Almost Equal Sequels Part XV: Return To Oz

I apologize for the length of time it has taken for me to get back on the saddle to get back in the saddle as well in writing.  I would love to give a few excuses, but they would all pale in comparison to the truth: I was on a classified mission to save the world and the details can’t come out until 2164.  This message will self-destruct in 2163, as to protect this information even more.  Anyways, on with the show!

The 1980s were a fantastic time for children’s and young adult film fare!  I’m not going to say that my generation had the best films.  Far be it for me to be that presumptuous.  What I will say is that my generation was the last one to get a steady supply of great films.  It was the last decade where it was okay to get away with darker stories, or at the very least, that danced with the devil in the pale moonlight for a bit.  After this, kids’ movies were surrounded by Nerf, enveloped by more bright colors and pastels, and, worst of all, became safer, more saccharine, more chewable.

But in the 1980s?  Oh, we had a treasure trove of darkness.  The beginning of the decade saw Luke and Han get their arses kicked in The Empire Strikes Back.  Then the floodgates opened up.  The Neverending Story, Time Bandits, and Young Sherlock Holmes.  Jim Henson gave us The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and the darker Muppets Take Manhattan.  (Even Follow that Bird was dark!  Well, it was!)  There was D.A.R.Y.L. and Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.  We had animated features like The Secret of NIMH and All Dogs Go To Heaven and The Care Bears Movie and Transformers: The Movie thrown at us.  And lest we forget, Batman was smothered in so much darkness, that it was hard to make out shapes until we brought the toys home.

Even Disney didn’t shy away from making darker and more daring choices.  Something Wicked This Way Comes came and Flight of the Navigator flew.  There was The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron.  And Disney also released a little film called Return to Oz.

The Sequel:  Return to Oz (1985)

Original Movie: The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Key Cast/Production Staff Returning from 1^st Installment:

L. Frank Baum

Original Author (Hey, I know it isn’t much, but it’s something!)

To Start With:

Ozma: “Why did they bring you here, Dorothy?”

Dorothy: “Because I can’t sleep, and I talk about a place that I’ve been to, but nobody believes that it exists.”

I’ve said it before, even though I’m too lazy to look it up: making a sequel to what some consider to be one of the greatest films ever made always seems ridiculous.  1939’s The Wizard of Oz transcended film, becoming part of the cultural lexicon to this day.  Even people who never saw the film or read the book know of Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion and Toto too!  Everyone knows about yellow brick roads and wicked witches and flying monkeys and ruby slippers and lions and tigers and bears!  Oh, my!

Creator L. Frank Baum wrote a whole series of Oz adventures.  A wealth of story material is there to be translated into films.  However, it is odd that, unlike some other series, the Oz books haven’t really had their cinematic potential tapped.  Why bother with more Tolkien threadbare retreads, Harry Potter streaming shows, and comic book cul-de-sacs when there still is no real Oz cinematic universe?

Walt Disney saw the potential, innovator that he was.  To be fair, back in the day, Disney didn’t shy away from the darker elements in the animated features he was releasing.  Pinnochio and Bambi have very dark and scary moments.  Cinderella has her horrible step-family.  Fantasia doesn’t shy away from portraying evil.  The witches of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty were terrifying.

Disney secured the rights to use the Oz books for his TV show.  However, these plans never really came to extensive fruition before Walt’s passing.  By the 1980s, the Disney company still had the rights to the Oz books.  However, the rights were going to expire unless Disney Studios put something into production.  So how to make use of the Oz saga in a film for a new generation?  And who would direct it?

Walter Murch was a sound designer and editor who had worked on The Godfather, The Conversation, American Graffiti, and Apocalypse Now.  He had never dipped his toe into the directing pool, but with the support of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, Return to Oz would be Murch’s debut as director.  (Hopefully, he learned from Coppola and therefore wouldn’t overpay Brando for a role.  You laugh, but I could just see him as the Gump.  “But Walter…I don’t feel like a sofa with a moose’s head…”)

Instead of competing with The Wizard of Oz, Murch went in a different direction as he co-wrote the script.  There would be no blazing color, no cutesy creatures, and no whimsical tunes.  Instead, this would be a darker film, with some scarier elements sprinkled around for good measure.  And for some, those scarier parts would be nightmare fuel for decades.  Just imagine being a kid trying to sleep after seeing a hallway full of decapitated heads or a gaggle of Wheelers screeching after you!  (Actually, you try to sleep when you realize that the crude electroshock therapy depicted in the film was viewed by some back in the day as an authentic cure-all.  Once again, reality is far more terrifying than anything imagined.)

Return to Oz was an amalgam of the second and third Oz books.  Since there weren’t going to be colorfully dressed little people, flying monkeys, or trees getting miffed about getting their apples picked, Return to Oz had a lot of leeway in telling its story.  It could take some chances that the MGM classic didn’t even dare to try.  Dorothy Gale, Aunt Em, Uncle Henry, and the Scarecrow all are back, with Toto, the Tin Woodsman, and the Cowardly Lion being present but barely seen in the finished product. 

Aside from using some of the characters I mentioned, the only real connection to the 1939 film is the use of ruby slippers instead of the silver ones mentioned in the novels.  (The other connection was asking Buddy Ebsen if he wanted to try out the make-up again while rudely laughing in his face when he chose to decline the opportunity.)

So with a darker story on hand, an almost $30 million budget, and large expectations to live up to, Return to Oz was ultimately released in June of 1985.  Would it become a film legend in its own right?  More to the point, would it be an embarrassment for Disney?  To be even pointier, would it even be more embarrassing than Disney’s latter-day Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Marvel output?     

Anything Done Better than the Original?

Dorothy: “When did you learn to talk anyway? I thought hens could only cluck and cackle.”

Billina: “Strange, ain’t it? How’s my grammar?”

The effects in Return to Oz are quite good, using elaborate make-up, animatronics, puppetry, and even stop-motion animation.  The companions on the trip this time required a bit more than was possible in 1939.  The movements of the Jack Pumpkinhead puppet are pulled off to great effect, as are the workings of The Gump. Tik Tok’s armored, proto-steampunk looks very believable.  The Scarecrow’s makeup effects also look closer to his depiction in the Oz books resulting in a nice effect.  There’s also a talking chicken!  Quite remarkable.

The stop motion and layers of change with the Nome King are treats as well.  Going from the Claymation effect to gradually becoming more human-looking and then back again still looks good today.  Call me old fashioned and bring me an Old Fashioned, but I believe practical effects that are done well always have a more substantive look than anything CG or AI or any other mush of abbreviations can produce.  (Now where’s that Old Fashioned?)

Getting back to Return to Oz though, one thing that I appreciate on a personal note is that there are no songs.  Yes, the original is a classic, loaded with toe-tappers that worm into your ears, but as I’m not a musical fan per se, having no musical interludes is just right with me.  True, they could have made it a colorful musical extravaganza with Disney forking over cargo loads of cash to get the rights to reprise the popular songs.  But nope.  They didn’t.  And I’m completely good with that.

Also, there is no recap of the previous events.  Return to Oz assumes you’ve seen the first movie or read the first book, and it wastes no time in getting right to the meat of the story.  No real recap, no preamble, so buckle up and go.  Yes, it defies expectations, but given the circumstances, I think that Return to Oz must take that course to have its own identity as a film.  They went their own way in an established universe while using a darker framework.  Granted, that takes some chutzpah, but I’m glad they took the chance.

Think I’m wrong?  Look at the tornado effects in the 1939 film.  Just watch that sequence; those effects have yet to be topped to this day.  No amount of CGI will ever be as convincing as what the effects guys did in 1939.  That cyclone looks like an authentic nasty piece of work, never letting up.  Think I’ll watch it again, it is that good.

Anything as Good as the Original?

“I am only a machine. So I can not be sorry or happy, no matter what happens.”

Fairuza Balk is simply terrific.  The role of Dorothy could have been cloying and irritating, but Balk does a great job as Dorothy.  I’m fully invested in her character.  Not that Judy Garland was bad or unwatchable, not at all.  I just like watching Balk work as an actress, seeing how even as a child, she was able to pull off being believable in a fantasy like this.  Kudos to her.  (Now if you want to scratch the itch of wanting to see an elderly childlike Dorothy in an Oz movie, go see Diana Ross in 1978’s The Wiz. Even in The Wiz, she’s supposed to be just 24. But Ross was 34 in 1978. Yeah….)

And even though it takes two villains to make up for the lack of the great Wicked Witch that was Margaret Hamilton, the baddies in Return to Oz are both a treat.  Nicol Williamson as the Nome King is wonderful how he menacingly manipulates all concerned.  In truth, Williamson is even scarier in his other role as the seemingly matter of fact quack doctor who seeks to hook Dorothy up to an electric chair for “treatment”.  (Have I mentioned it takes serious cajónes to blend your Oz movie with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?  Yeah, cajónes the size of the boulder that ran after Indiana Jones in Raiders.)

To that end, Jean Marsh as the nurse in the first part of the film is tapping into Nurse Ratched territory and it works well.  Marsh also has another role, playing Mombi, the Wicked Witch of the North.  She’s good when she’s interacting with Dorothy and that wonderful hall of decapitated interchangeable heads.  However, Mombi sadly disappears from the action a bit too soon, literally playing catch-up for the rest of the film.  But overall, a nice partner-in-crime with the Nome King.

Anything Not-So-Good as the Original?

“We come all this way to see a bunch a stiffs.”

