Is Return to Oz Really the Better Oz Adaptation?

Whenever anyone does a parody or an homage to The Wizard of Oz, you can bet they’re really doing one to the 1939 MGM movie, not the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.^[1]From what I understand, The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire is a partial exception, taking some cues from the book and some from the movie. Understandably, this can bug fans of the original book. A film that some recommend as a superior alternative to MGM’s The Wizard of Oz is Return to Oz, the 1985 sequel (of sorts) from Disney which combines the stories The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz, L. Frank Baum’s first two literary follow-ups to The Wonderful Wizard. Return to Oz was bombed with critics and audiences upon its initial release but has since gained a cult following. It’s relatively common to read people online say they prefer it to MGM’s The Wizard of Oz because it has a darker tone and is truer to the original Oz books.

I disagree with that last claim.

Well, that’s not entirely true.

I agree that in several ways Return to Oz is closer to its source material than your average Oz adaptation. But being darker is not one of them. In his introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum wrote that he intended it to be “a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained, and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.” That may seem like an odd description of a story about a girl being carried miles away from her home by a terrible cyclone, attacked by various animals and monsters and enslaved by a tyrannical witch. But there’s truth in it too. However terrible the villains or the peril in the Oz books, Baum’s prose style keeps them from ever being really intense reads. For example, Ozma of Oz begins with Dorothy Gale being swept overboard, clinging to a chicken coop, in a terrible storm at sea. Sounds scary, right? But here’s the book’s description.

Dorothy had a good ducking, you may be sure, but she didn’t lose her presence of mind even for a second… “Why, I’ve got a ship of my own!” she thought, more amused than frightened at her sudden change of condition; and then, as the coop climbed up to the top of a big wave, she looked eagerly around for the ship from which she had been blown. It was far, far away, by this time. Perhaps no one on board had yet missed her, or knew of her strange adventure. Down into a valley between the waves the coop swept her, and when she climbed another crest the ship looked like a toy boat, it was such a long way off. Soon it had entirely disappeared in the gloom, and then Dorothy gave a sigh of regret at parting with Uncle Henry and began to wonder what was going to happen to her next.

Just now she was tossing on the bosom of a big ocean, with nothing to keep her afloat but a miserable wooden hen-coop that had a plank bottom and slatted sides, through which the water constantly splashed and wetted her through to the skin! And there was nothing to eat when she became hungry—as she was sure to do before long—and no fresh water to drink and no dry clothes to put on.

“Well, I declare!” she exclaimed, with a laugh. “You’re in a pretty fix, Dorothy Gale, I can tell you! and I haven’t the least idea how you’re going to get out of it!”

Not exactly spine tingling, is it? Return to Oz by comparison is next door to a horror movie. I don’t mean that as an insult. Horror movies-or movies next door to horror-have their place. I just question whether this is really true to the spirit of the Oz books.

Here’s the setup. It’s been six months since the cyclone and Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) still keeps talking about the Scarecrow (Justin Case), the Tin Woodman (Deep Roy of The Neverending Story and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and the Cowardly Lion (voiced by John Alexander.) Thinking she’s crazy, Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) and Uncle Henry (Matt Clark) send her to the deceptively friendly Doctor Worley (Nicol Williamson) for his new shock therapy treatment. Director Walter Murch and his co-screenwriter Gill Dennis do a great job making the hospital scary with its narrow hallways, tall windows, squeaky gurneys and the stern Nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh.) Just as Dorothy is hooked up to Worley’s machine one stormy night, the electricity goes off. The adults leave to check on this, leaving her strapped to the gurney. Another patient, a girl (Emma Ridley), frees her and tells her they’ve got to escape. The offscreen screams Dorothy can hear, she explains, are patients who have been damaged by the machine and imprisoned in the cellar. The girls flee into the storm with Nurse Wilson pursuing them. They get separated and Dorothy is swept away by a turbulent river.

