Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Return to Oz

In this classic episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe venture into the magical world of Oz – not the 1939 version, but the dark fantasy stylings of 1985’s “Return to Oz,” featuring electrotherapy, nightmarish wheelers and other strange delights. (originally published 08/19/2022)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, Welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob Lamb.
Today we are taking you back to an episode that
originally published eight nineteen twenty twenty two. This is going
to be nineteen eighty five's Return to Oz. Oh, it's
a magically dark time. Let's dive right in.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb
and this is Joe McCormick. And this week we've got
a fun family picture for everybody. It is an OZ film,
but you don't have to endure any songs. It's also
that special variety of nineteen eighty's big budget fantasy film
that leans more than a little into what some of

(00:56):
you might describe as dark fantasy. We are going to
be telling talking about nineteen eighty five's Return to Oz.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
People have been telling me for years that I needed
to watch this movie. They'd figure out what like my
weird taste was, and they were like, you've ever seen
Return to Oz. That movie messed me up when I
was a kid. You should watch it And I never
did until last night, and I am absolutely blown away.
I in fact, I'm a little bit sad, truly, like,

(01:27):
not just to joking around. I am a little bit
sad that I did not actually see this as a child,
because I know this is this is precisely the kind
of movie that if I'd seen it when I was
seven or whatever, I would have been thinking about it
for months, Like it has just the right mix of

(01:47):
you know, bizarre original imagery and character types that are
not just like, you know, the characters you'd find in
any other fantasy thing. Is you know, it's truly original,
but a strange combinations of ideas that still nevertheless tap
into something very deep and archetypal. I think this is
a wonderful, scary children's movie.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
I think it's great. I never watched it growing up either,
and I think part of it was just because the
nineteen thirty nine adaptation of the Wizard of Oz is
just such a monolith and such an you know, such
an influential film, but also one that so many people
held close to their hearts that when this film came out,

(02:30):
there were plenty of people who are like, oh, we
don't we don't want that new Oz. We've got that
old Oz. It comes on television all the time and
or we have it on VHS. Why do we need
to dip into this thing that that summer even saying
is a little frightening. But here's the thing. Yes, we've
been hearing from people say, oh this is you know,
this is a weird film you need to watch. This
is a scary one where this messed me up as

(02:52):
a child. I really don't think this one is any
darker or scarier than any of the other big eighties
fantasy film like Labyrinth or the never Ending story stuff
of that caliber.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
Oh yeah, I agree. In fact, I don't think it's
actually even scarier than the thirty nine Wizard of Oz,
which if you go back and watch the original Wizard
of Oz, this movie gave me a new appreciation for
how weird and how scary the original is. I'm serious, Like,
if you you kind of accept it because it's part
of the air we breathe, The Wizard of Oz is.

(03:24):
You know, you grow up with that. It's just part
of American culture, so it doesn't seem that strange. But yeah,
it also has very unusual characters and imagery and and
there is real tense, frightening, magical peril in it. Do
you remember how heart stopping that scene is when you're
a kid and the witch turns the hourglass over and
says Dorothy's gonna die, and the and the you know,

(03:46):
the monkey soldiers are everywhere, and the tin man's with
the axe trying to chop down the door, like it
the original one is scary.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah, I always thought that the forest was pretty terrifying.
So yeah, there's plenty of plenty of weird and scary
stuff in that that thirty nine adaptation as well. And
it's funny. We were conversing before we went in here.
You noted that I had a couple of sort of
jabs at the thirty nine Wizard of Oz, and so
you asked me if I hated the original Wizard of
Oz film, and I said, no, no, And truly I

(04:18):
think it's kind of impossible to hate the thirty nine film.
I mean, it's such, like I said, it's a cinematic monolith.
It's so influential, Like even if you're not crazy about it,
it probably influenced some creators or some works that came
in its wake, you know, like more directly, if you
didn't have the Wizard of Oz from nineteen thirty nine,

(04:39):
you wouldn't have The Whiz, and of course you wouldn't
have this film either, but its tentacles run far and
long through fiction and dream weaving that came to follow.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
But more to your point about I guess how you
might have heard about this movie when you were a kid,
if people were saying, oh, you know, it doesn't live
up to the original, it's not worth seeing, or something.
I in a way, I think it's kind of silly
to try to compare them, because it's I think it's
called an unofficial sequel. It is clearly a sequel to
The Wizard of Oz, like the events followed directly from
the first one, but it's also not not like an official,

(05:13):
sanctioned one. And it came decades later. The original was
what thirty nine, and this is eighty five, so what
like forty six years in between. It was a long time,
and and that makes a big difference in terms of
tone and you know, the textures that are expected in
a movie like this, Like the original one has a
kind of a kind of gilded grandeur of old Hollywood

(05:35):
about it, whereas this one feels much more. I mean,
it feels like an eighties movie, but a lovely, scrappy,
imaginative one.

Speaker 1 (05:44):
Yeah. Yeah, and it's a it is. It is a
world in which the Emerald City is literally in ruins.
So there's probably a lot to say there about like
the state of of of the eighties mindset compared to
the late thirties mindset. I don't know, at least in
terms of like cinematic portrayals. But yeah, it is impossible though,

(06:07):
to go into this and not think of the thirty
nine film sometimes unfairly so. I actually watched this with
my whole family. We sat down and watched it, and
my son he really enjoyed this one. He enjoyed the
old one, but he was bringing up some things. He's like, well,
why is Dorothy younger now? And also why didn't Toto
talk in the last film. This film clearly established that

(06:28):
animals that come to Oz can talk. Wow, come Toto
never talked? That's some bs.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
Brilliant observation by your son. I did not notice this myself,
but yeah, So the premise of this movie is that
all the animals in Oz talk, and this includes animals
that are brought to Oz, such as one of the
main characters in this movie, which is a chicken that's
like a cool gnarly grandma. And the chicken talks. It
didn't talk when it was in Kansas, but it comes

(06:54):
to Oz with Dorothy talks now, so yes, you are
your son is absolutely correct. Toto should have to in
the original. This is a major oversight.

Speaker 1 (07:03):
Now, speaking of the chicken, whose name is Billina, I
have to mention the other reason I really love Returned
to Oz is I think it has better companions because, yes,
we encounter in this film, we do see ten Man again, Scarecrow,
cowardly lyon, but Dorothy has basically all new companions that
she goes on the adventure with here and it's I'm

(07:24):
going to list him here for it for us so
we can get a taste of what's to come. We
have Billina, the talking chicken, and this is wonderfully accomplished
via live action chicken actors and an incredible chicken puppet
that is just light years ahead of what we saw
in Thrilling Bloody Sword last week. Though I do love
both chickens.

Speaker 3 (07:42):
They are both great robotic chickens, but this one is
much more convincing as a chicken.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
Yes, then we have TikTok, who is a rotund, wind up,
mustachioed soldier made out of like bronze or brass.

Speaker 3 (07:57):
I was thinking copper, but yeah, it's one of those.
He's a metal wind up war machine.

Speaker 1 (08:02):
Yeah, he's a steampunk soldier and he's fighting on behalf
of the Emerald City and Dorothy. Oh, and then the
next one we have we have the Gump, and the
Gump is basically a junk gollum. It's like junk is
put together a moose's head on a couch with some
ferns and whatever else they could scare. They are able
to assemble together and then it's given life. And you

(08:25):
gotta love the Gump.

Speaker 3 (08:26):
They like shake some borax powder on it and that
makes it come to life.

Speaker 1 (08:29):
Yeah. Oh, and then we have Jack Pumpkinhead, who is
kind of a superior Halloween themed scarecrow sort of guy.
Would you say that's fair? Yeah.

Speaker 3 (08:38):
Jack Pumpkinhead is interesting because he has the scariest form
of all of Dorothy's companions, but his nature is to
be incredibly innocent and sweet.

Speaker 1 (08:48):
So that's the crew. That's the adventuring party for this film.

Speaker 3 (08:52):
But one has to wonder, Okay, wait a minute, what
more adventures are there to have in Oz because the
last time Dorothy was in Oz, didn't they defeat the
way Could Witch? And then everything was cool in Emerald City,
like they had a big ceremony. Was basically to celebrate
the fact that now everything's good and nothing bad. Every
is gonna happen again.

Speaker 1 (09:09):
I was trying to think back to exactly how The
Wizard of Oz ended. Did it end with the Scarecrow
becoming king of the Emerald City?

Speaker 3 (09:17):
I don't remember if it did or not. So that's
the premise of this movie, is that at the end
of the last one, the Scarecrow was king. That's a
detail that I could see being in the original that
I forgot about, but I didn't check to make sure.
But either way, things are good in Oz. When Dorothy leaves,
remember she's gonna leave on the balloon. But then the
professor or not the Professor, I think it's the guy,

(09:40):
the guy from like the Carnival Barker Charlatan guy, and
he's like, oh, he floats away on the balloon. He
doesn't know how to bring it back. And then she
thinks she stranded in Oz. But then she clicks her
heels together with the ruby slippers and says there's no
place like home, and then she wakes up back in
her bed and you were there, and you were there
and it was great.

