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A slew of fantasy movies were made in the 1980s. They were adapted from some of the genre’s favorite characters or original stories influenced by them. Whether it was a more adult affair like Robert E. Howard’s Conan The Barbarian or the family-friendly NeverEnding Story based on the book by Michael Ende, audiences were transported to strange lands with fantastic creatures, but familiar personalities.
Everybody wanted a piece of the genre’s pie, including Walt Disney Studios, which spent years trying to make a sequel to 1939’s The Wizard Of Oz, adapted from the novel by L. Frank Baum. Due to the enduring popularity of the MGM movie and the property entering the public domain in 1956, Baum’s Land of Oz has been adapted into many different mediums. Walt Disney Productions finally got to take their crack at it with 1985’s Return to Oz.
Before Middle Earth and Narnia, there was the Land of Oz. The first entry in the Oz series was penned in 1900. Dorothy, Toto, and the denizens of Oz were initially brought to life by W. W. Denslow’s illustrations throughout the books. Baum expanded the world of Oz to fourteen books before his death in 1919. His publisher, Reilly and Lee, continued publishing books in the series annually through 1963, making the total forty books in the series.
While Baum’s books were aimed at children, sometimes the imagery in them was not. For example, the Tin Woodman has a much different origin compared to his MGM movie equivalent. The neck-snapping revenge the Scarecrow exacts once saved by Dorothy goes against his good-natured counterpart. Director Walter Murch decided to lean into this aspect while making his adaptation based on the second and third books in the series, The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz.
Return to Oz tells the continuing story of Dorothy Gale, our returning protagonist six months after her first romp through Oz. Since her return, Dorothy has suffered from insomnia and longed to reunite with her friends over the rainbow. She had been trying to find her ruby slippers, which were lost on her way back home. While out on the farm one day, she finds a ring that says “Oz” and shows it to Aunt Em, who writes it off to Dorothy’s delusions.
These ramblings about Oz have concerned Aunt Em and Uncle Henry so much, they decide to take Dorothy to a sanitarium to try an experimental procedure called electroshock therapy. It’s here Return to Oz takes a page from MGM’s playbook; Murch makes the parallels between the movie’s characters in Kansas and their counterparts in Oz with Dr. Worley and his staff at the sanitarium serve as stand-ins for the villains of Oz.
While waiting for treatment, Dorothy meets a young girl about her age. After a storm causes a power outage, Dorothy and the girl escape and fall into a river where she is transported to Oz with Billina, a now-talking chicken from the Gale family’s farm. However, Oz has noticeably changed, especially Emerald City. As she walks around, she finds the Yellow Brick Road destroyed, and the Emerald City in ruins. Its people, including Dorothy’s friends from her first adventure, have been turned to stone.
As she travels, Dorothy finds new allies and enemies. She is discovered by the Wheelers—creatures with the tenacity of the Wicked Witch’s flying monkeys, but with only wheels for hands and feet. They squeal and squawk at Dorothy as they trap her in Emerald City. She finds a wind-up robot named Tik-Tok, who saves her from the Wheelers and takes her to the castle at the behest of the missing King of Oz, the Scarecrow.
They encounter Princess Mombi and her collection of about thirty removable, but wearable, heads. Mombi informs Dorothy there’s room for one more and hers will be ripe for the picking in a few years. Mombi locks Dorothy in the tower. While there, Dorothy meets Jack Pumpkinhead—who has a body made from tree limbs and a jack-o’-lantern for a head—and the Gump, the mounted head of an elk-like creature. Together, they help Dorothy escape to the mountains where she confronts Oz’s new big bad, the Nome King, a claymation, stop motion nightmare. The Nome King has cruelly been using Dorothy’s ruby slippers to rule Oz.
The Nome King offers to send her back to Kansas and continue his tyranny over Oz. Dorothy refuses, which angers him and morphs him into a claymation atrocity that starts eating his allies, until Billina saves the day and drops a poisonous (to him) egg down his throat. While celebrating their victory over the Nome King, it is revealed that the girl Dorothy saw in the sanitarium is Ozma, the true ruler of Oz. Given the horrors Dorothy has escaped in Oz, it is safe to say she is relieved that the sanitarium staff has been dealt with by the proper authorities upon her return to Kansas.
Return to Oz was released during a strange time in Walt Disney Productions’ history, where most of their live-action movies, while original, had elements of horror. Other adaptations included The Watcher in the Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes, the latter being adapted from the book of another famous American author, Ray Bradbury. While there are many fantasy aspects in Return to Oz, make no mistake: this is a much scarier affair. The film’s reception was tepid upon release but found an audience and has since become a cult classic.
Disney released Oz The Great and Powerful nearly thirty years after Return to Oz, with director Sam Raimi, known for his Evil Dead trilogy. While there are some intense moments and great casting, its thrills and scares don’t hold a candle to Walter Murch’s take on the material. Return to Oz stands as a unique and haunting take on the Oz series, deviating from the family-friendly tone of its predecessor. Whether you praise Walter Murch’s bold choices or despise him for picking and choosing the elements he wanted to from the original movie, there’s no denying that this movie is a ride and his own. In a time, where horror movies are being made based of classically beloved material as it enters the public domain, Return to Oz was able to inadvertently pioneer the concept and get it released through Disney.