Horrifying, right? And except for the part about Dorothy being swept away, absolutely none of that is from the books.^[2]Though, credit where credit is due, Dr. Worley sounds like the name of an L. Frank Baum character. What’s more, this Oz adaptation is actually copying one of the changes The Wizard of Oz movie made to its source material that book fans tend to find most irritating: having everyone and everything in Kansas correspond to someone and something in Oz. It even has Dorothy fall unconscious prior to waking up in that country and then when she returns home, reawaken in the same place she left without too much time passing. To be fair, the main thing that bothers fans is the implication that Oz is a dream of Dorothy’s and the ending of Return to Oz makes clear that isn’t so.^[3]To be fair, to the MGM movie, I’ve heard that it was going to end with a shot of the magic slippers, revealing Oz was real after all but this was dropped for distracting from the main business … Continue reading And, hey, I can’t really blame Return for following in The Wizard of Oz‘s footsteps there because it is fun in both films to play spot-the-actor and hunt-the-parallel especially for kids. Still, this does suggest to me that this adaptation isn’t as free from MGM’s influence as some make it out to be.

In fact, in many ways, it takes a similar approach to adapting the books. It simplifies the story by combining supporting characters and eliminating episodes. Actually, it does even more simplifying since it’s taking two Oz stories and turning them into one.^[4]I can’t really blame it for doing that since The Marvelous Land of Oz made the mistake of not featuring Dorothy and who wants a Wizard of Oz sequel without her? You could even argue making the story darker was also something the MGM Wizard of Oz did though you could just as easily argue it wasn’t.^[5]On the one hand, the 1939 movie cut the more violent parts of the book, mostly involving the Tin Woodman’s axe. On the other hand, it made the winged monkeys creepier and the Wicked Witch of … Continue reading But make no mistake. In many other ways, Return to Oz does make its own path. There are no musical numbers and more action scenes. Dorothy is played by a child, not a teenager. Both Kansas and Oz are in color.^[6]Actually, Kansas being in black and white was sort of from the book. L. Frank Baum described everyone and everything there as being gray. The movie just took him really literally. The sets and locations aren’t just matte paintings. The characters all look more like the illustrations by W. W. Denslow and John. R. Neill. And all that is to generally good effect.

Back to the story. Dorothy finds herself at the outskirts of Oz along with her family’s hen, Billina^[7]I wish the movie could have included the story behind her name from Ozma of Oz. who can now talk (and is voiced by Denise Bryer.)^[8]Why does Billina get the ability to speak when she arrives in Oz, but Toto didn’t? Well, continuity wasn’t one of Baum’s strengths. Dorothy is delighted to be back but horrified to discover that the Yellow Brick Road has been torn up, the Emerald City is practically a ruin and its denizens, including her old friends, have been reduced to statues.

Again, this is pretty disturbing stuff and again, it’s not true to the books. The Emerald City does get conquered and stripped of its jewels in The Marvelous Land of Oz. But it’s by an army of frustrated housewives armed with knitting needles. They win because the City’s army consists of one soldier whose gun isn’t loaded for fear of accidents. The conquerors’ tyranny consists of making the men do housework and take care of the children and their leader, General Jinjur, just wants to sit on a throne and eat chocolates all day. What I’m saying is it’s played more for laughs. In Return to Oz, creatures called Wheelers^[9]Remember those hospital gurneys with squeaky wheels back in Kansas? prowl the Emerald City and menace Dorothy. These come from Ozma of Oz, but I feel the movie makes them creepier than Baum did.

The Wheelers eventually conduct Dorothy to Mombi (Jean Marsh), the sorceress who has declared herself Princess of Oz.^[10]What I wonder is what happened to all the good witches? There were two in the book version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and one in the movie. Return to Oz can’t quite make up its mind which … Continue reading Mombi is a combination of three characters from the books: the previously described General Jinjur, an old sorceress from The Marvelous Land of Oz who actually named Mombi and Princess Langwidere from Ozma of Oz who had one neck but kept thirty beautiful heads in a cabinet and wore a different one every day.