Speaker 1 (09:59):
But basically the the pitch here is that in the
previous movie, the Previous Adventure anyway, Dorothy greatly destabilized Oz.
She ends up installing her own ruler, the Scarecrow, and
I get the impression of the Scarecrow's rule of Oz
last like maybe an afternoon before he is then conquered

(10:19):
by an entity known as the Nome King, and now
it's time for Dorothy to come back to Oz and
fix everything once more.

Speaker 3 (10:27):
The villains in this movie are Sue perb just excellent,
some of my new favorite movie villains of all time,
Gene Marsh as Momby, and Nicol Williamson is the Nome King.
They should go in the Hall of Fame of Children's
movie fantasy movie Villains.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
Yeah, they absolutely should, And it makes sense because we
often forget again just because how well known the thirty
nine Wizard of Oz film is. But Margaret Hamilton is
a terrific villain in that film, playing Miss gulch And
and of course the Wicked Witch of the East. I mean,
it's just a great cackling performance that you don't even

(11:06):
think of as a performance after a while, Like that
is just the wicked witch on the screen there.

Speaker 3 (11:11):
Wait, is she the east or the West? I thought
she was the west?

Speaker 1 (11:13):
Is she the west? We have a good No, Wait,
the East is the eastern witch? Is the one who
had the house dropped on her? Is that correct?

Speaker 3 (11:20):
I think that is right? Yes, I was correct. Margaret
Hamilton is the West. We never see the East. You
just see her socks.

Speaker 1 (11:26):
Both of those witches though out of the picture. Though.
At one point Mamby, who will get into here in
a bit, is described as a witch. So I guess
she's keeping the witching tradition going.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
Yeah. I like how she's first described I think as
a princess and then later as a witch. But I
guess we'll get into more detail later. Mamby is just wonderful. Well,
I guess you already sort of gave the elevator pitch right.
It's like, so Dorothy came in, she did a foreign intervention.
She installed a puppet ruler in the form of the Scarecrow.
Scarecrow has been deposed. Now Dorothy is back to Oz

(11:57):
and it's up against the Nome King.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
That's right, Let's go ahead and hear some trailer audio.
Four Returned to Oz.

Speaker 4 (12:13):
This summer, Walt Disney Pictures presents a motion picture fantasy
adventure beyond your fondest imagination. You'll be transported miraculously back
to the enchanted land of Oz, that magical kingdom beloved
by young and old for generations. It's just a.

Speaker 1 (12:32):
Yellow bick, no bollina, you don't understand. This was the
yellow Wick road.

Speaker 4 (12:40):
You'll share with Dorothy Gale, the shock of finding everything
mysteriously changed everybody, and you'll delight with her discovery of
four wonderful new friends who band together against a wicked
queen of the dreaded Long King. This is the Ours
you have seen before, and this is the Ours you'll

(13:02):
want to visit again and again. More Disney Pictures comes
a whole of entertainments. I don't just fly back to
Kansas too. Wow.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
All right, now, before we go any further here, I
do want to mention where you can watch this. Where
you can watch it just about anywhere. This is a
big release. It may not have performed especially well at
the box office, I understand, but Yeah, you can find
it in multiple different forms these days. If you subscribe
to Disney Plus, at least in the United States, you

(13:43):
can watch it there. That's where we watched it.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
Yeah, I watched Disney Plus two.

Speaker 1 (13:47):
All right, well, let's get into some of the people
behind this. I'm going to start at the top, and
that is with a director who also has a screenplay
credit on this. It is Walter Merch born nineteen forty three,
highly influential Hollywood sound and film editor who worked on
such pictures as THHX eleven, thirty eight, American Graffiti, The

(14:09):
Godfather Part two, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient, and I
think I think those are some of the ones where
he did sound. But he also was a film editor
on such films as Apocalypse Now, Ghost, Romeo Is Bleeding,
The Godfather Part three, and much more. The Lucas connection
is also interesting because when you look at Walter Murch's

(14:30):
directorial credits, there are only two titles there. There's Return
to Oz, which of course is what we're discussing here today.
This is only film directing credit, and then he doesn't
direct anything else. But he does pop up as a
director on a twenty eleven episode of Star Wars, the
Clone Wars, the animated series, and I was immediately curious, Okay,

(14:51):
which which episode was this, because I've seen them all
with my son, And it is an episode titled The General,
and it's a pretty great episode. It's one of the
episodes in a multi episode story arc concerning the Republic's
campaign on a planet called Umbara. So it's this shadowy
kind of world. They're not fighting the droids of the Separatists,

(15:12):
they're fighting another separatist faction, and the Clones are under
the ruthless leadership of one General Palm Krell, who is
this forearmed basilisque creature. But he's like a really just
ruthless general who is ready to just sacrifice as many
Clone lives as necessary to win the day. So it's ultimately,

(15:34):
I think one of the one of the best story
arcs you see in that series. And so they brought
in Walter Merch to direct this one episode, so I
thought that was pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (15:43):
Well for a mostly one and done director's filmography, this
is a strong entry. I much respect to Walter Merch.
I wish he had directed more movies.

Speaker 1 (15:53):
Yeah, Now, the screenplay credit the mainscreenplay credit, and this
goes to Gil Dennis, who lived nineteen forty one twenty fifteen,
writer and actor, best known for his work on the
screenplays for This nineteen ninety fives Without Evidence in two
thousand and fives Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash biopick.
As an actor, he played Man with Cigar in nineteen

(16:15):
seventy seven's Eraserhead.

Speaker 3 (16:18):
Oh yeah, I think I read somewhere that he may
have been a classmate of David Lynch, which would make
sense that if he showed up an Eraserhead.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
All right, But of course the screenplay is based on
the work of L. Frank Baum, whose novels I think
in particular, this screenplay is based on two novels, Ozma
of Oz and The Land of Oz. Bomb lived eighteen
fifty six through nineteen nineteen. Bomb was an American author
best known for his novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,

(16:48):
published in nineteen hundred, as well as its many sequels.
And this was fascinating for me because I really didn't
know much about the cinematic history of The Wizard of
Oz pre nineteen thirty nine, but even ahead of the
nineteen thirty nine film adaptation, this was already a highly
successful property. It was a Broadway musical in nineteen oh two.

(17:10):
The thirty nine film, though momentous, wasn't even the first adaptation.
The first attempt was apparently in nineteen oh eight with
the Fairy log and radio plays, followed by at least
a good half dozen silent films adapting the world of Oz.

Speaker 3 (17:25):
Oh man, I've got to see the silent films and
what they do with TikTok and stuff.

Speaker 1 (17:31):
Yeah, they looked that. I didn't get a chance to
really watching them, but they look interesting. We might have
to come back to some of those in the future now.
Of course, following the nineteen thirty nine classic, there's still
plenty of other dips into the world of Oz. There
was an ultra low budget adaptation titled The Wonderful Land
of Oz in nineteen sixty nine. There were a few
different animated adaptations, including a nineteen eighty two Toho produced

(17:54):
Japanese adaptation. There's there's really quite a lot of Oz
related media out there, including such works as the nineteen
seventy five musical and subsequent film, a film adaptation The Whiz,
the book in Broadway musical Wicked, and then there are
all sorts of literary treatments, spinoff illusions and more. Like
I had to think back on it because again, thirty

(18:17):
nine Wizard, especially as such a monolith that you don't
even think about the references to it. But like even
Stephen King includes more than a little OZ sprinkled throughout
his Dark Tower series, and yeah, they're honestly just seems
no end in sight to our fascination with Oz. Baum
wrote seventeen OZ books during his lifetime, numerous other children's
and adventures books as well. But we keep making OZ

(18:41):
related media, and it seems like it's just going to
keep going.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
I've never actually read any of the OZ books, but
I'm kind of tempted to check them out, because, at
least with the two movies, there's so much unexpected original
texture to the fantasy world created here when compared to
most fantasy. Because you know, after you consumed a decent
amount of fantasy, you see a lot of recycled elements.
There's sort of, you know, the standard tropes of high

(19:05):
fantasy that show up again and again. But but the
OZ world is full of bizarre, unfamiliar things and beings.

Speaker 1 (19:14):
Yeah, and one of the things that I'm always hit
with when I when I have looked at you know,
often just cover art and illustrations from these books. Is
that I feel like there's this there's certainly this familiar
sense to it, all due to the cultural impact of
the Wizard of Oz, but also this weird sense that
you get from popular fiction that is very much centered

(19:35):
in a particular past. You know, like I'm I'm not
the intended recipient of these tales, and they're not even
though they're in English in their you know, their American stories.
I don't feel like I am like I have all
of the gear lined up in which to receive the
message that is being sent to me through it.

Speaker 3 (19:55):
Like your operating system no longer supports this software.

Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah, Like I've never lived on a farm in the
middle of a prairie. How am I supposed to take
some of this stuff?

Speaker 3 (20:06):
You know, I see what you're saying.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
Yeah, all right, Well, let's get into the cast here.
Let's talk about Dorothy. This film's Dorothy was played by
Feruza Bauk, who was born in nineteen seventy four, still

(20:28):
active American actor, who might be better known to some
of you for her roles as an adult, but she
started out very young and this was her first motion picture.
Subsequent films included Valmont in nineteen eighty nine, Things to
Do in Denver when You're Dead in nineteen ninety five.
That's an allusion to a Warren Zevon song, by the way,
and of course the big one is The Craft in

(20:48):
nineteen ninety six.

