Welcome back to White Rose of Avalon, my Darlings.   Today’s post is about the 1985 Disney film Return to Oz and just how strange it is in the best ways possible!   I recently re-watched this film for the first time since High School, and wow, it is just as eerie as I remembered it to be.   I truly liked this film as a child and teenager but had not watched it in far too long.   I did remember much of its bizarre nature, and I am so glad I revisited it, as it is a really fun film starring a young Fairuza Balk as Dorothy!    

As the title suggests, Return to Oz is a sequel to The Wizard of Oz.   According to the credits, it is based on the second two Oz books by L. Frank Baum, The Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz.   The film begins a month after Dorothy returns from Oz for the first time, with Aunt Em growing increasingly worried over the fact that her niece has not been able to stop talking about the fantastical land she had ventured to and is having trouble sleeping.   Of course, Aunt Em does not believe that Oz exits and thinks Dorothy is going crazy after the events of the tornado, so she takes her to a psychiatric hospital.

Dorothy speaks candidly with the doctor during her visit, and Aunt Em leaves her at the hospital overnight to get treatment, which will obviously be ECT, due to the film being set at the end of 1899.   The doctor had even shown the ECT machine to Aunt Em and Dorothy before Aunt Em left!   Luckily, Dorothy is able to get away before any electroconvulsive therapy can be performed on her, thanks to the help of another young girl at the facility.   This is how Dorothy ends up finding herself in Oz again.   This time, instead of her dog Toto, she has the hen from the farm along for company!   The hen is named Billina, and she can talk when she is in Oz.   

However, the Oz that Dorothy finds herself in is not the one she left behind.   The residents of Oz, including the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man, have been turned to stone.   The Emerald City has been decimated, and the area is patrolled by creepy beings called Wheelers!   The Wheelers are often the thing about this film that scarred young viewers the worst because they do have an uncanny quality to them.   In the story, Dorothy and Billina are luckily able to hide from the Wheelers and find an automaton wind-up robot named Tik-Tok in a shed.   Tik-Tok had been sent to the area by Scarecrow the King (yes, the Scarecrow from Dorothy’s adventures had been King of Oz) to await Dorothy’s arrival, but he had run out of time, needing to be wound up again.   When Dorothy winds him up, he is able to give her the information about the Nome King usurping Scarecrow as King and turning everyone to stone!

This is what leads the trio to go to the castle of Princess Mombi, looking for answers.    Princess Mombi is a very unsettling character for many people, as she literally changes her head!   There is an entire hall of women’s heads that Mombi changes for her own when she grows tired of the one she is wearing.   She even states that she would like to have Dorothy’s head when she gets older!   As a reminder, this was a Disney movie released for children that includes a child nearly getting ECT, encountering the creepy Wheelers, and now being told by a witch Princess that she would like to have her head in this collection.   This was one seriously strange movie for Disney to release, that’s for sure, but in this era, many odd films were released by Disney (most famously The Black Cauldron).   They even had to get the rights to use the Ruby Slippers from MGM, as the books had Silver Slippers, showing the effort put into creating this film.  

Anyway, now that my tangent is over, back to the story.   Dorothy and her friends find a scarecrow-like figure with a Jack-o-lantern head in Mombi’s castle when locked in a room.   He is alive and named Jack Pumpkinhead, and he tells them that his ‘mother’ made him and put him in Mombi’s castle to scare her, which he did, but then Mombi brought him to life and left him in that room.   The ability to bring objects to life inspires Dorothy to bring other things to life to create a sled of sorts for them to escape from Mombi’s castle.   Their adventure then takes them to the Nome King, and they have to outwit him to save Scarecrow and all of Oz!   

The whole sequence with the Nome King is very uncanny in its own way.   Dorothy falls down long shafts and has to find her friends who had been turned into ornaments.   Not to mention, the Nome King is an unsettling figure who is made of stone, like a cave wall come to life!   I find the way the Nome King is portrayed to give off vibes of the Green Knight, but made of stone instead of greenery, but that just could be my own interpretation.   In any case, Dorothy succeeds in setting her friends free and defeating the Nome King!

When Dorothy and her friends return to Oz, she finds out the girl who helped her to escape was Ozma, the rightful Queen of Oz, and Dorothy is able to save her from the mirror she had been trapped in by Mombi.   That leaves Ozma to rule as Queen alongside Scarecrow, regaining his role as King.   Dorothy then asks to be sent home to Aunt Em, but Billina chooses to stay in Oz.   Dorothy is reminded by Ozma that she can always ask to return to Oz if she wants to.   The film ends happily with the psychiatric hospital burning down, and Dorothy reunited with her Aunt and Uncle!

Overall, the film is a unique and darker take on Oz than one would expect from a film made by Disney (but as I mentioned earlier, this is the same timeframe when they made The Black Cauldron), let alone one connected with the MGM classic in any way.   But I love it for its strange and creepy energy and just how different it is from the original!   It must be stated that the darker tone is more in line with the original books by L. Frank Baum, as older children’s media was less fearful of being too frightening for children.   There are even elements here that are reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, making me love it all the more.   I hope you have enjoyed my rambling thoughts and recap of this wild ride of a Disney film.   Do you enjoy Return to Oz?   Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!  

Note on Image: The image at the top of the post is the original film poster. I found it at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089908/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1_tt_8_nm_0_in_0_q_return%20to%20.

LINK TO AVALONIAN ROSE FAERY MYSTERIES PATREON: patreon.com/AvalonianRoseFaeryMysteries   

Further Watching/Reading

• Return to Oz (1985)
• The Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum
• Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum