Pop Culture Retrospective Episode # 18 - Return to Oz: An 80's cult classic film intended for children, but creepy as heck decades after it's release!!

Show #18 - Return to Oz

I can’t believe I am doing this.  I guess I must have really loved my sister because I decided to take it upon myself to re-watch and research one of the most terrifying films I can remember from me and my sister’s childhood, the 1985 cult classic, Return to Oz.  Walt Disney Pictures intended this movie to be aimed at young children and it was rated PG for tobacco use.  And let me just tell you, tobacco use is the farthest thing from the many other concerns I have about this film.  I really dreaded re-watching the film as I was pretty freaked out about it as a child and my sister and I often used to reminisce about how petrifying this film was to us.  Return to Oz was in no way a sequel to the cheerful and musical film that came before it decades earlier, the Wizard of Oz.  Instead, it was based off of 2 books- “Land of Oz” and “Ozma of Oz.”  “Return to Oz” didn’t have munchkins or song and dance numbers.  In fact, there are no musical breaks whatsoever in the film, but instead the energy is much more dark and suspenseful.  

With that being said, on today’s show you will learn everything you ever wanted to know about the bizarre and ominous film that is “Return to Oz.”  By the end of this show you will learn who the Wheelers are, what the evil Princess had a horrifying collection of, what went on behind the scenes and why, 35 years later, this film should ideally be viewed during the day. I will also be sharing a synopsis of the film so if you are planning on watching it anytime soon (you can watch it on Disney Plus) please note there will be many, many spoilers. So grab your ruby red slippers, a bucket of popcorn and a blanket to cover your eyes, here we go! 

Hello and thank you so very much for tuning in to the Pop Culture Retrospective Podcast, a show inspired by, and in memory of, my big sister Rebecca and her love for all things pop-culture, especially the people, places and things of the 80s, 90s and early 00s.  My name is Amy Lewis and I am your captain aboard this pop culture time machine.  You are tuning in to Episode # 18:  Return to Oz- a spine chilling film to view both as a child and as an adult.  My sister and I were too young to have seen this movie when it was released in theatres in the mid 1980s, but I believe we must have viewed it, more than once, either at friends or family’s houses or perhaps on the Disney Channel which I believe ran it pretty frequently in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

We’ll start today’s show with a detailed synopsis of the film including the main cast.  You may want to drink an adult beverage during this description, I’ll wait for you to grab something.  All set?  Okay, let’s continue. And I apologize in advance if I repeat the phrase:  “and remember, this was meant for children.”  Return to Oz is set in October of 1899, just before the turn of the century.  Tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1899!  Dorothy lives with her Aunt and Uncle in a dilapidated farmhouse that was destroyed by a tornado 6 months earlier.  Her good friends are Belina (a chicken) and Toto (the infamous, scruffy dog).  

Dorothy was played by newcomer Fairuza Balk who you may remember from “The Craft” or “American History X.” This was her first film role which you’d never know because she is excellent in this movie.  The film opens with Dorothy laying in her bed and looking at the reflection of the night sky in her mirror.  Her Auntie Em comes to check on her and notices she is awake and seems concerned.  She tells Dorothy she’s worried about her because she hasn’t slept well in 6 months, ever since the tornado.  Dorothy often daydreams about her “friends” in Oz and expresses she is worried about her friends there and that they may be in trouble.  Concerned, Auntie Em leaves Dorothy’s room to speak with her husband who is looking at a newspaper clipping.  This is when we know the direction this movie is headed in.  Is he looking at a job listing?  No!  Is he looking in the “for sale section?”  Nope.  He is looking at an advertisement that says:  “Announcement! Electric Healing.  I take pleasure in saying to the citizens of Black River Falls and adjacent towns that I have secured Dr. J.B. Worley from the Graduate American School of Electric Healing and have opened a sanitarium of Electric Healing, of my residence, Lower Falls, Town of Brockway, where the afflicted may exchange their aches and pains for ease and comfort.”  Foreshadowing perhaps?  It seems as though the Aunt and Uncle have been considering alternative methods for helping Dorothy with her daydreams and constant thoughts.  Money is tight, but someone has offered to help them pay for Dorothy to receive treatment.  It doesn’t appear as though Dorothy’s Aunt and Uncle are abusive by any means, but I guess they just don’t know what to do with distracted Dorothy. 

