there’s no place like home. especially if you’re home alone watching this film.
December 24th 2006 22:59
I recently returned to Oz. More correctly, I returned to Return to Oz, an unofficial sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz of 46 years prior and one of the most bestest film of my childhood. It’s greatness hasn’t weaned. Whimsical and weird with references to surrealist aesthetic, returning to oz offers a darker side to the rainbow.
Dorothy is back in Kansas and hasn’t been able to sleep since the tornado. Aunt Elm takes her to an ‘electric therapist’ to heal her insomnia and alleged delusions about a place called Oz. When therapy is about to commence they are hit by an electric storm and Dorothy escapes with the help of a little girl her age. Dorothy awakes in Oz, asleep in a chicken coop in the middle of a pond with her chook Billina who found a key that was delivered to Dorothy in a shooting star. They use stepping-stones to cross the deadly desert, and find a lunch box tree. They pick some ripe lunch boxes and eat the ham sandwiches from inside as eyes in the rocks around them watch. They yellow brick road is shattered and everyone in the Emerald City has been turned to stone. Some writing on a wall warns them to beware the wheelers. Wheelers (below, with Dorothy and Tick Tock) are the scariest things in the world. Bizarre cackling men
with squeaky wheels instead of hands and feet, frightening second faces on their helmets, bright clothes and punky hair and makeup. Dorothy finds tick tock who does everything but live and needs her to wind up his thought speech and action. Together they end up at Princess Mombie’s palace. They meet Jack Pumpkin Head who has a pumpkin for a head and wants to call Dorothy Mum. They have to steal the ruby key from Mombie to get the Powder of Life from her cabinet. Mombie has 30 heads in different cabinets and alternates between them. When Dorothy steals the Powder of Life from one of the cabinets all the heads start screaming in unison. Dorothy and co. escape on The Gump, a taxidermined moos head strapped to a couch with branches of a palm for wings, brought to life with the Powder of Life. They get to King Noam’s mountain to ask him to restore Oz and the Scarecrow, and he says they must inspect his room of ornaments and guess which object is the scarecrow. Noam lifts his robes of rock to reveal he has Dorothy’s ruby slippers. Billina finally lays the egg she has been struggling with, and they discover eggs are poison on Noam Mountain; Noam and the rock monsters crumble away, Dorothy gets her ruby slippers back and the Emerald city is restored.
The examination of the oppressive adult world on the impressionable child’s imagination loans itself well to psychoanalysis. The adult world is constantly telling Dorothy not to speak of things that don’t really exist and that the Land of Oz is of her own imagining. In the first sequence, before Dorothy finds herself returned to Oz, there are hints of what is to come: a pumpkin head, a tin lunch pale, the “head” nurse who is later princess Mombie, the pasty workers at the clinic pushing squeaky trolleys who are later the wheelers, and the mysterious blond child who rescues Dorothy, who is later Ozma the queen of Oz. Perhaps Dorothy uses these things of the ‘real’ world to conjure up the adventures in her imagination, or perhaps she really did return to Oz.
Sound as trippy and twisted as a Dalí painting? This G (!) rated film remains one of this normally nonchalant-about-fantasy blogger’s all-time favourites. Don’t expect a sing-along musical with bright colours, cardboard sets and dancing midgets, Return to Oz is much closer to L. Frank Baum’s original 14 novels which got progressively darker as the author neared his end.
Dorothy is back in Kansas and hasn’t been able to sleep since the tornado. Aunt Elm takes her to an ‘electric therapist’ to heal her insomnia and alleged delusions about a place called Oz. When therapy is about to commence they are hit by an electric storm and Dorothy escapes with the help of a little girl her age. Dorothy awakes in Oz, asleep in a chicken coop in the middle of a pond with her chook Billina who found a key that was delivered to Dorothy in a shooting star. They use stepping-stones to cross the deadly desert, and find a lunch box tree. They pick some ripe lunch boxes and eat the ham sandwiches from inside as eyes in the rocks around them watch. They yellow brick road is shattered and everyone in the Emerald City has been turned to stone. Some writing on a wall warns them to beware the wheelers. Wheelers (below, with Dorothy and Tick Tock) are the scariest things in the world. Bizarre cackling men
Sound as trippy and twisted as a Dalí painting? This G (!) rated film remains one of this normally nonchalant-about-fantasy blogger’s all-time favourites. Don’t expect a sing-along musical with bright colours, cardboard sets and dancing midgets, Return to Oz is much closer to L. Frank Baum’s original 14 novels which got progressively darker as the author neared his end.
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Comment by The Daily Sonnet
The Daily Sonnet
Lots of Sonnets
I do remember there being a dic-ta-tor in one of the later books, and I didn't know much about politics the first time that I read it. Maybe I'd appreciate it more now.
Comment by anonymous
that was my favourite movie. but i always had to have a pillow handy to cover my eyes when she gets cornered by the wheeler in the alley! and mombie's hallway full of detachable heads... so frightening!! i'd love to watch this again x mic