While the side characters such as Jack Pumpkinhead and The Gump have some good effects to bring them to life, they really aren’t that developed.  By the end of The Wizard of Oz, I can see someone in the audience crying when Dorothy is leaving, saying goodbye to Scarecrow.  Those characters had their individual backstories and the film spent time with each of them even as they skipped on the yellow brick road.

In Return to Oz, some colorful characters are introduced, but there’s just not enough time to build them up, showing the bond that they have with Dorothy.  Even the great Tik Tok doesn’t have enough quiet moments with Dorothy, which is a shame.  Perhaps trying to meld together two books’ worth of material into one movie didn’t allow for the whole story to breathe as well because too many ideas were jammed in there. 

To that end, the ending gets wrapped up far too quickly and tidily.  Again, cramming that much material into Return to Oz probably dictated that the film had to be a bit shorter.  Despite a runtime of 113 minutes, the ending still seems to be slapdash in comparison to what has led us up to this point.  I don’t think Return to Oz needs an extended cut as much as a better story construction to accommodate the ideas at hand.  Even the quack doctor character gets his comeuppance off camera, which admittedly isn’t as satisfying as it could have been if he were seen handcuffed to Jean Marsh in a Scooby-Doo-ish ending due to those “meddling kids”! 

Anything Far Worse than the Original?

“If I had a stomach, I know I would be sick!”

While the film does go to great lengths to distance itself from its predecessor, Return to Oz really hits the realistic time frame home.  And I don’t think it needed to be that mired in so much reality at the start.  For one thing, it takes up a lot of time to establish the universe that ultimately we really don’t spend a lot of time in.  It also makes Aunt Em look like a royal uptight stick in the mud and Uncle Henry seems to be a bit of a henpecked dolt.    

Let’s just say, the best tornado effects of all time are hard to follow up indeed.  However, Return to Oz goes to great lengths to show the comparatively lame way Dorothy gets to Oz this time around.  In fact, I’d say that Dorothy probably is nuts, making up these Oz stories all the time whilst swimming in the deep end of a pool of unconsciousness.  In the first one, there was a twister destroying everything in its path, throwing window frames right into Dorothy’s noggin.  This time around there’s no tornado, but there is a rain machine and a lightning effect for a cheaper storm.  Dorothy gets knocked out in the mud and boom, that’s it, she’s in Oz.  I can readily understand why Aunt Em wants Dorothy hooked up to a Die Hard to see if they can remove these delusions of Oz from her niece’s beleaguered psyche.

Follow-up installments?

 “Don’t you… know that… eggs are… poison?”

Return to Oz was not a box office success, however, I don’t think is truly the fault of the film.  I think general audiences were expecting Munchkins and charming songs.  Instead, they got something a bit grittier and a smidge unsettling.  Frankly, the Oz books themselves already had darker elements within the pages, so for tried-and-true Baum readers, Return to Oz plays rather well.  The rest of the audience stayed away because they knew that despite Judy Garland’s incredible reservoir of talent, it was extremely unlikely she was going to make an appearance in the film.

To this day, I don’t know why there hasn’t been a proper Oz series of films. There was the mostly forgotten animated Journey Back to Oz in 1972. There have been plenty of pastiches that tiptoe around the original stories like Wicked and Oz the Great and Powerful and Dorothy and the Witches of Oz from 2012, which no one remembers.  Even Tom and Jerry and The Muppets have been to Oz, but as far as a regular film series using the successive books goes, there’s been nothing, nada, zip.   

And Finally:

“I have always valued my lifelessness.”

I think Return to Oz is a great example of the darkness my generation grew up with in our fare.  In my day, parents would just plunk us down in front of the screen and let fire with these darker cautionary tales in the hopes that we would shape up and ship out as better-rounded citizens.  However, namby-pamby parents today get a bit too worried about films like these.  As a result, I think we’ve gone too far the other way, mollycoddling tykes with unimpressive fluff that just explores feelings ad nauseum instead of exposing them to slightly stronger fare with some entertaining stakes. 

Of course, I’m not saying that we go all in and show The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to a four-year-old.  (Frankly, a four-year-old would be rather bored watching that one since it is quite a slow burn before Leatherface starts filling the family freezer.)  Yet I think a healthy middle ground is certainly doable depending on the child’s viewing disposition, interests, and emotional stability.  Or just don’t care like my parents didn’t, letting your kid explore the vast world of cinema without any heavily monitored guardrails!

At any rate, don’t be frightened off by Return to Oz for your kids.  Just comfort your brood by letting them know that back in the day, some parents loved their kids so much that they would send their children away to be violently electroshocked into mental correction.  You see?  Bet those kids will sleep like childlike rocks after hearing that!  Thank you, 1980s!  And seriously, where’s my Old Fashioned?!

Jack Pumpkinhead: “If his brain’s ran down, how can he talk?”

Dorothy: “It happens to people all the time, Jack.”