Speaker 3 (20:50):
Oh man, several years back, Rachel and I around Halloween
decided to watch The Craft. And I don't know if
i'd say it's a good movie, but that was a
fun time.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
I don't think I've ever seen it, but you know,
of course I'm familiar with I remember the trailer, isn't all.
But this was a big film, and after this she
was in a string of big films, including The Cursed
nineteen ninety six adaptation of the Island of Doctor Moreau.
Oh is that? Oh yeah, this is the one. If
you're asking, is that the Island of Doctor Moreau, in
which yes it is. Okay, it is the Marlon Brando.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
One, yes, yes, the one where he allegedly had to
be fed his lines through an earpiece because he wouldn't
learn them.

Speaker 1 (21:27):
Yeah, just a I mean, their documentary is about this
is just a ridiculous production. That still is it has
things going for it. I mean it's it's it's oddly
hypnotizing if you catch it on TV and all. I
don't think I've ever given it a dedicated viewing. It
just it was on a lot for a certain amount
of time, I guess back in the late nineties, and

(21:50):
so you would catch bits of it and it's it's
thoroughly weird and just thoroughly a mess.

Speaker 3 (21:54):
Okay, sorry to interrupt.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
American History Acts in nineteen ninety eight is another big one,
almost famous in two thousand and she was also in
Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant Port of Call, New Orleans in
two thousand and nine, which also featured Nick cage Val Kilmer. Again,
he was in the Doctor Moreau movie Jennifer Coolidge, Brad Dorof,
and Michael Shannon.

Speaker 3 (22:15):
I've not seen Port of Call, New Orleans since it
came out, but I've been meaning to revisit it because
that one I remember being a jaw dropping experience.

Speaker 1 (22:25):
Another interesting fact for Usa, Bauk's father, Solomon Felthaus, was
one of the founding members of the psychedelic band Kaleidoscope
and Balk herself is also a musician.

Speaker 3 (22:36):
You know, I feel like we tend to if a
child performance in a movie is bad, we tend not
to dwell on it as much as we might on
a notably bad adult performance, because I don't know, you
don't want to be mean about a child actor. But
I would say not just being nice. She's genuinely great
in this great great performances Dorothy.

Speaker 1 (22:53):
Yeah, she has this great, big eyed engagement. She's always
seems very much a part of the action going on.
Sometimes with kid actors, this kind of just you can
kind of just at times just see a child standing
on a set. You know, there's this less of a
sense that they're connected to their surroundings and the scene
and the characters. But she's totally in there. She helps

(23:15):
make these scenes which often feature no other human characters.
It's all puppets and suits and so forth. I mean,
they're humans inside the suits obviously, but no other visible
human in the scene. And she's able to be that
human center for everything. And also I would say that
she has a confidence, like she's a confident character. It's

(23:35):
a confident performance that maybe make some of the otherwise
scary elements a little less scary, you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (23:41):
Yes, so I agree with that. And at the same time,
she also, firs of all, also has the natural energy
of kind of a government created scanner child who might
make people's heads explode if she doesn't get her string cheese.

Speaker 1 (23:54):
You know, which is I think the appropriate energy for
a child who is able to to journey through the
mists to another dimension ruled by scary individuals scary entities,
and then move back again.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
Yes, so really notably good kid performance. But we've got
to talk about Nicol Williamson. He left me floored in
this movie.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
Yeah, Nichol Williamson plays it's a double role. He plays
doctor Warley, the electricity obsessed physician. And let's say is
a psychologist or his credentials exactly?

Speaker 3 (24:32):
Well, it takes place in nineteen hundred, so I don't
know if they add all the same categories. I guess
he's a psychiatrist, a you know, a physico psychiatrist. This movie,
I will say, takes a firm stance against mental health.
We can explain. We can explain more about that when
we get into the plot. But yes, he plays a
kind of his psychiatrist's character I think is supposed to

(24:54):
be taken in a very negative way, though it's not
as explicitly evil as the Nome King. But he's great
in bo roles.

Speaker 1 (25:00):
Right, yeah, because he had the alter ego in the
Land of Oz is the Nome King that's spelled nog.
But yeah. Williamson lived nineteen thirty six through twenty eleven,
and he's I think he's always a treat, at least
for the viewer. Has discussed in our episode on the
nineteen eighty one snake movie Venom. Williamson had a reputation

(25:22):
apparently for being difficult to work with, which again, sometimes
you don't know exactly what to make of those supposed reputations.
Making movies is obviously complicated, and there are a lot
of personalities involved, So I imagine there's some cases out
there where these reputations are well deserved. Other times there
maybe it's a little more complicated than this person was difficult,

(25:45):
But at any rate, however difficult he was or wasn't
to work with, definitely a great actor. He played Merlin
in the nineteen eighty one movie ex Caliber, which is
a really shiny, very just glistening King Arthur movie. He
also was in the nineteen ninety seven Spawn movie. He
was in The Exorcist three, and he played Sherlock Holmes

(26:06):
in The Seven Percent Solution.

Speaker 3 (26:08):
This is the one that was made by Nicholas Meyer,
who did Time after Time.

Speaker 1 (26:12):
Yeah. Yeah, and he was in tons of other stuff
as well. But yeah, in this movie. The thing about
the Nome King is, I guess the Nome King is
largely a vo character except for the very end of
the film, and even then he's under a lot of makeup,
and I think there's still some voice distortion going on.
But it's still a great role.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
Oh yeah, yeah, I think he is hypnotizing. I just
wish there were more movies where he plays a magical
big bad of some kind. What just occurred to me
when you were talking about like great but difficult actors,
I was thinking, wouldn't it have been great if you
could get a Blade sequel that was Wesley Snipes versus
Nicol Williamson.

Speaker 1 (26:49):
Oh, yeah, it would have been good. Have you seen
ex Caliber No, she plays Merlin. Oh it's a great performance.
He gives a great Merlin. All right, but our main villain,
but we also have a secondary villain and that and
is also a dual role we have. It's Mombi, the
Witch the princess, but also her earthly counterpart is Nurse Wilson.

(27:13):
These characters are played by Jean Marsh.

Speaker 3 (27:16):
Jean Marsh is also just off the charts on this
So good.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
Yeah. Born nineteen thirty four, an awesome British actor who
appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's excellent nineteen seventy two thriller Frenzy,
and many viewers I think will probably best remember her
for her portrayal of the evil witch Queen bav Morda
in nineteen eighty eight's Willow Joe. Have you seen Willow's Been?

Speaker 3 (27:42):
I haven't seen it since I was a kid, basically,
so I don't really remember it except for little little
images here and there I remember. Does that Val Kilmer
like hanging in a cage?

Speaker 1 (27:52):
Yes? Yeah, Val Kilmer is all over the place in
this one as well. But yeah, Jean Marsh plays this
evil witch queen and it's just a wonderful, snarling and
cold role. This movie has I think the greatest witch
versus witch battle ever ever committed on film. Right right

(28:12):
at the end of the picture, It's just a real
like eye gouging, spell slinging kind of encounter. I highly
recommend it. Anyway, Marsh did a lot of TV during
her career, and I believe she's retired now, but those
TV credits include an award winning role on the British
drama series Upstairs Downstairs. She was also on Doctor Who,

(28:33):
an episode of Tales from the Dark Side the Saint,
and even a nineteen to fifty nine episode of the
original Twilight Zone one called The Lonely This is one
I've seen before. This is the one where a convict
living alone on an asteroid which just looks like the desert,
the California desert or something. He receives a female robot

(28:54):
from his captors to help keep him company on the
asteroid for some reason. And anyway, Marsh plays the robot
woman opposite Jack Warden, and Ted Knight is in that
episode too, in an uncredited kind of background role.

Speaker 3 (29:08):
So something that's interesting about Marsh and Nicol Williamson in
this movie is that they both get to play these
dual roles in which in the mundane world in the
world of Kansas, they are presented as villains, but in
a very subtle way, you know, sort of blending in
with society and doing something that from Dorothy's perspective in

(29:31):
the movie we see as wicked. But you know they're
not chewing the scenery, they're not overt. In fact, they
their outward appearances is sort of friendly, or at least
Nicol Williamson's is Jane marsh is kind of cold as
the lady in the clinic. But then you get to
flip the script and go to Oz, where the characters
reappear once again, but as just like frothing monstrous versions

(29:55):
of their mundane world characters.

Speaker 1 (29:57):
Yes, yes, characters that demand over the top performances. Just
you use every muscle in your face. Go ahead and
crank your eye intensity up to to to eleven or twelve.
That's that's the sort of villains that populate the world
of Oz, all right. Now. A few more performers have
note in this. Auntie m aunt Em in This is

(30:19):
played by Piper Laurie born nineteen thirty two. I don't
know about you, Joe, but I thought this was this
was rather hilarious, given yes, that she plays Carrie's mom.
Margaret White in seventy six is Carrie both movies about
special girls with special powers, and this is the and
Piper Laurie plays the moms sort of trying to understand

(30:41):
these these these young women.

