What’s everyone’s take on RETURN TO OZ, the spooky 1985 film that featured Dorothy receiving electro-shock treatment to cure her of her Ozian delusions?
I see on Amazon that the video is back in circulation, after being unavailable for several years.
Uke
I thought Return to Oz was a marvelous movie. The attempt to “cure” Dorothy with ECT (Electro Convulsive Therapy as it’s known today) was pretty much standard therapy for the insane in 1896. Killed a few folks that way and made others worse.
The reason it wasn’t as successful as Wizard is that most folks expected a musical with a much lighter tone. Siskel & Ebert did not care for Return. Well, nobody’s perfect. 
This was Fairuza Balk’s feature film debut. She was Adam Sandler’s girlfriend in The Waterboy. According to www.imdb.com , she’s recently completed a film entitled Great Sex, which is not yet in release. Nobody stays Dorothy forever.
TRIVIA: The original screenplay called for Dorothy to remain in sepia tone for much of the Munchkinland sequence. Glinda was supposed to look at her and say, “This will never do,” and wave her wand and make Dorothy Technicolor. Unfortunately, the MGM Visual Effects Department was unable to figure out how to insert a B&W image into a Technicolor sequence and it was dropped. Now, of course, this effect is done all the time digitally.
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Shayna:
Just completed reading “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” for the first time!! Thanks for the link, as well as the nice welcome.
Welcome to you, too!!!
Again, thanks to everyone who helped me with this question. I’m seriously thanking my lucky stars (and the co-worker who introduced me to this site) for learning about Straight Dope.
“I never lie, but I don’t always say what I’m thinking.”
ENC Heel
Gee, I thought this was going to be about the urban legend that a stage hand hanged himself accidentally while filming the scene in the woods where the flying monkeys come and take Dorothy away…
On a quasi-related note,I’ve seen a lot of freaky movies in my time, but the neighbor (aka the Wicked Witch) riding her bike thru the tornado still scares the bejesus out of me.
Yeah. The stage-hand’s name was Floyd Pink.
Uke
Actually the “hanging” takes place at the end of the sequence where the Tin Woodsman is introduced. As he, Dorothy and the Scarecrow march away from the camera, singing “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” there is something moving in the trees just to the right of the Woodsman’s cabin. Careful examination reveals it’s a large bird, a peacock or a crane or a stork. It’s easier to see on the new videos made from the recently-restored prints.
Cecil’s column is here: www.straightdope.com/columns/970509.html
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Oh, no no no, don’t apologize. I was just saying for those that didn’t know how many other Oz books there are out there. I’ve read all the Baum books at literature.org up to The Patchwork Girl of Oz. I read the first few chapters, and they for whatever reason I didn’t get around to reading the rest.
MORE OZ TRIVIA: Walt Disney bought the rights to all the other OZ books and was going to film The Patchwork Girl of OZ in the 50’s but never got around to doing it because he was also building Disneyland at the time. He did go so far as include a Patchwork Girl in a Christmas Special for TV, but the movie was never made. But the company retained the rights and, in 1984, finally got around to making Return to Oz, released in 1985.
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The problem with “Return to Oz” is that only a die-hard Oz book fan could enjoy it. The story was two books smashed into one (“Nome King of Oz” and “Tik-Tok of Oz”), to the detriment of both stories. On the plus side, the fantasy characters were spot-on duplicates of the illustrations (Tik-Tok and Jack Pumpkinhead were exactly right).
If you look closely in the revived Oz scene, you can spot dozens of characters from other Oz books, such as the Patchwork Girl, Tommy Qwik-step, Polychrome, and the Tin Soldier.
Gotta throw in my $.02 on this one.
As some of the posters here have alluded to, no part of TWOO was ever originally shown in ‘black & white.’ What people have for years been calling b&w is actually sepia tone (more brown than black). The Kansas sequences were produced in sepia tones.
