of the article, but I’d be surprised if any intent to “do a disservice” was there. :)
Yup. A short story is up to 7500, a novelette is 7500-17,500, a novella is 17,500 to 40,000, and everything above is a novel. There are children’s books in all those length ranges.
Return to Oz was my favorite film as an Oz-obsessed child, much the way Ozma was my favorite book! I actually found it more true to the spirit of the novels than the MGM film (which went from being a young child obsession to a preteen’s great disappointment as I decided Garland’s Dorothy was all wrong) and my interpretation wasn’t that of a fever dream – it was that of the Nome King and Ozma directly interfering in Dorothy’s world.
Admittedly, I was seven at the most when coming to this conclusion, but it does seem to stand up. The perspective in this post is also a totally valid and understandable one!
I saw Return to Oz in the theater at the age of 7. My parents, aunt, and uncle, who wanted to keep us kids occupied while they saw a more grown-up movie at the same multiplex, made the mistake of sending me and my younger sister into the theater accompanied only by our ten-year-old cousin—and I’m pretty sure not a single one of the three of us got even a minute of sleep that night. For seven-year-old me, it was straight up nightmare fuel and specific scenes and images from it were emblazoned in my mind for years afterward (people who haven’t seen it always think I’m lying when I tell them that the entire plot kicks off with Dorothy being sent off for electroshock therapy in a creepy asylum with “damaged” patients screaming from the cellar, and that’s not even getting into Mombi’s hall of heads. Although I’m pretty sure my maximalist decor style and lifelong love of knickknacks were at least somewhat influenced by the Nome King’s halls of treasure.)
But those same scary images that stuck with me so strongly as a kid are also what make me enjoy the film so much as a less sensitive adult. There’s a genuine level of artistry to the nightmare fuel that makes the movie, for all its shortcomings, remain visually and thematically interesting to an adult viewer. And Fairuza Balk really was wonderful in the role of Dorothy.
I also read all the Oz books as a kid and in retrospect I do appreciate the movie’s use of plot elements from the subsequent books in the series and also recognize that there were many, many creepy elements in the Oz books (including the first one! Remember those illustrations of the Hammerheads?) that the 1939 film omitted. I think that was ultimately to the advantage of the 1939 film and it’s obviously a classic but I appreciate the fact that Return to Oz tried to bring to life a few of the darker elements of Baum’s vision.
The Hammerheads are intensely creepy, for sure! I was delighted to see them used in the “Wizomania!” sequence of Wicked (on stage, anyway – I forget at the moment if they also figure in the much-revised version of that sequence in the film).
I adore this movie so much. And yes, quite possibly fundamental in the formation of my ElderGoth self. I also read through all the Oz books at a very young age and they are even more messed up than this adaptation.
I saw this in the theater and it definitely haunted me for a long time.
I absolutely adored Return to Oz and never understood why other people, both children and adults, found it too scary – especially since many of those people were fans of horror books and movies! Maybe it’s because they don’t think scary stuff belongs in children’s movies? I dunno. I always found it to be a comfort watch, in a way that the Wizard of Oz film never was.
As for the dream framing of Oz, I think it was partly because the MGM film did it, but also it was very much a thing of the era. Whenever a kid got isekai’d in a marvellous fantasy world, the story had to be quick to reassure the children (or really the parents) that the fantasy world was not real! Or if it was, they just *had* to go back to reality at the end! ‘Cause if the fantasy world was real, then you’d have to start wondering why everyone didn’t just move there permanently given the option (…like Dorothy and his aunt and uncle do in the books, ironically).
Children need scary stories. Everyday life is scary for children, since there’s so much about it that they don’t understand, and since everything is an unprecedented new experience, so the stakes feel life-and-death. Fear is not something you can insulate children from; it’s an inevitable part of their lives. Scary stories, haunted houses, etc. help children learn to cope with fear in a safe context.
I agree, but given the amount of people who can watch IT without batting an eye but were utterly terrified by this movie, there is probably something at play. In a similar vein, I know many people who couldn’t get into A series of unfortunate events because “the kids never win”. Well, yeah, that’s the point.
Huh? The kids in ASoUE win all the time, through their knowledge, inventiveness, and talent. They face constant setbacks and betrayals, but they never give up and achieve many individual victories, even if the fruits of their success are then snatched away again through factors beyond their control.
To paraphrase a lesson from the anime Freiren, which I’ve been watching: As long as you keep standing up again, you haven’t lost the fight. The winner is the one still standing at the end.
