Wheelers and chickens and nomes, oh my! Welcome back to the Movie Rewatch of Great Nostalgia! Today’s Nostalgia post concerns 1985’s Return to Oz, the semi-sequel to the 1939 classic film Wizard of Oz, and based on the books by L. Frank Baum. You’ve probably heard of at least one of the things in this paragraph.
Please note that as with all films covered on the Nostalgia Rewatch, this post will be rife with spoilers, so take whatever precautions appropriate. Unlike the first film I covered, though, Return to Oz is pretty easily available, so it should be no problem to watch the film so you can follow along.
Got all that? Good! So without further ado, click on to see what I thought after all these years!
So, since this is going to come up a lot in the MRGN (which is not the greatest acronym, is it. Oh well), I might as well explain now to all you infant whippersnappers how a girl and her sisters went about being child movie geeks in the 80s-to-early-90s, before all this newfangled Internet stuff started happening.
…Okay, yes, technically Internet or proto-Internet stuff had been happening since the 70s, but it wasn’t until the mid-90s that it started having any impact on my life personally, so whatever with your historical accuracy blithering. It certainly had no importance whatsoever in terms of how child-me acquired movies or television, I’ll tell you that.
Back then, young grasshopper, there was really just one giant advance in media technology that was of importance, and that, of course, was when video cassette recorders became widely available (and, more importantly, affordable) for use in the home. This is as opposed to Laserdisc players (also known as DiscoVision, because the 70s), which a friend of ours owned and which we envied mightily, but we discovered our VCR was even better, because not only could it play movies, it could—gasp—record them as well. Right off the TV! OMG WHAT IS THIS SORCERY
I don’t remember exactly when our house got its first VCR, and neither does my mother or sisters, but it was probably right around the same time we first got cable television as well. So, sometime between 1980 and 1985 at the absolute outside, but probably more like 1982 or 1983. God, I feel old just typing those dates. This coincides (roughly) with the emergence of premium cable channels like HBO and, much more importantly from our point of view, The Disney Channel. And even though it wasn’t until years later that my mother finally caved to the pressure to pony up for them, the premium channels served our nefarious youthful geekdom purposes anyway, by dint of providing this wonderful thing called free previews.
The Disney Channel especially did these all the time: every couple of months the channel would become unscrambled for a few days (ha, scrambled TV, what memories) and anyone with basic cable could watch the content. This was intended to tempt people into paying for the premium service, of course, but my mother regarded it instead as a golden chance to tape as much stuff as she could off of it, so we could watch it all anytime we wanted and not have to pay for it.
This led to some interesting consequences. First, that 95% of the movies my sisters and I watched as children had a ticker running along the bottom advising us to Call This 1-800 Number To Order Now!, and also that we frequently did not have the whole movie, as my mother would either have missed the beginning, or the tape would run out before it got to the end. Sister Liz also reminds me that sometimes we would try to stop and start the recording in order to skip the commercials (yes, The Disney Channel was a pay-for-subscription premium channel which also had (Disney) commercials, because Disney), and consumer-grade VCRs not exactly being precision instruments, especially not in the 80s, this meant we often lost bits and pieces of the middle of the movies as well.
It was the like the Wild West of movie-watching, y’all. Yee haw!
One such casualty of completeness was 1985’s Return to Oz, the focus of today’s Nostalgia post and which I will now finally talk about.
For years I didn’t know how this movie ended, or at least I thought I didn’t. I think it wasn’t until Blockbuster video stores became a widespread thing and I rented the movie on professionally produced VHS that I realized we had literally only missed about 15 seconds of the end. Basically, what I had missed was: Dorothy runs out of the door with Toto to play in the yard. The End, credits roll. I was so mad. Heh.
Anyway. When I told my sisters which movie we were doing next, the following conversation happened:
LIZ: Why are we doing this movie?
ME: …Uh, because we loved this movie? We watched it like 500 times.
LIZ: Yeah, but, no one else liked this movie.
ME: Pfft. That’s just the Hook problem.
LIZ: …What.
ME: Return to Oz is like Hook. They were both sort-of sequels to much-beloved adaptations of turn-of-the-century works which alienated modern audiences because no one understood that the differences were because they actually adhered much more faithfully to the source material than the first films did.
ME: Everyone just got all huffy because the Tin Man and Scarecrow looked like their original illustrations instead of Jack Haley and Ray Bolger.
KATE: I have to say, I didn’t like the way Tin Man and Scarecrow looked either. It was only okay because they were barely in the movie anyway.
ME: …Okay, I didn’t really like them either. But it was FAITHFUL.
KATE: You don’t know that. You haven’t even read any of the Oz books.
ME: I have s—
KATE: Reading the Christmas ornament Mom gave you that year doesn’t count.
ME: Well—well, the Internet said it was, so it must be true!
LIZ & KATE: Uh-huh.
Sisters, man. No respect.
I am aware, by the way, that not having read the Oz books is a travesty, and one I totally intend to correct in my copious spare time. And upon doing some actual research, I learned that Return to Oz was in fact a mash-up of two different Oz books, The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz, one of which apparently didn’t feature Dorothy at all. So whether this movie was more faithful to the source material than the 1939 Judy Garland film is probably a matter of opinion, and one which I should probably leave to people who have actually read said source material. If you would like to school me on this subject in the comments I would most appreciate it!