However, somewhere along the line, someone struck a print and thought they could save money by printing the first few reels in honest-to-God b&w rather than bothering with the sepia tone. What’s the difference, right? Wrong of course. Ignoring for the moment the altered look and feel of the mis-colored portions, they also destroyed one of the most carefully crafted segues in the movie.
Watch the ‘out the door and into Munchkinland’ sequence. In one, continuous shot, a monochromatic Dorothy goes through the door and enters the Technicolor Land of Oz. Dorothy switches to color also, but though the shot is continuous, her transformation takes place off-camera. They shot the scene in full color, but used a sepia dressed house interior and a spepia costumed Dorothy double (we only see the monochromatic Dorothy from the rear). The full color, faux-sepia bits perfectly match the actually sepia footage used up to that point.
After the door opens and sepia Dorothy drops out of the shot, the full color Dorothy steps into frame and the scene continues. All-in-all, a seemless sequence.
Except that after the incorrectly struck b&w reels started making the rounds, it looked like this:
When viewed in the original sepia tone, the sequence is seamless. In b&w, it’s jarring as hell.
For years the annual CBS Oz broadcast used a bastardized b&w print. I didn’t know the actual beauty of that scene until I finally saw a non-broadcast tape of the movie.
OK, I’m done.
“Return to Oz” is not based on “The Gnome King of Oz” (which isn’t even by Baum) or “Tik-Tok of Oz”, but on a complex fusion of “The Marvelous Land of Oz” and “Ozma of Oz”, the first two sequels. That choice was probably made because filming “The Marvelous Land of Oz” would be extremely difficult nowadays, inasmuch as (as I remarked earlier) one major plot thread of the book is a satire on feminism. (However, a somewhat satisfactory version – apart from eliminating the feminist plot – was done for television as a segment of “Shirley Temple’s Storybook” in 1960 or so.) “Land” couldn’t be eliminated altogether, because major and permanent changes in the land of Oz come about in it, so they gutted it and farced what they needed into the plot of “Ozma” to make “Return”.
(The issue of “Tik-Tok of Oz” is complex. “Tik-Tok of Oz” is essentially a rewrite of Baum’s musical comedy, “The Tik-Tok Man of Oz”, which in turn was a rewrite of “Ozma of Oz”. After two rewrites, the story had changed enough that he was able to palm it off as a new book.)
The electroshock treatment, however, has no parallel in Baum whatever, and I believe it to have been a fault, not only because the dark tone damaged the picture’s reception, but because the entire subplot indicated a desire by the filmmakers to have it both ways, with Oz both a dream and not a dream.
(In the books, Uncle Henry and Aunt Em are somewhat mystified by Dorothy’s stories, but, for the most part, accept them. The issue is finally resolved in “The Emerald City of Oz”, when, with the bank about to foreclose on the Kansas farm, Dorothy receives permission to bring them with her, to live in Oz forever. All three are members of Princess Ozma’s privy council, and Dorothy has remained about twelve years old ever since that day.)
The abortive 50’s Disney film was to be called “The Rainbow Road to Oz”, and was to star the original Mouseketeers. The plot does appear to have been based more on “Patchwork Girl” than anything else. Three numbers from the proposed movie were performed by the Mouseketeers on the Disney TV show, but nothing further came of it.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
The Rainbow Road to Oz
Darnit, I would love to see a film based upon The Road to Oz. Button-Bright, the Shaggy Man, and Polychrome are three of my favourite characters from the canon.
'Fraid I made a boo-boo when I described copyright laws above. At http://britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/1/0,5716,26641+1,00.html it says that copyright laws in the US were changed by Congress in 1978 to “life of the author plus 50 years. For anonymous works, pseudonymous works and works for hire, it’s 75 years from the date of publication or 100 years from date of creation, whichever is shorter. Copyrights prior to 1978 (this would apply to all of Baum’s Oz books) run for 28 years, but may be renewed for an additional 47 years (for a total of 75 years).”
And I said the initial copyright is for 50 years and can be renewed for 25 years. I was wrong.
There is much more to this article and there are separate articles on the copyrights of movies, TV shows and other works other than print.
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