Speaker 3 (30:43):
No, I would say, auntim is a is a is
a good caregiver, like she's you know, she she's trying
to be loving. And she does end up taking Dorothy
to a bad place, but she doesn't mean bad. She's
trying to help. And her her benevolence in this movie
is yes, almost hilariously contrasted with the other main roles.

Speaker 1 (31:06):
I can think of her in Yeah, she's aside from Carrie.
She was also in nineteen sixty one's The Hustler, she
was in Twin Peaks and Children of a Lesser God.

Speaker 3 (31:16):
So another funny thing Rachel and I always talk about
whenever Piper Laurie comes up is the the just the
absurdity of the machinations about the mill in Twin Peaks.
Remember that's like one of her main motivations is fighting
about the mill.

Speaker 1 (31:32):
Oh no, no, I don't remember that, all right. So
those are some of the really those are the main
human characters. A lot of the other characters were Gonna
or a lot of the other actors and individuals involved
here are. They're kind of a mix of actual like
physical performers or puppeteers or special effects manipulators. So and
I'm not going to list all of them here, but

(31:53):
some of them stand out because of other work that
they did.

Speaker 3 (31:56):
I like that in the credits at the end of
this movie, when the not human characters appear, they will
be given multiple credits for multiple people playing the role,
like they put the often the puppeteer and the voice
actor side by side. I think that's cool.

Speaker 1 (32:10):
Yeah, yeah, So one name that does stand out is
the voice of Jack Pumpkinhead. It's Brian Henson born nineteen
sixty three. This is, of course the son of the
late Jim Henson, producer, director, actor, and writer. He's of
course been involved in tons of Hinson projects over the decades,
but I think his most treasured place in my cinematic
memories is as the voice of Hoggle in nineteen eighty

(32:34):
six Labyrinth. He was also the voice of the dog
on Jim Henson's Storyteller.

Speaker 3 (32:38):
Oh okay, and.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
I could be wrong, but I think he also did
some manipulation on Jack Pumpkinhead's head in this film as well.

Speaker 3 (32:47):
I couldn't tell was Jack pumpkinhead a puppet or was
there like a really skinny actor inside a costume.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
Oh that's a tough call, right without really diving back
into the credits, because he is supposed to look like
a thing that is essentially a magical puppet made out
of parts. But there may well have been a human
actor in there at least for some of the scenes,
along with some sort of puppetry manipulation of the head.
And also sometimes the chicken ballina is inside the Jack o'

(33:18):
lantern head. So there's a lot going on here. Oh, now,
this one was fun. I wasn't prepared for this, but
I mentioned we have the Gump here, which is this
junk gollum that has a like a stuffed moose's head,
and the individual that's credited for effects and manipulation on
the Gump's head is Stephen Norrington born nineteen sixty four,

(33:41):
the man who would go on to direct nineteen ninety
nine's Blade and did monster effects on nineteen ninety two.
Split second.

Speaker 3 (33:47):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
So yeah, he keeps coming up on the show, and
he's going to keep coming up.

Speaker 3 (33:51):
The connections never stop.

Speaker 1 (33:53):
Yeah. Okay, now this next one is more of a
physical performance, and that is the Lee Wheeler. The Wheelers
are kind of the flying monkeys of this film, only
instead of flying monkeys, instead of some sort of a
simian creature with feathered wings. They are like half human
half old timey bicycle people. Or they are a like

(34:17):
a tribe of post apocalyptic maniacs who have taken up,
you know, vehicular locomotion instead of walking. They're really odd.
They're difficult to describe. Anyway. There's a whole group of
these Wheelers and the lead Wheeler is played by this
actor by the name of ponds Mar, and I'm glad

(34:39):
we finally get to mention pons Mar because he's a
Florida born artist, affects artists, puppeteer, and a monster suit guy.
He's one of He's just one of the creepy Wheelers
in this movie. But he is also memorable for playing
the reptile man Saarrodd in nineteen eighty seven's Masters of
the Universe and the character Fu in nineteen eighty six

(35:01):
is the Golden Child. He also did some Dino sued work,
both on TV's Dinosaurs the Hintson Effected sitcom, but also
the nineteen ninety five movie Theodore Rex, in which he
plays a cool talking t Rex opposite Whoopi Goldberg.

Speaker 3 (35:19):
To clarify, Theodore Rex is a buddy cop movie, and
the buddy cops are Whoopi Goldberg and a dinosaur.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
Wow. Have you seen it?

Speaker 2 (35:28):
No?

Speaker 3 (35:29):
I haven't seen it. I just know the premise, and
apparently he's like a rad dinosaur.

Speaker 1 (35:33):
He looks rat. He looks pretty rat at any rate.
Oh Man Ponsmar is the lead Wheeler. His performance in
this is just cranked up to about a thousand. I
was thinking, it's kind of like, what if you took
one of Bill Irwin's mind performances, like he would do
on Sesame Street and so forth. What if you had
that level of intensity but it was also deafeningly loud

(35:54):
at the same time.

Speaker 3 (35:55):
Yes, yes, he is manic oh and Rob. I noticed
something I put together about the Wheelers only after I
watched the movie, not while I was watching it. Okay,
So throughout the movie, you've got these characters who appear
in OZ, but then there's some sort of counterpart in
the mundane world back in Kansas. So of course Mamby

(36:16):
is the nurse at the clinic. The nome King is
the doctor at the clinic, but I think the Wheelers
are the sallow, moist looking orderlies at the clinic who
are like wheeling the gurneyes around and they look haven't
slept in a month.

Speaker 1 (36:34):
Yeah, I believe you're right on that because I.

Speaker 3 (36:36):
Think looking back on it now, I'm not positive about this,
but I think Ponsmar is also one of those orderlies.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
M hmm, Yeah, I think he is. He has a
very distinctive look that shines through even when he's not
made up like some sort of reptile man. Now, speaking
of monster suits, Oh, I have to mention this guy,
even though the Cowardly Lion is not much of a
character in this The Cowardly Lion is basically turned a
stone and only becomes unfrozen at the very end of

(37:03):
the film. But when he does move again, it's this
cool monster suit. And the man in the monster suit
is John Alexander, who is a gorilla guy. Gotta love
a good gorilla guy.

Speaker 3 (37:14):
Oh, he does gorillas quite often.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
Oh yeah, oh yeah. Alexander was a former circus performer,
cabaret actor, and theater actor who first climbed into a
gorilla costume on screen for nineteen eighty four's Gray Stoke
The Legend of Tarzan. This was the one that starred
Christopher Lambert. Of course this was his This was his

(37:37):
follow up performance and return to OZ, but he also
played a gorilla on the TV show Jeeves and Wooster.
He was in who played a gorilla on Baby's Day Out,
Fierce Creatures, nineteen ninety eight's Mighty Joe Young, twenty eleven's
Planet of the Apes, and he, along with a few
others I found this kind of interesting, are credited as

(37:58):
quote unquote mime AARs in nineteen eighty eights Gorillas in
the Mist. And the thing about Gorillas in the Mist
is Gorillas in the Mist definitely has gorilla costumes. It
has great gorilla costumes designed by the great Rick Baker,
But the credits don't say don't list humans as gorillas
or say gorilla suit. They say these are mime artists,

(38:20):
which I thought was interesting.

Speaker 3 (38:22):
Oh, Gorillas in the Mist is the one that has
Sigourney Weaver playing Diane Fosse.

Speaker 1 (38:26):
Yeah, good movie, I guess it. Thought it was a
little over like it was above gorilla suits for some reason,
but at any rate.

Speaker 3 (38:33):
Above gorilla suits.

Speaker 1 (38:35):
I don't know. Maybe they just they were like, it's
it would be we shouldn't list people as gorillas, or
maybe they thought they would They wanted to keep this
suspension of disbelief alive that these are real gorillas. I
don't know, but John Alexander also did monster suit, creature
suit work, and Men in Black one and two, The
Country Bears Zathura and hell Boy two.

Speaker 3 (38:57):
Now, as we mentioned, the original opinions from the First
Wizard of Oz are only sort of in this movie. Well,
Scarecrow is in it more. But I felt bad for
the tin Man at the end of this movie because
Dorothy when she's like, you know, saying goodbye. Of course,
she has a pretty extended scene with the Scarecrow. She
has a real good hug on the cowardly Lion. It's like, hey, world, buddies,

(39:19):
he has good to see you again. But then she
just disses the tin Man. Basically, I don't think she
ever even says anything to him.

Speaker 1 (39:26):
Yeah, he's barely in this as well. But it is
noteworthy that the tin Man is played by Deep Roy
born nineteen fifty seven, the Kenyan British actor who, at
four foot four has been a go to actor for
creature performances and diminutive character performances for decades. So Roy
has popped up in Star Wars, The Dark, Crystal Flash,

(39:47):
Gordon Gray Stroke, The Never Ending Story, The X Files,
Planet of the Apes, in which he plays a gorilla kid.
That is what is he's credited as. He's in Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory. He's been in I think, various
Star Trek shows and much more. All right, and so
just a few behind the scenes credits to go through
real quick. Norman Reynolds was the production designer on this

(40:09):
born nineteen thirty four British production designer who worked on
the original Star Wars trilogy, Raiders of the Lost Arc,
The Exorsis three, Alien three, and more.