Either way, though, Liz is correct in that Return to Oz did not do all that well at the box office. But as kids, naturally, we neither knew nor cared about what anyone else thought; we adored it with unabashed enthusiasm regardless.
And do we still adore it, you are clearly dying to know?
And, well. I think the answer is: Yes. But also, No.
“Yes”, in that there are many many individual elements of Return to Oz that I loved as a child and still find fascinating and/or hilarious now. The running gag of having multiple characters utter the word “CHICKEN” in the same dire tones of horror one might apply to, say, “Ebola Cockroach”, for instance, has been an in-joke among the three of us for decades:
C’mon, that is comedy gold.
Also the character of Tik Tok, who is basically Clockwork Teddy Roosevelt, and was steampunk way before any of the rest of you posers thought of it:
Sister Kate in particular loves Tik Tok and will hear no criticism of him. Naturally, this declaration led to relentless commentary from Liz and me pointing out all the ways in which he is a ridiculous character just to rile her up, as is our sacred duty.
LIZ: I guess the Army of Oz doesn’t do stealth commando raids. THONK THONK THONK THONK—
KATE: His walk is adorable, go away.
ME: But how can he cry, if he—
KATE: IT IS OIL SHUT YOUR FACE
Heh.
On a more artistic level, I was enthralled both then and now by the production design:
(Many years later, my mother owned an antique shop on Magazine Street, and Kate comments that she would wander about and pick out all the green things in it, and grin to herself, remembering Dorothy in the ornament room.)
I loved the visuals, but I was even more enamored of the sound. The director, Walter Murch, is in fact a celebrated editor and sound designer with three Academy Awards under his belt (Return to Oz is his only directing credit), and he obviously had a marvelous time playing with the sound on his own film. The entire aesthetic of the film’s sound design revolves around echoes, something I don’t think I’ve ever really seen (or noticed, anyway) anywhere else.
It’s really marvelous, in my opinion. If you watch the movie again, pay attention to the echoes, and how Murch uses them throughout the film to create very different atmospheres: the vast, serene emptiness of 1890s Kansas, the disquieting desolation of a ruined Emerald City, or the deep, deep creepiness of the shadiest mental institute this side of the rainbow:
(Sorry about the quality, this was the only clip of the scene I could find.)
And oh yeah—holy crap some parts of this movie are hair-raising, even now. Even more so now, in fact, as I am much more aware as an adult that shit like that actually really happened in mental hospitals in that time period (not to mention much more recently than that). Yeesh.
Liz, however, believes the hospital scene doesn’t hold a candle to the creepiness of Princess Mombi and her hall of heads:
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek
We did not actually remember until we started watching, by the way, that doing Return to Oz immediately after Willow meant we were doubling down on Jean Marsh evil queen awesomeness:
When we realized Mombi aka Nurse Ratched Wilson was Jean Marsh, all three of us laughed our heads off. Er, no pun intended.
(Okay, I totally intended it, sue me.)
And as in the 1939 film (and, I presume, the original books), another great thing was how the characters and objects in Oz reflected people and things Dorothy encountered in the real world. Everyone loves a parallel, y’all. There was the very pointy Mombi/Wilson combo:
The sonorous and really pretty effectively scary Dr. Worley aka the Nome King:
Dorothy’s jack o’ lantern gift becomes the should-be-scary-but-is-strangely-endearing-instead Jack Pumpkinhead:
And my favorite, Tik Tok aka the Clockwork Brain Zapper Machine:
I was so proud of myself for making the connection between those two when I was a kid, y’all. Maybe it was silly, but I felt terribly clever about it.
We did think it was weird, this time around, that pretty much every other new Oz character had a real world representation… except, apparently, the Gump.
I even went back and checked to see if there was a moose head or something mounted on the wall in the hospital scene, but there was not. There was a deer head in one shot, but Liz opines that that is really weak, if that was meant to be the reference. It really should have been a moose head if they wanted anyone to make the connection. Even the divan Dorothy sits on in the hospital scene isn’t one of the divans used to make the flying Gump thing (yes, I actually checked), and I just don’t get why they wouldn’t have gone ahead and made that happen when it’s such an easy fix. So, kinda dropped the ball there.
But then, last but most definitely not least, there were the semi-straitjacketed mental hospital orderlies (seen in the earlier clip), whose creepy squeaky gurneys became what is by far the most awesomely freaky part of the entire movie, in my opinion: the Wheelers.
If anyone remembers anything about this film, it’s these guys and this scene, and rightly so. It was memorable, to say the least.
Fun fact: the main Wheeler character was played by Pons Maar, a voice actor and puppeteer who officially has the best crazed laugh I’ve ever heard (sorry, Mark Hamill), and who I did not know until I looked him up also voiced the Noid in those 80s Domino’s Pizza commercials. Extra nostalgia toppings!
I am really, in retrospect, sort of surprised we weren’t more scared by this film as kids, all things considered. But what children fear, I should remember, is frequently not at all what adults fear, nor is it what adults think kids should fear. Kids are contrary that way. This is perhaps why we were not bothered as kids by Dorothy’s general lack of terror at all the bizarre and (let’s face it) highly disturbing crap that happens to her in this movie, but as adults we found her equanimity very strange indeed.