One day while doing chores on the farm, Dorothy stumbles upon a key that she believes has Oz engraved into it. Dorothy shows her Aunt the key and says she thinks her friends sent it to her from Oz via the shooting star she saw the other night.  Apparently, that is the last straw and we soon see Dorothy riding to town in a horse-drawn carriage with her Aunt.  They are headed to the blasted sanitarium.  When they arrive, Dorothy and her Aunt meet with the Doctor and she explains what she has been thinking about:  ruby red slippers, the cowardly Lion and the tin man who lost his leg.  The Doctor is played by Thomas Nicol Williamson who was a famous English actor who performed in many stage plays before moving to the big screen.  He also plays the villain of the film, the Nome King.  More on the Nome King later.  However, Williamson does an excellent job playing a suspicious yet inviting doctor as well as the terrifying Nome King, but we’ll get to that in a bit.  The Doctor shows Dorothy a machine that will quote “help rid her of the waking dreams.”  It tells her it looks like a face:  two meters are supposedly the eyes, a metal cylinder is the nose and a rectangular slot is the mouth with a sliding lever that is the tongue.  The Aunt leaves shortly thereafter and Dorothy is escorted to her room by an intimidating and sinister-looking nurse who is played by Jean Lyndsey Torren Marsh, a storied English actress and writer.  She not only plays the evil nurse, but also the even more evil Mombi which we’ll discuss more later.  Apparently Marsh got bit by the acting bug after she took dance and MIMING classes as a child.  It seems like the creepy art-form that is miming, was excellent preparation for the characters she would play down the road.  She also starred in Willow that was released just 3 years after Return to Oz in 1988.   While Dorothy is waiting in her dust filled room for her shock treatment, a young girl suddenly appears and gives her a pumpkin.  

While she is in her room, Dorothy hears screaming coming from other patient’s rooms.  Dorothy also somehow locates a comb and uses it to brush the pumpkin like it has hair.  Shortly thereafter, the nurse appears at Dorothy’s room (the mysterious girl has already disappeared) and asks her if she quote: “wants to go for a ride.”  Dorothy is then placed onto a stretcher and is wheeled into an exam room.  The electric shock machine she saw earlier in the Doctor’s office is now back, it gets plugged in and heavy duty headphones get put on over her ears.  Just as they are about to get started, the power goes out and the white noise from the machine turns off and the screaming and moans from other patients can be heard again.  The mysterious girl comes back to help Dorothy escape from the medical procedure room.  They escape the sanitarium and run out into the rain and thunder.  They are chased by the nurse and end up falling into a river and floating away.  Somehow Dorothy stumbles onto some kind of crate/wooden crib looking structure that she gets herself on to.  She eventually floats into open water and comes to a stop after landing in a puddle and her faithful chicken, Belina, appears. It seems as though Dorothy has landed at Oz - her old house that blew away in the Tornado is in shambles there, the yellow brick road is all ripped up and all of the people in the city have been turned to stone.  Further, on a few of the cement walls around the city, someone has spray-painted: “Beware the Wheelers.”  The Wheelers are some of the scariest villains to ever grace the screen of a children’s movie as you will soon learn.  As she is walking around the destroyed city, she hears the sound of squeaky wheels moving about.  All of a sudden a group of said Wheelers surround Dorothy.  The wheelers are a group of men who have large wheels attached to both their arms and legs.  They hunch over like a monkey on rollerskates to get around.  They are dressed in bright clothing, and have helmets on with a blood-curdling face painted on top that shows when they are rolling about with their heads down.  They also all have makeup on, mainly red and black eye shadow which further adds to their frightening look.  Dorothy manages to get away from this group of freaks but using her Oz key to open up a cinder block wall she is standing by and closing is quickly before they can get in.  When the wall closes, the Wheelers frighteningly peer in through the key hole and yell at her in their screetchy and cracking voices.  While trapped in the small cinder block room, she encounters Tick-Tock, a copper colored, round tin-man like character who will soon become her friend.  Tick-Tock reminds me a combination of Wilford Brimley and Pat Marita (Mr. Miyagi from Karate Kid).  After winding him up, Dorothy and Tick-Tock leave their spot and thankfully, Tic-Tok manages to fight off all of the wheelers.  They find out from the head-wheeler that Princess Mombi knows where Scarecrow is and that is where they decide to head next.  In addition to the wheelers, the next few scenes are also some of the most horrifying of the entire movie.  They find Mombi’s castle and let themselves in.  As they are walking through, they walk through a large, sort of mirrored closet area.  The closest is essentially a hall of heads as there are dozens of live heads, on pedestals in display cases which are numbered, that the Princess often switches depending on her mood.  They catch Mombi switching out to the #4 head in one of the first scenes in the castle.  And in case you were wondering, which you probably weren’t, Mombi’s original head is in cabinet #31.  

