Return to Oz

The 1985 film Return to Oz is the unofficial sequel to The Wizard of Oz. It was made by Walt Disney Pictures and has no approval by MGM, the company that made the original film. The film was directed by Walter Murch. The movie's plot is a combination of two sequels to the original The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: Ozma of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum. In the movie, Dorothy (played by Fairuza Balk) returns to Oz only to find it in a post-apocolyptic state (the yellow brick road is desecrated; the Emerald City is a collapsing ruin) and all of her friends turned to stone. She is soon imprisoned by the wicked Princess Mombi. After meeting a mechanical man named Tik-Tok and a talking scarecrow named Jack Pumpkinhead, Dorthy discovers that her friends have been turned to stone by the evil Nome King (sic), who is planing to conquer all of Oz. After escaping Mombi's castle, the three friends venture underground to confront the king. The film is considerably darker than the 1939 MGM musical. Dorothy is much younger, and there are scenes of violence. Some ties to the original were purposely kept, however. For example, though in the books Dorothy was blonde, she remains dark-haired in this movie. The silver slippers in the Baum story remain ruby in Return to Oz as they had been in the MGM film, as well. The movie was overbudget, and extremely expensive to make, yet did poorly in theaters. The PG rating likely caused considerable problems in this regard, and many critics denounced the film as being too scary for young children. Those not familiar with the Oz books also found the characters and scenes to be quite bizarre and unfamiliar, as other than Dorothy, few characters from the first film appear. Category:Oz