We discussed, afterward, the possibility that Dorothy’s fearlessness was perhaps a deliberate choice, to emphasize the ambiguity of whether Oz is real or something she dreamed (aided by the parallel characters noted above). I suppose that would explain it, but it bothered me that, if it was all a dream, it would indicate that Dorothy is actually seriously mentally ill. Ozma’s presence (or, maybe, “presence”) in the real world alone would prove that:
But of course, that’s not the kind of thing you think about as a kid. Or at least I didn’t.
Two more things before we move on to the “No” portion:
Dorothy Gale was Fairuza Balk’s debut role, and no matter what odd turns her career has taken over the years, I will always love the shit out of her. It is no accident that she stars in at least two more films I would love to cover on the MRGN. I’m just saying.
Second thing: I cannot let a review of Return to Oz pass by without mentioning its score, composed by David Shire. He’s not really a well-known name in the film composer racket, though he had a perfectly respectable career, and I don’t really know if most film score aficionados would think this score is particularly worthy of note, but here’s the thing. Back in the day, I had a Walkman and a small set of cassette tapes that were film scores from a select few movies, and I would listen to these scores endlessly, because I loved them to tiny itty teensy bits, and Return to Oz’s soundtrack was one of them.
Today I have the score on my iTunes, and I still go back every once in a while and listen to it, especially the opening theme and the end credits. Shire’s lovely, strings-heavy score added an air of melancholic majesty to the film that may not have even been entirely deserved, but I care not, for I love it. If you’ve never listened to it, I say it’s well worth your time if you’re a film music buff. Or even if you’re not.
So there’s all that. And now you’re saying, jeez, Leigh, that’s a whole lot of shit you love a whole lot about this film you just listed here. So where does the “No” come in?
But that’s the thing: I love all these disparate elements of it, on an individual basis, but what we discovered upon rewatching Return to Oz is that while these individual aspects are generally awesome on their own, they rather fail to gel together as a whole.
There are just too many plot holes and inconsistencies in the film, ranging from the silly and inconsequential (how does a headless body snore?) to the minor-but-annoying (how does Jack know why his mom built him if he can’t remember anything before he was brought to life, as he later asserts?) to the major: WHY do chicken eggs poison nomes? What’s the logic there?
How did Bellina get onto Dorothy’s crate that washed her to Oz when she was miles away at the farm? If Dorothy’s wish at the end (“I wish I could be in both places at the same time”) frees Ozma, does that mean that she and Ozma are somehow the same person? How does that make any sense?
I think these are particularly adult flaws to find, because while clearly none of this bothered us in the slightest when we were kids, it annoyed me enough now that I found my attention beginning to wander in between my favorite parts.
So, yes, I love this movie. But without the nostalgia factor (i.e., if I watched it today without having seen it before), I have a feeling my critique of it would have been rather harsher than otherwise.
So! On the Nostalgia Love To Reality Love 1 to 10 Scale I have just now invented and shall apply from now on, Return to Oz’s score is:
Nostalgia: 10
Reality: 7
(Willow’s score ratio, if you’re curious, would have been 9/8. Start your fantasy… er, fantasy leagues now!)
And I’m spent! What are your thoughts, O My Peeps? Tell ‘em to me! And then come back on June 7th, where the intrepid Butler sisters will be covering a suddenly STRANGELY RELEVANT 80s film: an obscure little flick that no one’s ever heard of called Ghostbusters. Yeeeeeep. Until then, I have gone bye-bye. Cheers!
Nope. That was a complete invention of the 1939 film. The books don’t really discuss much about Dorothy’s life in the United States at all, beyond telling us that she lives on a Kansas farm with her aunt and uncle, which they later are at risk of losing because they can’t pay the mortgage, presumably because between those periods Dorothy and Uncle Henry trot off to Australia and California.
The eggs, though, are straight from the books. This is the Nome’s King’s explanation:
“You don’t understand,” retorted the little monarch, nervously. “Eggs
belong only to the outside world–to the world on the earth’s surface,
where you came from. Here, in my underground kingdom, they are rank
poison, as I said, and we Nomes can’t bear them around.”
Loved the review. Thanks!
The element of things in Oz reflecting elements/people in the real world (and thus implicitly being a dream) is an invention of the Judy Garland movie that is definitely not in the original books. It’s pretty much the one main element of Return to Oz that’s derived more from the movie than from Baum’s works. Baum intended Oz to be an entirely real place within the world of the books.
I never saw this movie as a young’un, because the mere description of the insane asylum sequence in a newspaper review was enough to give me nightmares. I can’t recall, now, what bothered me so much. Some combination of electroshock therapy in itself being so obviously inhumane (I gather the real thing is not like that, at least not anymore) and being upset with Dorothy’s family responding to her secondary world experience by locking her up in an asylum, perhaps.
I did read the books, every last one of the ones Baum himself wrote, and when I did get around to seeing the movie (in college) I thought it was a pretty darn good adaptation of the two books they based it on. But it’s not imprinted on my memory the way Willow is.
Y’know who else loved Return to Oz? Harlan Ellison — In his film columns, collected in Ellison’s Watching, he praised it to high heaven and urged everyone to run out and see it. (Unlike, apparently, most of the major critics of the day.)
Y’know who apparently didn’t love Return to Oz? Disney — Again, per Ellison columns, it sounds like they lost faith and gave it the John Carter treatment — no real publicity push (for 1980s values of publicity, of course) to counteract less-than-stellar reviews and try to get butts into seats.