Speaker 3 (40:18):
The sets in this movie are tremendous.

Speaker 1 (40:20):
They are amazing. Yeah, so I just had to call
that out. Also, this film has some great claymation, some
stop motion animation using clay in it. Really if you're
a fan of that genre of effects like this is
definitely an eighties film to check out.

Speaker 3 (40:37):
Like when the Rocks are delivering reports to the Nome
King before you ever see him, you just see the
face in the stone sort of scrunching up and getting
worried about giving the Nome King bad news.

Speaker 1 (40:50):
Yeah, yeah, it's tremendous. So I'm not even gonna list
all the Claymation team members that worked on this, but
the team included such artists as Will Vinton who lived
forty seven through twenty eighteen, Joanne rad Milovich, who you
can find images of. I included an image for you here, Joe,
where you can see the artist working on some of

(41:11):
the Nome King's minions. Here, Bruce McKean, who lived nineteen
fifty one through nineteen ninety three. Oh, and this is
an interesting one. Mark Gustafson, who is co director on
the upcoming guiermel del Toro Pinocchio movie. And then there
it's also Craig Bartlett born nineteen fifty six, who worked
on Dinosaur Train, which was is. I'm not sure if

(41:34):
it's still going, but at any rate, Is was a
long running Jim Henson animated series that I believe also
used poppetry to create the movements for the animated dinosaurs.
And finally, the music. The music credit here goes to
David Schier born nineteen thirty seven, American composer who scored
a ton of films over the years, including All the

(41:55):
President's Men, Oh Godjo Devil, Short Circuit, Monkey Shines, and
David Fincher's Zodiac.

Speaker 3 (42:01):
Trying to remember the music in Zodiac. But I can't
recall the orchestration. All I recall is the hurdy gurdy man.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
Yeah, excellent use of the hurdy gurdy man. But I
too don't remember the score offhand. Likewise, I don't really
remember the score from this movie. I watched it the
other day. It's one of those scores that does its job,
does its job well, but you don't necessarily think back
on it. It's just not that type of score.

Speaker 4 (42:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:24):
I mean, a movie like this depends on the music
being good, so it must have been good, but it
didn't stand. I don't recall what it was.

Speaker 1 (42:31):
Yeah. It's also not a musical, so there's not a
scene where Dorothy says something and then the TikTok is like,
well that sounds good, Dorothy, But could you sing a
song about it so I can remember it. No, it
doesn't work like that.

Speaker 3 (42:43):
Oh, we are the Wheelers, we will everywhere.

Speaker 1 (42:48):
Oh man, what I can't I don't even like to
think what sort of musical genre the Wheelers would use.
It would just have to be some sort of like
screaming punk song or something. Yeah, some sort of screeching
avant garde industrial punk. That would be my guess what.

Speaker 3 (43:03):
Would Mom be saying, I want all your heads?

Speaker 1 (43:07):
Oh, maybe it would be a different genre. It would
certainly be a different voice depending on which head she chooses. Right.

Speaker 3 (43:13):
Oh, that's a good point.

Speaker 1 (43:14):
And when it comes to the Nome King, it would
just it would be hard rock because that's what he's
made of.

Speaker 3 (43:19):
That's that's good. Okay. I guess we've already teased the
plot a good bit. But I think this is one
of those ones where we're not going to try to
go scene by scene and describe the whole movie. Because
this is this one. It's good to let some surprises remain.

(43:41):
But maybe we should talk about some broad broad sections
of the plot and some of our favorite details. So
do you want to start with life in Kansas?

Speaker 1 (43:50):
Let's do it. So.

Speaker 3 (43:51):
The film seems to take place a little while after
the events of the original Wizard of Oz. Dorothy Gale
is back on the farm with Aunt em and Uncle Henry.
They are rebuilding the house because of course it was
you know, carried away by the Kansas cyclone in the
previous movie. But Dorothy is you know, she not just
totally back to normal. She is obsessed with her memories

(44:13):
of adventurous in the Land of Oz, to the point
where she can't sleep at night. Like you see Piper
Laurie come into the room and it's like, Dorothy, you know,
you got to go to sleep. But she's you know,
she's looking at the stars because she's thinking about monsters
and thinking about trees that trees that attack.

Speaker 1 (44:27):
Well, this is what they get for living in the
middle of nowhere. The stars are so bride out there,
they basically keep you up at night.

Speaker 3 (44:32):
It's true. I can report from brief experiences. If you
go to a place with truly dark skies and you
look up at the stars at night, it is a
borderline hallucinatory experience. Yeah, but okay, aunt Em and Uncle
Henry are troubled by what's happened to Dorothy. They think
she is suffering from persistent delusions because of her belief

(44:53):
that Oz is real. So ann Em gets the idea
that they've got to send her to a doctor in
town who has a machine that can cure her brain
with electricity. So there are a few things that are
established in this early section. On the farm, we see,
you know that ann M and Uncle Henry are our

(45:13):
loving parents. You know, they care about Dorothy and they're
trying to do good, but also that they're disturbed by
her seeming to believe that Oz is a real place
and she actually went there, and you see them trying
to discourage these apparent delusions. And meanwhile, Dorothy's just thinking
about Oz all the time. Like she finds a key
on the farm and she's like, see this key is

(45:35):
from OZ because it's got like the handle on it
is round like an O, and then it's got to
slash through the middle of it that sort of makes
like a crossbar on a Z. So yeah, this is
obviously an artifact from OZ. And then I think it
literally is. Later but we also we meet a chicken
who can't talk. But this chicken who cannot talk is

(45:55):
Dorothy's friend, and the chicken is threatened by Aunt Em
because An M's like, if you don't lay an egg soon,
I'm gonna turn you into soup.

Speaker 1 (46:03):
Yep, yeah, this is Billina. Billina is going to be
a major character. Delena is not just there for comic relief.

Speaker 3 (46:10):
Now, shortly into the movie, Dorothy is taken by aunt
Em to town and Toto tries to follow them. They
have a very cute dog to play, Toto, but Toto
does not accompany Dorothy on her adventures in this movie.
Toto stays behind and so she's taken to town to
go to the offices of doctor JB. Worley played by
Nicole Williamson. And again this is going to be for

(46:33):
the electrical cure. Now. As I said earlier, Williamson and
Jean marsh are both fabulous in their roles because, like
in the original Wizard of Oz, they play these characters
on both sides of the fantasy divide, right, they have
real mundane characters and fantasy counterparts in Oz. Nicole Williamson's
Earth character, doctor Warley, is I think wonderfully realized as

(46:56):
as the kind of man who presents a soft, friendly,
reassuring exterior while preparing the machinery that will steal your soul.

Speaker 1 (47:05):
Yeah, this is this is a wonderful performance. And you
know you don't see a lot of him here. We're
not in Kansas for too long. But yeah. Yeah, he
seems he is a He doesn't come off as a
suspicious adult. He seems like a trusting adult who is
in who's rightfully in a position of authority and is
going to help you.

Speaker 3 (47:23):
Like there's a part where he's showing Dorothy. He says, look,
this machine has a face. Here are its eyes, and
here is its nose. And of course the machine is
the machine they're going to use to administer electroconvulsive therapy
to Dorothy. Now, a brief note on psychiatry in this film.
I would say this movie depicts psychiatry in general and

(47:45):
electroconvulsive therapy in particular as cruel and evil, which I
would say I have twofold thoughts about number one. It
really works in the context of the plot. But of course,
if you're going to be literal about it, I think
this is very mis guided. Like I think if you
get your ideas about ECT from the movies, especially like
I don't know, movies made in the seventies and eighties,

(48:06):
such as scenes from One Flow of the Cuckoo's Nest
and stuff, you would basically think that it is like
a pseudoscientific involuntary torture mechanism. Used to inflict pain and terror.
But I think actually, you know, a lot of psychiatrists
think that there's very good evidence that it's helpful and
that you'll meet people who have experienced severe, major depression
that did not respond to other treatments, and they would

(48:29):
say ECT made a major positive difference in their lives. Though, obviously,
if it were actually administered in the way it is
depicted in this movie, which is like an unexplained, non
consensual punishment inflicted on children for the crime of having
an imagination, that would be pretty awful. So while you
should obviously not get your real, real world ideas about

(48:51):
ECT from the OZ universe, it does make a really
great plot device, scary plot device within the fantasy context
of the movie.

Speaker 1 (49:00):
Yeah, absolutely so.

Speaker 3 (49:01):
Anyway, Dorothy is left at this clinic to be subjected
to the electrical cure for her brain, and there's this
great scene where you know, Dorothy's kind of thinking about
other things while you hear the doctor talking to aunt
Em in the background saying, you know, the mind is
simply a machine. Sometimes the machine has too much electricity
in it, and you get a similar foreboding elements from

(49:26):
other things at the clinic so Gene Marsh plays a
what would you call her, She's like an assistance sort
of a warden at this clinic, and she's wearing a
dress that looks like it might as well be Darth
Vader's suit.