They confront Mombi and ask her where Scarecrow is and she takes Tic-Tock and Dorothy to the tower and threatens to take her head so she can add it to her collection.  Lovely. While in the tower, we meet Jack Pumpkinhead who becomes another of Dorothy’s friends.  And, as you might imagine, Jack looks like a wooden stick figure with a humongous and top heavy pumpkinhead.   She also meets a taxidermy moose head named “Gunk.”  The group fashions a sleigh out of a few fainting couches (including the one that Gunk is already attached to)  and sneaks out of the tower to grab the Powder of Life from Princess Mombi.  While running through the hall of heads, head #31 (the original) wakes up and screams, waking up the other heads.  In the nick of time, the Power of Life is sprinkled on the DIY sleigh and off they go, flying into the night.  Irritated, Princess Mombi summons the Wheelers and they start to chase after the sleigh.  Eventually the sleigh starts to unravel as it was a P.O.S. and they crash land in an area with mountains and snow and the Nome King appears.  Dorothy finds out that the Scarecrow was essentially kidnapped because he was accused of taking Emeralds which upset the Nome King.  By the way, the Nome King is made out of Clay-animation and is quite scary, even with the technology being a bit dated at this point.  Pretty impressive for the time though.  The Nome King ends up having Dorothy and all of her friends go to his nick-nack room, one by one.  If they can pick what item or items that the Nome King is thinking of in his head, the Scarecrow can be let go.  One by one the group heads in but none of them can seem to figure out which item the Nome King is referring to.  When it’s Dorothy’s turn, the Nome King shifts from being clay-animation to being a real life human character, dressed in a very elaborate costume that makes him look as though he is made of stone.  The real-life Nome King ups the creep factor when he starts smoking a pipe and shows Dorothy her Ruby Red slippers that he is wearing underneath his rock-like cape.  None of her friends ends up being successful with selecting the items so now it is Dorothy’s turn to go into the nick-nack room.  She uses up two out of her three chances and finally selects something that is green.  She says the magic word, “Oz” and all of a sudden, the scarecrow appears.  If Michael Jackson was reincarnated as a scarecrow, he would have looked like this.  His expression is way too alert for being a burlap bag head and it reminds me of the Rainbow Brite live-action character I referred to in Episode # 8 of the PCRP in that, he looks like something out of your worst nightmare.  In said nightmare, perhaps you are being chased by a knife-wielding creature which turns out to resemble this horrific scarecrow.  Dorothy and the Scarecrow then work together to find items that are green or emerald in color and they bring back all of their comrades which further infuriates the all-ready irritable Nome King.  The group attempts to escape but the Nome-King, who has now returned to clay-animation status, starts to destroy his nick-nack room and ultimately his kingdom.  The creepy clay-animation king grabs Jack Pumpkinhead and dangles him over his open mouth, ready to swallow him whole.  Thankfully, Belina is inside of Jack’s head for whatever reason and one of her eggs falls out into the Nome King’s mouth.  Eggs are poisonous to Nomes so shortly thereafter, he is gone and subsequently defeated.  Just before the kingdom completely crumbles, Dorothy grabs her ruby red slippers out of the rubble, puts them on and clicks her heels and wishes for Oz to be completely restored.  

Her wish comes true and Oz returns to the way it was and the final scene in Oz finds Dorothy being celebrated in a palace with wall to wall green carpeting with many mirrors, but thankfully no decapitated heads.  Although they want Dorothy to be Queen of Oz, she knows she needs to return home and the young girl she keeps crossing paths with becomes the leader andas it turns out, she is the rightful ruler of Oz, Princess Ozma. The movie is then closed out and we see Dorothy back with her family.  Their house is no longer in poor condition and she is happy to be with her Aunt, Uncle and dog, Toto.  She can also see Princess Ozma in the mirror that sits atop her dresser.  It appears as if she will be getting the best of both worlds.  