I didn’t see it when it came out, but caught it on video years later and would generally agree with your assessment — it had lots of great bits that didn’t always quite cohere together. As far as the book/film relation, the (frankly terrifying) asylum is entirely a creation of the film. As you said, the second book (Land of Oz) doesn’t have Dorothy in it at all; in the third book (Ozma of Oz), Dorothy & Billina are on a ship and swept away by rough seas to wind up back in Oz.
I really need to watch this again — it’s available on Blu-ray, but I think only as part of the Disney whatever-it-is-club that requires you to order straight from their website.
Wow, your descriptions of your childhood and of your recording practices so mirrors my own it makes me wonder if we watched this movie from the same cassette, lol.
I remember as a kid hating the scene where she had to steal from the head case. It always freaked me out.
Just the pure craziness of this movie made it great.
I also loved this movie as a child of the 80’s, but found it hard to get through when I rewatched it last week. It doesn’t seem to really move until they get to the Nome King’s mountain.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen all of this. What I did see was definitely on The Disney Channel. All I remember is seeing a woman take off her head, and that freaked me out so badly that I didn’t want to watch anymore.
I’ve added it back into my Netflix queue to give it a proper watch one of these years (my Netflix queue has about 370 titles in it, and some have been in there for probably a decade.)
I remember that the movie was absolutely panned by Gene Siskel in Chicago, mainly because of the electroshock — he had a bug up his butt about danger to children, though I remember a rant he did about Labyrinth regarding Toby being tossed around by the Goblin King. Between the ‘torture’ and the lack of songs, critics had a tough time with it.
But it was a film we loved and our kids loved. Yes, there’s a lot of logic absent, but that’s part of the charm of the Oz books too: it just is. And it’s just plain gorgeous.
Another great set of adaptations of Oz are the Marvel Comics versions done by Skottie Young.
This movie terrified me as a child. Back and forth, up and down, deep to the core. I think I watched it when I was around six or seven, and I don’t remember much about the ending, but I remember a whole lot about the beginning, all of which seemed calculated to play on every single type of fear I’d ever had.
Except snakes. I think if the film had also contained Menacing Venomous Snakes there would have been a sobbing mess in front of the TV, instead of just very unsettling memories. It was weirdly validating, decades later, to come across people talking about this movie and going “…that was full of some pretty messed-up shit for a kiddy movie, wasn’t it?”
Yes. Yes it was.
Oh, and since I’d read the first book (but none of the sequels) and never seen the first movie when I watched this one, the whole mirroring between reality/Oz was unexpected AND terrifying. When I went back and saw the first movie later, as a child, I found that unsettling because of the connections to this one. The first entry into my deep suspicion of movie adaptations of books, which, as far as I could tell, were designed to make book stories scarier and more banal all at once.
Man.
I still have a lot more feelings about this movie than I realized.
I remember watching this movie at a very young age (probably 4, after seeing the MGM one). I, at the time, believed that it was meant to be the sequel to the 1939.While the scariest part in the 1939 film was the Wicked Witch of the West cackling in the magic ball, this movie had plenty of things in it that should have sent me to a therapist (hopefully one better than Dorothy’s).
The wheelers still send a shiver down my spine, even when I recently re-read Ozma of Oz for my literary character website, and even when I read Shanower/Young’s adaptation of the same. Further, the part about Langwidere (“Mombi” in the film, though Mombi was really an evil with in Marvelous Land) was sort of strange (though around the same time I was exposed to Rankin/Bass’s Last Unicorn, Labyrinth, and Dark Crystal with even less background) with the head swapping. Further, the Nome King melting probably affected me more than the similar face-melting in Raiders of the Lost Ark. My young mind trying to make sense of the two Oz films headcanoned Ozma as Glinda, and made Jack her son (fathered, of course, by the Scarecrow).
One thing that still makes me laugh looking back at Return was the Powder of Life being rendered to an aerosol can. How 80’s.
Being raised on Oz as much as I was on Star Wars and Indiana Jones (I can still win Star Wars trivia competitions, not having seen any Star Wars movie aside from TFA for over a decade), I actually never read the books until high school. It was then that I was amazed that not only are the SLIPPERS SILVER, Glinda and the Good Witch of the North are DIFFERENT WITCHES, Return to Oz was actually based on TWO BOOKS, and the LION WAS A REAL FREAKING LION. I’ve since read every Baum Oz book multiple times.
In the end, I’d say I’m pretty well adjusted, but still take issue with ruby slippers. And wheelers.
I only remember most of the film vaguely (we did also have the picture book of the film as well) but I did buy it last year as a present for my cousin along with some other 80’s fantasy films inspired by an article on Tor about ranking the ten best.
I split them into two categories. Films entirely in a fantasy world and films featuring the real/modern world (origin of protagonists or actually set in) and gave her one set for her birthday and the other for Xmas. DVDs are so cheap to get now, only a few £s for most. They were –
Time Bandits, Flight of Dragons, Highlander, Return to Oz, Neverending Story, Labyrinth, Big Trouble in Little China, Princess Bride.
Dark Crystal, Red Sonja, Conan the Barbarian, Willow, Beastmaster, Ladyhawk, Excalibur, Dragonslayer. (btw Currently in UK – 36 copies of willow available from Amazon for between £3 and £10, so easy to get over here.)
I would have included Legend too but she doesn’t have a bluray player and the tangerine dream version is not on DVD over here.
How many of these films will be featured in this article in the future I wonder?