Speaker 1 (49:39):
Yeah. It is like such a gothy number. I don't
know how else to describe it. It's just like multiple
shades of black, and how's all of these like cremulations
and sort of fabric spikes on it.

Speaker 3 (49:53):
It's like if you combine like a Little House on
the Prairie dress and the Road Warrior. Yeah. But also
here at the clinic, Dorothy meets a mysterious blonde girl
who like appears in her room and warns her about
doctor Worley's machines. I think, is this the scene where
they're like hearing people screaming and she says like those
are the people who have been subjected to the machine.

Speaker 1 (50:15):
Yeah, yeah, and that's this is probably the darkest moment
in the film. I thought for me anyway, like this
is this This is the moment where I was sitting
there watching it, you know, next to my son, and
I'm like, this is maybe a little too dark, But
he didn't seem to mind. And you're through it pretty quickly.

Speaker 3 (50:33):
And there's a scene where they're like taking Dorothy to
be hooked up to the electrical machine, the one that
had eyes and a nose and a mouth, and they're
hooking the electrodes up to her head, and just when
they're getting ready to send the charge the there is
a storm and lightning strikes and power is lost, and
Dorothy actually escapes during this lightning storm, along with that

(50:54):
strange blonde girl who she keeps seeing in the mirror,
and they they get swept up in a flood, being
chased by Jeane marsh in that crazy black dress, and
they end up floating away down a torrent in a
chicken coop.

Speaker 1 (51:07):
By the way, I couldn't help it be reminded of
the movie Brazil, which I guess came out the same year,
nineteen eighty five. But that film has a scene where
an individual's strapped to a contraption and in that case
is about to be tortured when something miraculous happens that
seems to save him. And then at the end of
the film, all depending on the cut, you find out

(51:28):
that this was all just what an occurrence at what
is at Awl Creek Bridge situation where everything was happening
in his head and he really died on the interrogation table.
So I'm happy to say that that is not the
case in Return to oz there's not a scene later
where you realize, oh, this was all just electricity going
through Dorothy's brain.

Speaker 3 (51:48):
Right. No, no, no, there is like a waking up later scene,
but it's not that.

Speaker 1 (51:52):
Yeah, she did.

Speaker 3 (51:53):
Really go out and get in the mud.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
And into the river and then seemingly into the ocean.

Speaker 3 (51:57):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's a good thing she did
run out into the floodwaters because apparently if she had
remained behind at the clinic, she may be she may
have been incinerated. Yes, But so from here we're gonna
go to Ozta. We gotta talk oz First thing is
she wakes up in that chicken coop being wrecked in
what's called the Deadly Desert, which is a plot device

(52:20):
that I love. The idea of the Deadly desert is
if you touch the sand, you turn to sand, and
it's very simple, but it's great. We see a wheeler
turned to sand at some point and it's brutal.

Speaker 1 (52:33):
Yeah. That was one of my son's favorite moments, and
in part because we hated the Wheelers. All we could
tell the Wheelers were bad news, So any bad things
that happened to the Wheelers are somewhat justified.

Speaker 3 (52:42):
But as soon as Dorothy wakes up in the deadly desert,
her chicken friend Billina is there with her, and Billina
can talk. Now, remember by the mechanism we discussed earlier,
you know, you're an animal, you're in Oz. Now you're
a talking animal. And it turns out all along, if
Billina could talk, we would have noticed that she has
like a sassy, old prairie grandma tude.

Speaker 1 (53:02):
Yeah. Yeah, it was full of fun one liners as well,
and occasionally has information and advice.

Speaker 3 (53:08):
So they're going around, they're checking out Oz. They're like,
what's up in Oz? And uh oh, everything is wrecked.
Nothing's good anymore. The yellow brick road is all torn up,
Munchkin Village is gone. I think Emerald City is in ruins.
We see it in the distance and it looks like
it has been shelled. Yeah, and we gather that when
Dorothy last left, the Scarecrow had been crowned King of

(53:30):
Oz in the Emerald City. And I think there's an
understanding that Scarecrow is going to be a good and
just ruler. Scarecrow is kind, Scarecrow is thoughtful. You know,
he wouldn't do he wouldn't be a bad king. But
in the meantime, something has gone terribly wrong, and I
was immediately tempted to think how different the story would
be if it had been like George R. R. Martin's

(53:51):
Return to Oz, where the friendly Scarecrow has a heel turn.
As soon as Dorothy leaves, he's corrupted by power. He
immediately institutes, you know, Tonyan repression, purges of his perceived enemies.
He sends ten man to prison, He's got dungeons in
the Emerald City. That would have been a way to go.
But no, it's not that the Scarecrow had a heel turned. Instead,

(54:12):
what happened is that the Scarecrow has been deposed and
someone else has taken over someone bad.

Speaker 1 (54:17):
Yeah, but I don't know.

Speaker 3 (54:18):
Wouldn't that have been a good twist. What if the
Scarecrow was the villain of the movie.

Speaker 1 (54:22):
Yeah, yeah, it would have been. It would have been
nice and twisty. It seems like the kind of thing
they would do today if they were to make return
to Oz, though this film does have some neat twists
concerning what exactly happened.

Speaker 3 (54:32):
So anyway, Dorothy and Billina investigate everywhere there are statues
of human forms, and in the ruins of the Emerald
City they find a creepy graffito on a wall that says,
beware the Wheelers.

Speaker 1 (54:44):
Yes, written in red. I don't think it's written in blood,
but who can say for certain.

Speaker 3 (54:51):
It looks like it's written in red colored pencil.

Speaker 1 (54:53):
Yeah, or they didn't have a lot of blood. It's
not drippy blood, but it's like, we're not not going
to really just layer it on. We only have so
much blood to work with here. I'm just saying it
could be blood. It could be blood.

Speaker 3 (55:06):
I think blood is a scarce resource in Oz now
because most human bodies have been turned into stone from
what we can see. And in the ruins of the city,
Dorothy and Billina get attacked by these horrible creatures called
wheelers we've already talked about. They got wheels instead of
hands and feet, and Dorothy uses her special key. I
think this is the oz key that she found on
the farm in Kansas. Is that right?

Speaker 1 (55:27):
Yep?

Speaker 3 (55:28):
He uses that to open a door inside a secret room.
There she finds this bulbous mechanical man and this is
one of our heroes, TikTok. I loved TikTok. He is
like a wind up copper Ronan. He is a mechanical
warrior whose master has been deposed and now he's in
the service of Dorothy.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
Great design, great effects with this being the like a
lot of it is puppetry, but also it's clearly a
person in a suit, and it's they're able to pull
off this wonderful gait, this wonderful walking style of of
of TikTok. It's it's, it's it's absolutely wonderful. He was
one of my favorite parts of the whole film.

Speaker 3 (56:08):
He's sort of a little bit teddy roosevelt Ish, but
other elements too, like he's blustery and headstrong and has
a big walrus mustache, a metal one, of course. But
I thought a really interesting recurring theme is that we
are frequently reminded throughout the movie that TikTok is not alive,
Like when Dorothy first finds him, there are instructions on

(56:29):
his back for how to wind him up and make
him work. But U and one of the things the
instruction says is like that, you know, the TikTok, the
mechanical man, does everything but live. Yes, but what does
that mean? So TikTok clearly has a mind, he has
a personality, and he even has preferences in the ability
to take a fence like. There's a scene later when

(56:52):
Jack Pumpkinhead suggests throwing TikTok out of the gump aircraft
because he's the heaviest of them, and TikTok clearly takes
a front like he is annoyed by this suggestion. Yes,
and yet there are other times where TikTok seems to
reference the fact that he is not alive as a
reason for not being concerned about something. It's like, you know,
I don't really worry about getting turned into an inanimate

(57:15):
object because I'm not alive anyway.

Speaker 1 (57:17):
Well, in Oz, being a non living entity, I think
you have a lot of company. It's not one of
these stories where oh, I am the lonely being that
is a machine and not a human but has feelings.
In Oz, everywhere you look there's some sort of reanimated form.
There's there a machine people all over the place.

Speaker 3 (57:34):
They just different varieties I think Return to Oz explores
some of the same thematic territory as Terminator too. Can
this machine be a good parent? Does this machine know?
Does it understand why we cry? Even if it's something
it can never do? Yeah, so anyway, I thought that
might This is like a kind of a thoughtful movie
for kids. It planned some interesting philosophical ideas in their mind.

(57:56):
But what does it mean to be alive? But also
I like the wind up and wind down dynamic with TikTok.
So TikTok has winding keys for three different things, thought, speech,
and action, and at various times throughout the movie, one
of the three but not the other two, will wind down,
including a very funny scene where they're trying where all

(58:17):
the good characters are trying to like work on a
project together, but TikTok's thought runs down while his speech
and action are still active.

Speaker 1 (58:26):
Yeah. I love this as well, the three wind up
wind down dynamics, because on one level, I think it's
it's a good way to get kids potentially thinking about
like what what what the human experience is, you know,
like thinking of our of our own mental facult faculties,
not as a single entity, but this thing that sort
of emerges out of out of out of different things

(58:48):
and different stimuli and different processes. So, uh, it's it's
an interesting way to look at a in this case
of fantastic being, but also to sort of turn that
reflection back on yourself at times.