So, there you go.  There is a mouthful about the synopsis of the movie that terrified me and my sister as children and which I anxiously watched again as an adult.  Now that we’ve gotten through the bizarre synopsis, here are some fun facts that you may not be aware of from this eccentric film from the 1980s:

• A male gymnast named Michael Surdin was responsible for maneuvering the tick-toc character.  He essentially had to bend over at the waist, with his legs bent to smash himself into the costume since tick-toc had a short stature.  
• The Walt Disney company initially fired the Director, Walter Murch about a week into the film’s production due to concerns over the budget.  Fortunately for him, he was re-hired and finished out the film.  In addition to this directing credit, Murch was also responsible for editing the Godfather and Apocalypse Now...perhaps that’s why this movie was so twisted?!
• Judy Garland was 17 when she played Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz and Varuza Balk was 10.  
• In the actual Wizard of Oz books, Dorothy’s magical slippers are silver, the ruby red slippers were just made up for the movies.  
• Both Tim Curry and Christopher Lloyd were considered for the role of the Nome King.  Curry and Lloyd are extremely talented actors, but the gentleman who ended up playing him was outstanding and creepy as heck.  
• For about 20 years, Return to Oz held the title of being the longest wait for a film’s sequel.  
• Several other actresses auditioned for the role of Dorothy including:  Drew Barrymore, Juliet Lewis, Elizabeth “I’m so excited, I’m so scared” Berkeley and Alanis “you outta know” Morrisette.  
• Fairuza Balk did all of her own stunts.
• Mary Stenburgen and Terri Garr were both considered for the role of Princess Mombi, but again, she was cast perfectly with  Jean Lyndsey Torren Marsh.
• The clay animation done in the film, primarily the Nome King, was all done in Portland, Oregon while the film was shot primarily in the UK
• Walt Disney was a big fan of the Wizard of Oz books 
• Everything in the return to Oz books was influenced by the original bound books including the dreaded costumes (which were ultimately impressive but so creepy, even now).
• The Cowardly Lion in the film as well as the head of Tick-Toc were completely remote controlled 
• You can watch behind the scenes footage of the movie on YouTube, I’ll post a link in the show-notes.  If you want to up the fear factor, you can also watch the wheelers in rehearsal and utilizing their archaic workout space which looks like a toture chamber.  Being hunched over was of course very taxing on the wheeler’s bodies.  Perhaps that further added to their psychotic presence.  
• In many photos taken while the film was in production, we see the director Walter Murch wearing a staple of the 1980s, a Members Only Jacket which proves that while he had a very dark perspective on the Return to Oz story, he also dressed in a stylish, yet sophisticated manner.  Gotta love that Murch, keeping it classy as usual.  
• The Cowardly Lion, Tinman and Scarecrow were supposed to have more prominent roles in the film, but budget constraints prevented them from being in more scenes.  
• Originally the Scarecrow was supposed to have an animatronic face, but budget cuts forced them to make several masks with fixed facial expressions on them.  I am not sure which would be more creepy.  
• When Dorothy is at the asylum, her room number is 31, much like that of Mombi’s original head number in her decapitated head room.
• The film received mixed reviews when it was released, but I think Canadian Film Critic Jay Scott put it best when he said:   "Dorothy's friends are as weird as her enemies, which is faithful to the original Oz books but turns out not to be a virtue on film, where the eerie has a tendency to remain eerie no matter how often we're told it's not."   "It's bleak, creepy, and occasionally terrifying," added Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader.

Terrifying is just the beginning.  

I hope you have enjoyed this look back on the 1985 psychological thriller for children, Return to Oz.  Okay, Psychological Thriller is a little dramatic but after revisiting the film all of these decades later and researching it more, it’s darkness has stood out for me even though it has been so long since I last saw it.  My sister was very easily spooked and this movie was no exception.  Another one of her (and my) most hated thriller films was Silence of the Lambs.  After seeing that movie as a teenager, my sister always wanted to be accompanied to any basement and while I sort of teased it for it, it is a good reminder of just how much something scary can really stick with you, even when you are an adult.  If you are enjoying the Pop Culture Retrospective Podcast, please do myself and yourself a favor and subscribe and rate the show!  Please tell your family and friends about the show!  You can contact me anytime, my email address is:  popcultureretrospective@gmail.com or you can follow me on Twitter, I’m @popcultureretro.  I hope you will join me for my next show where we will discuss the short lived time in the spotlight of none other than Vanilla Ice.  Until then, be kind, be safe and hold on to your memories.