As for the fantasy world reflecting the real world, my understanding is that it is inherited from theater productions of things like Peter Pan wherein the show begins in the real world before jumping to a secondary world, why waste an actor by having them appear as the father for only one scene at the start when you can have him play Captain Hook as well for the rest. It gives the show more layers to enjoy and saves on paying more actors, win win.
@Mari
(You of all people probably already know this, but…) Henry and Em had to get a mortgage after the house was blown away by a tornado in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The rebuilding of the farm house led to additional stress on Henry’s health, for which his doctor prescribed a vacation, which he takes to visit family in Australia (Ozma of Oz). Returning from Australia, they visit Em’s family in California (Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz), before returning to Kansas (The Road to Oz). Over these events, Henry’s health takes further decline, being as he thinks (a) his niece got swept from the boat and drowned while traveling to Australia, (b) his niece died in an earthquake in California, and (c) his niece disappears mysteriously shortly after a shaggy vagrant arrives in town. The trips and the declining health really started to limit their funds, especially as Henry couldn’t farm as well as he used to.
It’s no wonder they had to foreclose in The Emerald City of Oz.
Never seen this movie nor do I particularly care to…but I totally remember the VHS thing. I actually had a system down for recording. I would pause the recording after a few seconds of commercial and the un-pause it at the end of what I thought was the last commercials (many of my old recordings have little blips of commercial). For some reason, the recording would go back a couple of seconds from where it paused and it took a couple of seconds to start recording again. What a pain!
Yes! I love this movie. Always have, always will – in part because Ozma of Oz is my favorite Oz book. While this isn’t strictly “faithful” in terms of being an original story that mashes up two of Baum’s books (and will insist on not acknowledging the reality of Oz’s independent existence – harrumph!), it’s an ambitious and deep story, beautifully executed. Such a shame it doesn’t get more love – so thanks for giving it some here!
@4/hoompanjh laments, “I really need to watch this again — it’s available on Blu-ray, but I think only as part of the Disney whatever-it-is-club that requires you to order straight from their website.”
Nope! $10 at Amazon (less if you want to rent the streaming video) and you’re done: https://www.amazon.com/Return-Oz-Fairuza-Balk/dp/B0000DZ3EN/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1466714903&sr=8-2&keywords=return+to+oz
Yeah, I still have the DVD on my shelf, but wanted to upgrade to an HD version.
For whatever reason, I don’t keep it shelved with the original Wizard of Oz movie — I think because it’s different enough that I don’t regard it as a sequel to the original film.
This, Willow and Ghostbusters are all great flicks.
Plenty of weird imagery in this one, what with the Wheelers and the Hall of Heads.
Does anyone here read the Namesake webcomic? It is based on the idea that the titular Namesakes get pulled into other worlds when they are young adults/children, have an adventure and return to find their Writer who tells their story, in this way stories keep spreading and strengthening magic/reality in all worlds. They are called Namesakes because children of particular names will always be pulled into the same world – a Dorothy will always go to Oz, a Wendy to Neverland, an Alice to Wonderland etc. Any child of the appropriate name could have their world turned upside down in this way.
The story starts when a girl called Emma goes to pick up her sister, Elaine, from the library and ends up being pulled through a portal. Emma ends up in Oz and Elaine is picked up by an organization called Calliope comprised of former namesakes and Writers who are very confused that an Emma has disappeared when there is no record of Emma being a Namesake name and so they don’t know where she has gone. Emma is confused herself as everyone keeps referring to her as ‘The Dorothy’ (as well as the fact that she is in Oz and a purple witch immediately tries to turn her into a handbag).
I recommend it to any Oz fans as well as any fantasy fans. It has great humour too (eg when one character learns about magical, reality warping Writers he asks ” Is Terry Pratchett one of you guys too?”)
I both loved and hated this film as a kid. Tik Tok and Jack Pumpkinhead were my favorite parts of the film, and the princess and the wheelers I found rather disturbing.
The Wheelers bit gave me a definite Labyrinth vibe.
Oh man, I *love* this movie. It’s so messed up, twisted and dark, and a much more faithful adaptation of Baum’s tone. I still play this in the background at parties sometimes.
Just went to the SFX website which has a picture of a new transformer.
spoiler alert
It looks as though Tik-Tok had a kid.
MRGN is a perfectly good acronym, easily pronounced as “margin” — a word not entirely inappropriate in characterizing this rewatch. (Among other things, we in the gallery may now legitimately refer to ourselves as MRGNalians….)
I still have a fair number of VHS cassettes of recorded-off-the-air material that I hope to convert to disc at some point, although quite a few of them are old-school Doctor Who that’s now available commercially. The one I really, really want not to lose is an obscure made-for-TV film called Earth Star Voyager (from 1988 on The Wonderful World of Disney).
More specifically regarding Return to Oz: I was somewhat surprised at the time to discover that Disney had commissioned a novelization of the movie from none other than Joan D. Vinge. I was even more startled to discover, on acquiring and reading it, that Vinge had done an unusually good job of creating a work that was both faithful to the film and respectful to the two Baum books it merges together — to the extent that I’d recommend the book as a worthy companion to the film.
I loved this film as a kid – and still do. I didn’t know it’s out on blu-ray; I will have to track that down! (I picked up the bare-bones DVD some years ago.)