Speaker 3 (59:02):
But so we said the TikTok he's a soldier, right,
he's a warrior for the Scarecrow, and he's been left
behind by the Scarecrow. I think to wait for Dorothy.
So here's Dorothy and now they're teaming up. So right
from the outset, TikTok is ready to beat up some wheelers.
He like walks out. Oh there's a fight scene that

(59:23):
you could regard as underwhelming because TikTok is just basically
spinning around in a circle whacking wheelers, But I don't.
Something about it is really good.

Speaker 1 (59:33):
Yeah, it's intensely satisfying, in part because the wheelers have
established themselves as a total menace and their acting is
over the top. Here comes TikTok. He absolutely wails on them,
and then he captures the lead wheeler, who is again
the most animated and annoying of the wheelers, and begins
to roughly interrogate him, and we were just cheering for

(59:55):
TikTok during this scene. We're like, yeah, get him TikTok.

Speaker 3 (59:58):
It's great and of course under torture essentially no under threat.
The lead Wheeler reveals that the Scarecrow has been overthrown
and taken prisoner by the Gnome King, and to learn
more about what's going on, they have to go and
visit the castle of Princess Mamby. Yeah, so that's what

(01:00:26):
happens next. The whole section in Momby's castle in the
middle of the movie is just awesome. Where do you
want to start here? So Mamby's palace is like in
many ways it's made of mirrors, or at least sort of.
The throne room is, which is very creepy, especially in
scenes where like Dorothy's trying to find a door or
figure out what to do.

Speaker 1 (01:00:46):
Yeah, her whole palace is just, oh my goodness. The
sets are amazing. Even sets, even parts of the palace
that you don't really spend much time in just look incredible.
Like they walk through a bedroom and nothing ever happens
with the bedroom. You see it in the background as
just stupendous. It's like this weird evil Princess Cathedral, and

(01:01:07):
then you venture into this hall of heads. This is
where Momby stores these various stolen female heads that she has,
stores them alive, and we'll use them. We've mentioned this
on the show before because somebody wrote in on listener
mail about this. How curious it is that Momby is
always the same Mamby. But Momby takes off her original

(01:01:30):
head and puts on these other heads, and while she
has these other heads on, she again is still Momby.
But it also is stated in the film where it's
sort of suggested in the film where it's hypothesized by
one of the characters that if she does something with
one head on and she switches to another head, she
might not remember something she did previously, which just sends

(01:01:55):
my head reeling trying to figure out how all of
that works.

Speaker 3 (01:01:58):
Yeah, her personality always seems to be the same, but
I think it's Jack Pumpkinhead says that because Dorothy's about
to meet him. He says that Momby locked him up
in the tower, but then forgot he was in there
because she switched heads and that Memby was in a
different head. And when we first meet her, it's not
Jean Marsh's head. So we don't you know, our guard
is down. We're not seeing like, oh, that's the scary lady,

(01:02:20):
remember her from the clinic. It's just some other lady.
She looks nice and you know, she's sitting there playing
a harp. And then she and Dorothy start talking. But
then she's like, Dorothy, I'm gonna need to cut your
head off and keep it in my keep it in
my collection. But you're not old enough yet, So I
got to lock you in a tower for a few years.
Then your head will get bigger and then I'll cut
it off and then I'll keep it.

Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
Yeah, she realized is an investment. We're gonna wait for
you to mature a bit. She didn't want to wear
Little Girl for USA balk Head. She wants to wear
the Craft for USA balk Head, and she doesn't have
to wait a few years for that to happen. So
off to the dungeon chamber with you, up to the
locked room, and so she's thrown in there with Jack Pumpkinhead,

(01:03:01):
who she meets. But also there are all these pieces
that will eventually become the Gump because at this point
we're dealing with an escape plan they find out about this.
What is it the Is it the powder of animation
or the powder of life?

Speaker 3 (01:03:16):
Powder of life? Yeah, it's a magical powder that Momby
has that she sprinkles over inanimate objects to wake them up.
And this is originally, I think where Jack pumpkinhead comes from.
That's like he's made of sticks and a pumpkin. Though wait,
I think he was originally a real boy. Maybe I'm
not sure.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
He asks if he can call Dorothy mom and she
allows it, which.

Speaker 3 (01:03:40):
Is a little creepy, but it's also kind of sweet
at the same time. I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:03:44):
Yeah, but any rate, they realize we got to get
out of here. Well, we could fly out of here
if only we had a winged mount. Well, we could
make one out of this moose's head or Gump's head
on the wall and this couch and we could use
these pieces of this to make wings and this will
somehow work. But we need that powder in order to

(01:04:05):
bring all this to life and fly out the window.
Where's the powder? Well, we find out it's stored with
Momby's original head. So Dorothy is going to have to
sneak out and make her way through that museum of
heads and try and find the original head and steal
the powder from that headlocker.

Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
It's a heist at the head repository.

Speaker 1 (01:04:27):
Yeah, and this is an amazing sequence and also just
a wonderfully magical dark fantasy sequence because you know, it's
the scene where Dorothy's creeping down the hallway. All these
silent heads are in the are in their chambers, and
then when she gets there she opens it up. There's
Jeane Marsh's head and they're the original Mamby head. And
of course it's not going to go without it without

(01:04:49):
at least a single hiccup, because she ends up waking
up the Momby head. All of the heads wake up,
all of the heads are screaming, and then she takes
off with the powder while Mombi's body is waking up
from the bed. We do see something with the bedroom
and that's right, and it's like walking around like a
zombie with no head coming after. It's a wonderful nightmare.

Speaker 3 (01:05:11):
So with the gump aircraft they've put together again, it's
like a moose type thing, a gump head that's mounted
and then it goes with some couches and wings made
out of plant leaves like I think palm leaves or something.
They make this aircraft and they fly out to escape,
and they're gonna fly to the Nome King's mountain. Though
it's very funny because the Gump is like, I don't

(01:05:31):
know how to fly. I'm just ahead. I never flew
in life, so I don't know what I'm doing.

Speaker 1 (01:05:36):
Yeah, the Gump is wonderful and has lots of little
snide comments about how he liked it better when he
was just ahead. This current life is a little more
challenging than he likes a little more moving around, So.

Speaker 3 (01:05:48):
They fly over the deadly desert to get to the
Nome King's mountain. He lives in a mountain, and ooh,
the nome King. When they get there, I feel like
here maybe we should start to describe in a little
or in lighter detail. But warning, if you are going
to watch the movie, you don't want anything about the ending.
It all spoiled. Maybe maybe you can tune out here
until you've seen it, because we will discuss a few things.

(01:06:10):
But the Nome King is so cool. He is some
kind of humanoid elemental being of mineral origin. He's a
greedy but clever sorcerer of rocks. Yeah, and the claymation
here is just wicked. So throughout the movie we've seen
this like rock Face doing reports of what's happening to

(01:06:31):
the Nome King, and that's all stop motion animation. That's
very good. But here we start seeing claymation and general
stop motion of the king himself and the sorcery that
he casts. Like one of my favorite animations is that
there's a that like Dorothy and her friends are in
a cave with the Nome King, and occasionally the Nome

(01:06:51):
King will open a portal to go into a into
a palace with these halls, and the way the portal
opens is the rock turns into many hands that starting
the like pulling a hole open in the rock itself.

Speaker 1 (01:07:04):
Yeah, all of these effects, all of the effects they
used to bring the Nome King to live, are amazing,
and most of them are these kind of stop motion effects. Though,
as we'll discuss, something is happening that makes the Nome
King increasingly more human in form. So we eventually get
Williamson himself there as the Nome King, but covered under

(01:07:26):
a lot of rock makeup and like a rocky beard
and so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:07:30):
Right, So the Nome King has Dorothy and her friends
play a guessing game where he says, oh, yes, I
have the scarecrow captive, and I've turned him into an
inanimate object, into an ornament. And if you can walk
around my palace and guess which ornament is the scarecrow,
then I'll let him go. But if you guess wrong

(01:07:50):
three times in a row, I'm going to turn you
into an ornament. Actually he doesn't tell them that at
the beginning. It happens first to I think the Gump
and then they're like, wait, you didn't say that was
going to happen, and he's like, oh, you didn't ask.

Speaker 1 (01:08:03):
Yeah, he's adding a lot of rules after the fact,
though at the same time, our heroes are not really
asking for a full breakdown of the terms ahead of
time either.

Speaker 3 (01:08:14):
Yeah. So you get the sense that he is made
of rock, but he sort of wants to become a
human for some reason. And the more humans he absorbs
and turns into inanimate objects are not necessarily humans living
things he absorbs and turns into inanimate objects, the more
he becomes a fleshly creature instead of a rock.

Speaker 1 (01:08:37):
Yeah, And it's not explained in the film why this is,
and I kind of like that. I like anytime there's
sort of grandiose evil magic going on in something, it's
even more creepy if there's stuff going on that you
don't fully understand. We don't know why he wants this
transformation to occur or why it is occurring, but it

(01:08:58):
is at least a byproduct of the evil that he
is doing.