I guess we’re giving different definitions to the word, because to me the Baudelaires survive every book but don’t exactly end up winning, even in the finale. Heck, they literally and metaphorically end up in the Great Unknown.
And to me that’s the core of the series, that constant “keep on going and give it your all” despite all the adversities and the unfairness and the fact that the adults seem useless and oblivious despite their well-meaningless, which, as you said above, is very much the experience of a child. The Baudelaires would have all reason to give up, but they don’t.
However, there’s a lot of people for whom that constant kicking in the kidneys, that rag pull where they lose everything they just gained, doesn’t look uplifting at all. Many of them couldn’t get to the end because they found it too depressing.
[also: her aunt and uncle in my initial post, obviously; unfortunately I can’t edit it now]
Does anyone ever really “win” at life, in the long run? There are always gains and losses. To me, what defines the Baudelaires is their problem-solving skill. They’re written to show children the value of education, creativity, and hard work in solving problems. So I define it as a win when they succeed in solving a problem, deducing the answer to a mystery, exposing a secret, escaping a deathtrap.
And they win by never giving up, by retaining their hope and confidence and determination to keep going. Their life sucks, but it’s an optimistic series because that doesn’t defeat them, but challenges them to bring out the best in themselves. Their victory is defined by who they choose to be, not by external circumstances.
I feel like we’re walking in circles. It seems to me that you’re replying as if *I* didn’t like ASOUE and RtO for their darker elements, while I’m saying that I loved them but other people I know (who are not me) didn’t like them because of that, despite that they (not me) watch/read much darker materials on the regular.
Huh? I was talking about my own reasons for defining it as a victory. I wasn’t expressing an opinion about anyone else.
Hear, hear!
By the time Return came out, I was in high school and had read all of the original material. So, it’s been 40 years or more since I read some of the books.
I’ve watched “Return” more than once, but still, it’s been some time, so I’m currently blank on a lot of what’s in it.
However…
Much of the protested content is book-accurate, or has been adapted to be faithful to the sensibilities of the era in which the stories were written. Which, I believe, is part of the problem for many viewers, as what was acceptable for children 100 years ago doesn’t fly with today’s attitudes.
I was more than a little surprised at the asylum stuff. Nothing like that is any of the books. However, having Dorothy go to Oz due to another storm would feel like plagiarizing the first movie (for those with no other reference). Also, the asylum thing is period-accurate. It wasn’t unheard of to attribute unacceptable, chronic behavior as a medical problem. What makes the asylum scenes particularly frightening is the fact that treatment methods of mental illness in the days in which this movie takes place were often brutal.
It didn’t help that they made the electroshock machine controls form a face.
Baum liked the hidden or mistaken gender thing, because it hasn’t been mentioned in any of the comments that I remember, but to the best of my recollection, Dorothy’s chicken for much of the book was “Bill,” and was only renamed “Billina” after she laid an egg.
A question I have about wheelers: how do they get dressed? They’re all decked out in fancy clothes, even in Neill’s illustrations, but with wheels for hands and feet, putting on clothes would be more than problematic. As well, the sleeves are smaller than the wheels on the end, so…
Suspension of disbelief. Baum’s books are loaded with the necessity for it.
Also, you can’t think too deeply into the “ick” factor in a lot of them. On top of being a place where animals can talk, nobody can die there, either. The story of Nick Chopper (the Tin Woodman) is pretty gruesome, with quite an “ick’ factor. Read the story. You’ll understand what I mean.
Two words: Meat Glue
There’s a scene in this movie that chokes me up every time. I’m starting to get that way just thinking about it. Dorothy gasps and runs to a jumble stones and picks one up. It’s yellowish and roughly rectangular. Billina says, “What’s wrong? It’s just a yellow brick.” Dorothy cries out in distress, ” Billina, you don’t understand. This is the yellow brick road!”
For any Oz fan that’s a pretty chilling statement, seeing the state it’s in.
Anyhow, Princess Mombi bugged me, as, in the book, Mombi was a witch, not the girl with all the detachable heads. That was a Princess Langwidere. The scene with her was, indeed frightening, but it’s right there in the book.
For the author of the article: Jack Pumpkinhead was spot-on. Tik-Tok looked like Neill’s drawings. The gump (the head of the flying contraption) looked a little too much like a terrestrial animal, but other than that, it worked for me.
Anyhow, I could go on, but will refrain.
Is the movie scary? Yes, because they kept the spirit of the books, which were written in an era where children’s literature was a lot different. But a horror movie?
There’s a soapbox I could climb on and rant about people attempting to apply modern sensibilities to classic children’s literature, but again, I will refrain.