I read the original Oz books (the first 14, which were written by Baum) when I was about 6 or 7 and they became some of my favourite books ever. (I’m going to buy the complete set for my niece in a couple of years.). One of the reasons I like Return to Oz so much is that, while it isn’t completely true to either The Marvellous Land of Oz or Ozma of Oz, it’s truer to Baum’s Oz than the 1939 The Wizard of Oz film *running lest die-hard film fans send flying monkeys after me*. ;) Baum’s Oz was dark sometimes; the Wheelers and Mombi with her interchangeable heads scared the you-know-what out of me, to the extent that my mom had to cover up the illustrations of both in my copy of the book (she taped paper hearts over them) There was definitely a darker side to Oz, which I felt this film captured very well. I expect it would have “hung together” better if the filmmakers had been truer to Baum’s original narrative.
This is yet another film that my family quotes often; when we’re looking for something, we all have a tendency to say, “Green, green, green…green ornaments.” My sister and I have adopted the phrase “Tie my feet together!” as a kind of “secret” way to signal that one or both of us in in a totally frustrating and illogical situation. ;)
EDIT: I feel like a DOPE – in the novel Ozma of Oz, it was Princess Langwidere, NOT Mombi, who had the interchangeable heads. Mombi was the witch who transformed Ozma in The Marvellous Land of Oz. My bad!
PS: I picked up the e-book bundle of all the Baum-authored Oz books, plus illustrations, for a couple of bucks on Amazon. While the ebooks don’t compare to the physical books, that can be a cheap way to read them for anyone who is interested. I think they may be over on Project Gutenberg, but sans the great (and scary, if you’re a kid!) illustrations
This may have been one of the first non-cartoon movies I saw in a movie theater. Maybe I was 6 or 7? I remember being so traumatized by the mental hospital scene that my mom and I never spoke of me seeing this movie, and for years I thought/hoped I had imagined the entire movie. Because something that bizarre and nonsensical couldnt possibly really exist, right? Id dreamed the whole thing, right? Thanks to blockbuster video, 12 year old me realizes the movie is real, and I did finally see it again. Not as scary, plot still didn’t make a lick of sense, and hospital scene still utterly disturbing.
@18/ChocolateRob and @23/John – Thank you for both of those recommendations. Both the webcomic and Vinge’s novelization sound pretty neat. I’m a little surprised they commissioned a novel rather than just republishing and brand-marketing Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz in an omnibus or something (although then again, this being Disney, maybe I’m not surprised… they’re not ones to miss a chance for marketing).
I would love to see a sequel to Return to Oz combining the best elements of books 4-6: bring the Wizard back, introduce Polychrome for real (not just marching in a parade), get Aunt Em and Uncle Henry to Oz for good, turn back the Nome invasion. And maybe bring in a little bit of Scraps the Patchwork Girl from book 7. My memory, though, is that Baum’s Oz books kind of fall off after that point… as a tween/teen, I read them all, but have no strong memories of any of them past Emerald City of Oz.
@12/aethercowboy – How can you tell everyone about the slow decline of the Em and Henry farm but not let them know that Ozma brought them to Oz and gave them a place to live. Baum could be dark at times, but not that dark.
As far as the books: When I was young, the only ones I had access to were the original Wizard of Oz (one of those 1950s or 1960s children’s hardcovers with the shiny covers) and a Scholastic Book Club edition of Ozma. I did pick up the full Baum run (Del Rey mass-market paperbacks) when I was in grad school, and did try to read them but kind of lost momentum somewhere around the 6 or 7 mark, I believe.
@MikePoteet – Baum was not a stickler for canon, even with respect to Ozma’s kidnapping by the Wizard (something Baum wrote off, but was leveraged very wonderfully in the Marvel comic adaptation of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz as a sort of unsaid elephant in the room). Also, there’s a 1987 anime adaptation of four of the first five Oz books. Unfortunately, the only localized (en_us) version edits the episodes into four movies instead of 52 episodes. Also, I wouldn’t mind another Disney Oz movie, as long as it’s not called Oz the Great and Powerful. Also, apparently, Disney was wanting to make an adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz after Snow White’s success, but was unable to, as MGM held the rights at the time, and then eventually released what most people associate with Oz these days, including, apparently, Disney.
@Robert – Details…
I loved OZ as a kid, having been involved a few theater productions and having read all the books. We even had a cairn terrier that looked just like Toto. Despite all that, I have ZERO recollection of this movie. None whatsoever. Which is just odd. Maybe it was just the timing. I don’t think it was targeted at teenage boys after all, and by 1985 I was probably more interested in what I could get the VCR to record off of late night HBO than the Disney Channel. Still, I might have to go back and check this one out.
Ozma of Oz was my favorite book as a kid. I read it over and over. Then, I saw the movie.
What did they think they were doing? Princess Langwidere is meant to be humorous (not a total success when I first read the book, but I didn’t take her seriously after that). She doesn’t steal head. She just has a lot but only one neck so she can only wear one at a time. The Wheelers are scary at first, but they have old Dr. Who mobility issues and can be beaten off by a robot armed with a lunchbox. And Auntie Em signs up Dorothy for electroshock? Because the kid keeps telling everyone about the really vivid dream she had after the tornado? Wow, their really is no place like home.
And Billina. What happened to Billina? She had personality in the book. She also was willing and able to fight a rooster who didn’t like insubordinate hens (whether that’s supposed to imply attempted sexual assault with Billina making mincemeat out of the guy, I’m not sure, but how can you downgrade Billina? It’s criminal. And the assertive chicken figures out the Nome King’s plot and saves the day).