Speaker 3 (01:09:02):
Oh, we should say. The entire time they're with the
Nome King and playing this guessing game, Billina, the chicken
is hiding inside of Jack Pumpkinhead's pumpkin head. He's like, right,
she's in the jack o lantern.

Speaker 1 (01:09:15):
Oh, so this is another important thing now that we've
mentioned the chicken. It has been established a few different
times that the chicken is noteworthy in Oz and that
the Nome King will want to know about this chicken.
And it's even implied that the chicken is really the
most important member of this party. He is of the
most interest to the Nome King. And Mamby realizes this,

(01:09:36):
and Mamby is rushing to the Nome King's castle, I
guess to warn him of the chicken, and she does so.
Oh God, I love this sequence. She does so by
getting all of her wheelers together and lashing them to
a chariot and then climbing aboard the chariot and whipping
them to get them to ride at top speed and

(01:09:57):
take her to the Nome King's castle.

Speaker 3 (01:09:59):
It is t they're traveling through some kind of underground
tunnel that cuts underneath the deadly desert.

Speaker 1 (01:10:05):
I think, yeah, it is. It's wonderful and eyebrow raising,
it's it's it's tremendous.

Speaker 3 (01:10:12):
And she does get there, but I don't think she's
able to really to warn him sufficiently, at least not
enough to save him in the end. I don't remember
what she says, but like when she gets there, he's
very haughty. He's like bow bow lower.

Speaker 1 (01:10:27):
Yeah, and then he locks her in a cage.

Speaker 3 (01:10:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:10:29):
I believe so. Yeah. Ultimately, it doesn't really make a
huge difference that she made it there at all. But
the Nome King here is becoming more and more humanoid
in appearance, and more and more of Dorothy's friends are
being turned into unknown ornaments in the room, and I
think this is is this also where we find out
how the Nome King was able to carry out this

(01:10:52):
this attack on the Emerald City. Is this when he
reveals his feet.

Speaker 3 (01:10:56):
Oh, no, explain that.

Speaker 1 (01:10:57):
Well, there's he reveals that it's mentioned earlier in the
film that you know, I think it's an m asking. Well, Dorothy,
if all this odd stuff is realed, and where are
these ruby slippers that you speak of that gave you
this power? And she's like, well, they fell off when
I was returning to Earth. And they're like, okay, we'll
see there's no proof. Well, the Nome King reveals that

(01:11:18):
he is wearing the ruby slippers, but they basically fell
into his lap, and he used the power of the
ruby slippers to then overthrow the Scarecrow King. And so
we see the see of the Nome King wearing the
shiny ruby slippers.

Speaker 3 (01:11:34):
There great twist, and I think Dorothy tries to go
for them, but he's like no, no, when he tucks
them back under. Yeah, and in the end, how are
they going to defeat the Nome King? I mean, the
Nome King is so powerful? What kind of power do
they have that could stand up against a creature of
such such immense potency?

Speaker 1 (01:11:53):
Well, well, for starters, Dorothy is able to retrieve some
of her friends from ornament transformation. But but This just
makes the Nome King all the more enraged. He turns
into this gigantic stone monster and he has decided he's
going to eat them. He picks up the gump and
like eats the gump's body and like the head falls off,

(01:12:14):
and then he goes to eat Jack Pumpkinhead instead as well.
But Billina the chicken is in Jack pumpkin Head's head
and it is finally time for Billina to lay her egg.
She lays the egg inside Jack Pumpkinhead's head. It rolls
out of the pumpkin and goes down the Nome King's

(01:12:35):
throat and then uh oh, the Nome King realizes that
something has gone terribly wrong.

Speaker 3 (01:12:42):
Because the big twist is that eggs are poison to
the Nome King.

Speaker 1 (01:12:48):
Right, we didn't know this until it is finally revealed.
We knew that we kind of got the sense that
the chicken was a threat, but we didn't know why
the chicken was a threat to the Nome King's rule.
Now it is revealed, the egg is It has terrible
magic in it, the terri and does terrible things to
the Nome King's power, which I guess is not I

(01:13:08):
don't know I didn't do a lot of deep thinking
about this, but eggs do factor into various magical rituals
and so forth. There is something about the egg that
is often seen as sacred, and somehow the egg is
able to undo everything that the nome King is doing.

Speaker 3 (01:13:24):
Yeah, the egg symbolizes potential, symbolizes transformation. Yeah yeah, it
has a lot of symbolic loading, so that makes sense.
But of course, so, yeah, the nome King is defeated,
and then Scarecrow, who has been restored from I think
he had been turned into a like a just a
big green gem. He's he's back into his form. Dorothy

(01:13:47):
is able to restore everybody who got turned into an ornament,
and then they all go back to the Emerald City,
where the Scarecrow's back on the throne. Everybody's happy again.
Momby is in a cage, and then they're like, they're like, oh, well,
you know, she doesn't have powers anymore, so she'll be
all right.

Speaker 1 (01:14:03):
I know. It's the Wheelers are also just hanging around
at this point in the movie, and I was thinking, well, okay, cage.
The Wheelers just yeah, they just get by with the
sorry like they seem to be the scourge of the
of the realm there for a while, but everything's forgiven.
Everybody's happy again.

Speaker 3 (01:14:21):
How many denizens of Oz did they eat? Or whatever
they do? But also we get another twist, which is
that the blonde girl that Dorothy had seen several times
already is her name is Ozma, and what is her role?
She's like the rightful Princess of Oz or something.

Speaker 1 (01:14:40):
Yeah, she's like the Yeah, she's she's the good She's
the good Witch of this movie basically, and she's been
sort of in the background helping things move along the
whole time. But then also there's this idea that like
she is also connected to Dorothy, she is going to
be She is like the way that Dorothy remains in
Oz and in the Earth realm at the same time.

Speaker 3 (01:15:01):
She is Dorothy's counterpart, so Dorothy can be on both
sides of the mirror. Dorothy can go back to Kansas
and be home, but also stay in Oz in the
form of this other girl and be the princess there.

Speaker 1 (01:15:14):
And Ozma's like, basically like, hey, you can still be
in Oz all the time in your head. Just don't
tell anni em about it. Just be quiet about it.
And everything's fun, and then we.

Speaker 3 (01:15:23):
Get a very sweet reunion back in Kansas where Toto
finds Dorothy washed up on a washed up on a
grimy river shore. And then there's Uncle Henry and they
all get back together again and it's very sweet.

Speaker 1 (01:15:35):
Yeah. Yeah, though we do see mom Be's earthly counterpart,
this would be Nurse Wilson. We see her being taken
away in the back of a carriage that also kind
of looks like a cage. Yeah. And then it's revealed
that doctor Warley died in a fire because he had

(01:15:55):
basically the clinic, the facilities there had been struck by
lightning and he went back in to save his machine
and died.

Speaker 3 (01:16:02):
He was too devoted to his machines and it killed him.

Speaker 1 (01:16:06):
Yeah, so very very Frank Herbert kind of moment there where.
Oh yes, this character died off screen.

Speaker 3 (01:16:12):
So return to Oz. Deeply strange, fantastically imaginative, totally wonderful,
one of my favorite new fantasy movies or kids movies. Yeah,
it's just a blast.

Speaker 1 (01:16:25):
I richly enjoyed it. I mean, obviously, parents will have
to make their own decisions about films like this. I
was researching it a little bit before we watched it.
I went to the IMDb parental guidance area where the
users submit stuff about films, and they did have the
chicken lays an egg in the nome King's head as
an example of violence in the picture. I didn't really

(01:16:48):
think of it as violence per se, but it's certainly weird.

Speaker 3 (01:16:53):
It is an act of inadvertent poisoning, so I guess
it would be like a scene where if a character
accidentally put arsenic somebody else's sandwich.

Speaker 1 (01:17:01):
Yeah, I guess, but anywright, Yes, Return to Oz. I
absolutely loved it. I think it's a lot of fun.
And I'd love to hear from folks out there though, because,
like we've been saying, Joe and I only just watched
this movie in full as adults. We'd love to hear
from folks who saw it back in the day. What
was it like seeing Return to Oz on the big
screen in nineteen eighty five or seeing it on VHS

(01:17:25):
once it was available on home video? How did other
people in your life present it or respond to it?
Did you hear people saying, well, this is not what
Oz is all about. What is this gump business? It's
supposed to be the cowardly lion. Did you have to
put up with all that? Was it effective? All of
this is fair fair play. I'd love to hear from everyone.
So that's it for this edition of Weird House Cinema.

(01:17:47):
Just a reminder, Weird House Cinema publishes every Friday in
the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed We are
primarily a science podcast, but on Fridays we set aside
most serious concerns and just talk about a weird film.
I blog about these episodes at Summuto music dot com
and if you use letterboxed dot com that's l E
T t e r box d dot com. You'll find

(01:18:09):
us on there. Our username is weird house and we
keep a Weird House Cinema episode list going there where
you can see all the films that we've covered thus far.
As of this episode, it is eighty two films that
we've covered, and I'll often go ahead and add the
next film on the list so you can sort of
look ahead and see what we're talking about next.

Speaker 3 (01:18:28):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch
with us with feedback on this episode or any other
to suggest a topic for the future, or just to
say hi. You can email us at contact at stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:18:51):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
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