@Jacob Silvia
Thankfully, in The Emerald City of Oz, with the house foreclosing, Dorothy, Toto, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry all move to Oz permanently. In case anyone reading that rundown was worried.
@23
I used to do something similar as a kid too. You used tie my feet together.
I used, “little girl, pumpkin heads, make chicken fly the coop.” As a way to say my brain felt overloaded to the point where I was slap happy.
While I loved this movie as a kid it was also the only movie I remember absolutely terrifying me! I had nightmares about that hall of heads.
By all means, please oh please, do a MRGN on The Worst Witch. That was one of my favorite movies as a kid that I still have to pull out and watch every Halloween. My awesome husband tracked it down on DVD years ago. :) It’s one of those movies you have to explain to people because almost no one I have met has ever seen it – and that is not an easy movie to explain. You get a lot of blank stares as you roll off the cast and when you get to the plot most of them say, “So, kinda like Harry Potter?” NO!!
Looking over my above post:
The Wheelers in the book have old Dr. Who dalek mobility issues (before the new series, they were regularly defeated by stairs, air ducts, and difficult terrain).
I loved this movie at the time and was disappointed it wasn’t more successful. (For the record, I wasn’t a kid but an adult in his early 30s.)
Much though I treasure the Garland classic, I appreciated the way this was more faithful in many respects to Baum. It drove me crazy that so much of the criticism of this movie was illogically based on its not being more like the 1939 musical. I was shocked that one of those making that error was Roger Ebert, who as someone who learned to write in our own fanzine fandom and who had a deep background in SF&F, should have known better. It was quite disillusioning.
Thanks to previous posters who mentioned the Vinge novelization. I meant to read it at the time but never did, and I plan to make up for that now.
@35/Ellynne: Actually, the first time we were explicitly shown a Dalek hovering up a staircase was not in the new series, but in “Remembrance of the Daleks” in 1988. And even in the early years, Daleks were implied to be able to climb, hover, and negotiate obstacles. “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” in 1964 memorably ended its first episode with a cliffhanger of a Dalek rising out of the Thames. “The Chase” the following year tried to repeat that with a cliffhanger of a Dalek rising straight up out of the desert sand, and later showed Daleks on two levels of the Marie Celeste‘s deck. So it was implicit almost from the start that they could levitate; they just didn’t have the budget to show it. But I think some later episode writers confused the production limitations with in-story limitations and started writing Dalek mobility issues into the scripts.
This was a really interesting experience for me: I was 11 when this came out. I saw it in the theater and hadn’t seen it again before streaming it from the local public library for this re-watch. I had read all 14 of Baum’s Oz books multiple times when the movie came out, so I was really excited. I remember being really disappointed because it wasn’t exactly like the books—I’m pretty sure this was my first real experience with a book adapted into a movie.
Now, 30+ years later, I was surprised to discover just how much is exactly from the books. As others have pointed out, the frame story is wholly an invention of the movies (there’s no doubt at all in the books that Oz is real), and of course the episodes are mixed together, but overall, it’s actually fairly in the spirit of things.
It strikes me that you’re perhaps being overly critical of the “eggs are poison” plotline; it’s clear from the beginning that the Nome King is afraid of chickens, and later it’s revealed why. It seems to me that asking why eggs are poisonous to nomes is going a little too deep. (As MariCats @1 says, it’s spelled out in the novels, but it would probably be out of place to insert the explanation the way the movie is set up.)
And finally, you should definitely read the books. They’re pretty easy reads (you could probably get through all 14 in the time it takes to read 1 or 2 ASoIaF books!). I forget if you’re the e-book type, but if you have a Kindle (or are willing to download the Kindle app to you favorite device), I’m seeing the complete series available for $0.99 at Amazon!
Loved this movie as a kid, still love it now. It definitely isn’t flawless, but I think it holds together as a whole better than you (for the most part, I can suspend my disbelief/chalk it up to “Oz magic” for most of the things that bother you – I mean, the heads snoring is odd, but no moreso than, you know, a woman having a bunch of interchangeable, living heads in the first place). And thanks for calling out the score – as a film music aficionado, I think it’s an overlooked gem, and was really happy when Intrada recently put out a complete recording of the score.
The Nome King being poisoned by eggs is no more arbitrary than the Wicked Witch of the West being melted by water. If anything, it’s less implausible, since it’s easier to live without (or avoid contact with) eggs than water.
The Nome King being poisoned by eggs is really not so far from children who can’t be in the vicinity of peanuts today. I had an egg allergy as a kid. Nothing big, rashes, sties and boils if I ate them. My cousin also had an egg allergy and he could not be in same room if an egg was being cracked or he would go into anaphylactic shock. So being killed by eggs isn’t that far a stretch.
@41/percysowner: Good point — but then, that means the plot hole in the movie could’ve been fixed by a single line like “I’m deathly allergic to eggs!”
Wow, it’s scary, I was thinking about this movie lately, because it keeps popping into my mind and I don’t know why, when I last watched it VCRs were prized items. Coincidences indeed. Great review and true, there is some disturbing stuff in it which didn’t disturb me at all back then.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this review and I love how you mentioned the soundtrack! Every time I walk over stepping stones, the one song comes back to me and I can’t help but hum it. I always of course immediately think of how nice it would be to be able to pick a sandwich from the lunchbox tree! My sister loved the movie but hated the wheelers, she’d always leave the room when she knew they were coming on. But the “is there a chicken in there with you?”, line is the most notorious in my household. I could also go on and on! I still watch it now, when I need a comforting moment ( of course i have the dvd now!) this one brings me back.
I specifically remember hearing along the grapevine (a few people mentioned it, bc everyone was well aware of how badly I wanted to be Dorothy- (I’m assuming most likely due to the yearly Halloween costumes and my need to wear the Ruby slippers with whatever outfit and needed my hair double braided everyday). All I cared about was that there was a part 2 of Oz! It probably didn’t matter what they showed me on the screen, I would have loved it! We were on waiting list at the local video store. We never returned it. I felt lucky bc the video store had made a glitch! I still have the vhs as memory, in the bulky black box with the numbered stickers on the side. Oh, those were the days.. can’t we go back??!
You really should try reading the books, They are pretty short, wouldn’t take that long to read. They are also in the public domain, so it should be easy to find an electronic version of them.
I really adored this movie as a kid, and was terribly annoyed that there basically no way to buy it in Italy until the DVD edition that came out a few years ago. Rewatching it as an adult, it is a bit slower and could do with some tightening of pace, but I still think it’s, all in all, a better movie, and a much, much, much better Oz movie than both the 1939 one and whatever that thing with James Franco wanted to be. It keeps the odd and the weird and the marvellous, but also the matter of factness of the unfairness and cruelty of things that happen, which is life as seen by a kid (and an adult too, if we remove the blinds).
You should read Tim Powers’ Declare for an explanation of the deadliness of eggs and a possible cross-over with the nomes. The book is worth it even without this fanciful connection to Return to Oz.
Thanks for the enjoyable article.
I’d say the MGM film was more faithful to the source in terms of plot, since it was derived from a single book. What Return did better was presenting the general look and feel of Oz from the books. It was a lot darker than the books, although part of that probably comes down to how elements that are funny and whimsical in text can be disturbing when presented visually. That said, yeah, the electroshock therapy bit probably wasn’t necessary, and had no basis at all in the text. The portrayal of Aunt Em was likely a holdover from her stern personality in the MGM movie. In the books, she and Uncle Henry were very loving to Dorothy, even if hard work and prairie living had sucked a lot of the life out of them.
I have an interesting background with this movie in that I had never heard of or read the other Oz books when I saw it, and yet despite how much it differed from the MGM movie (other than in the “actors appear in both the ‘real world’ and in Oz” conceit), I actually loved it. Yes it was disturbing and scary, odd and unusual, but that made it stand out to me and do what ideally a sequel should do: mark new territory and include new material even as it also retains elements of the original. Also I believe I simply appreciated the fact it got darker without completely dispensing with hope and happiness. (The insane asylum horrified me though…even more when I later found out such things were real.)
Aside from that, lots of great memories. Loved Jack, Tik-Tok, and the Gump (and indeed how weird he didn’t get a parallel in the real world). Loved Mombi and her heads (the scene with stealing the Powder of Life was indeed one of the most suspenseful and tense ever). On a related note, the statues of headless dancers were very disconcerting indeed. Terrified by the Wheelers and the Nome King. Loved the whole bit with the ornament room. I remember seeing what had become of the Emerald City and Dorothy’s companions was so shocking and upsetting for my young mind, but it absolutely galvanized me into the “this has to be fixed, NOW” mindset so essential for investing in a work. (And no disrespect to Bert Lahr, but I loved that the Lion was an actual lion this time.)
As for some of the smaller points and nitpicks: I would imagine part of the disjointedness in the movie is precisely because of the fact it was based on two different books. Or maybe the two plots wouldn’t have worked together no matter how good a job the screenwriter did? I always thought myself that Dorothy’s wish meant she and Ozma were one and the same despite not looking alike. I guess it’s supposed to suggest the two were linked instead, to explain why Dorothy kept getting drawn into Oz and to allow her a chance to remain linked even after going home. But if they had somehow been the same it might have made things make more sense (and explain why the girl in the asylum didn’t seem to be real). On the egg front, I always assumed it had to do with the fact eggs are a source of new life, while Nomes are all about stone and the underground which are either associated with death or things that were never alive to begin with, and so they are antitheses to each other. And as for Billina, I assumed the farm was closer to the asylum than it appeared (or else the storm washed Dorothy very far away, close enough for Billina to get swept up in it too, before she reached Oz). But in any event, simply that she ended up with her because of the same storm.
Well, not everyone in The Wizard of Oz (1939) has a Kansas parallel, either. Glinda springs to mind.
Of course, Oz movies ought to treat Oz as a real place anyway, in my opinion. Much straddled the line with this one. He did it wonderfully, but I would have been happier if he’d committed to the non-MGM-sequel route (especially since his film wasn’t a musical).
I wonder if we’ll ever have a straightforward, new major film adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or if the iconic status of the Judy Garland movie means we’ll only ever have “twists” and “takes” and “reimaginings” and prequels and sequels to it. Even Wicked, which I think is a fantastic show (and hopefully will make a great movie), makes more than one nod to the 1939 movie.
I thought the James Franco movie was going to be a chance at kicking off something really new and true to the books, but the end result was such a dreadful and disappointing mess, I suspect we’ve seen the last of that Oz.