Like Mombi in Return to Oz, Langwidere wanted Dorothy’s head for herself and imprisoned the girl when she refused but she offered to trade Dorothy another head for it. There was no implication that losing her head would kill Dorothy as there is in Return. Langwidere was spoiled and selfish, but she wasn’t much of a villain. According to Baum, the head she happened to be wearing when she met Dorothy had a temper that “was fiery, harsh and haughty in the extreme, and it often led the Princess to do unpleasant things which she regretted when she came to wear her other heads.” When Dorothy’s comrades showed up and demanded her release in Ozma of Oz, Langwidere readily gave it. There was nothing like Return to Oz’s chilling scene of Dorothy sneaking out of Mombi’s room with all the heads in the cabinet coming to life and calling her name and the headless Mombi rising from bed to pursue her.

Dorothy winds up in the underground lair of the Nome King (Nicol Williamson)^[11]I prefer the spelling “Gnome King” but Baum felt differently. along with a posse of friends she’s collected along the way. (More on them later.) The Nome King has transformed the Scarecrow into an ornament and agrees to turn him back if any of the heroes can pick him out of a vast collection of ornaments. But if they fail three times, they will become ornaments themselves. This terrible guessing game comes from Ozma of Oz but, as with Mombi and the Wheelers, this adaptation makes the Nome King creepier and in his case, more physically intimidating.^[12]It also adds the detail that with each wrong guess the heroes make, he becomes more human though why that should be or why he would want to be human is anyone’s guess. There also isn’t any scene where the King tries to devour any of Dorothy’s friends in Ozma.

Neither does he undergo anything like the disturbing demise he does in Return to Oz.^[13]After the Wicked Witch of the West melted, it became rare for villains in the Oz books to die.

For the record, I’m not saying that to bash this movie. I’m cynical about this actually being true to Baum’s vision but that doesn’t mean I disapprove of it on its own terms. After all, while many kids don’t enjoy being scared, many also do enjoy it. And there’s plenty to love about Return to Oz. The Nome King and Mombi are unforgettable villains. The casting is all great. So are the action scenes, the visuals, apart from some bad bluescreen, and the overall direction and sense of atmosphere. A big part of me wants to give this movie a hearty recommendation. Yet…I can’t honestly call this an improvement on The Wizard of Oz (1939) or even its equal. Here’s where I’m really going to alienate fans of the books because I believe this movie’s main problems come not from infidelity to Baum but from following him too closely.

Well, that’s not totally fair. It’s more like the movie glosses over Baum’s storytelling strengths, other than his visual imagination, which was admittedly his main one, while maximizing his weaknesses.

Besides Billina, Dorothy’s comrades in Return to Oz include a mechanical man called TikTok (voiced by Sean Barrett), Jack Pumpkinhead (voiced by Brian Henson), a wooden man with a jack o’ lantern for a head and the Gump (voiced by Lyle Conway), an amalgamation of furniture brought to life by Mombi’s magic powder.^[14]Why do the Gump and Jack Pumpkinhead need the magic powder, but the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman were automatically alive? Like I said, continuity was not one of Baum’s strengths. Regrettably, we don’t get the Wogglebug, the highly magnified and thoroughly educated insect who was the funniest character in The Marvelous Land of Oz. Neither do we get the army with twenty-six officers and one private from Ozma of Oz or that book’s Hungry Tiger who was cursed with both a ravenous appetite and a conscience that kept him from eating anybody. To be fair though, I can’t really think how Return to Oz could have contrived to include any of them. Anyway, Dorothy’s allies that we do get are great fun visually, but they don’t have much in the way of personality. L. Frank Baum was great at ideas for characters-or, perhaps more accurately, he was great at character designs, but he wasn’t great at making them individuals. All their dialogue tended to sound the same. The script for The Wizard of Oz by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf actually improved on the literary characters a little by making Dorothy more vulnerable and conflicted, the Scarecrow a bit more irritable, the Cowardly Lion funnier and the Wizard more silver tongued. Return to Oz, on the other hand, actually makes the characters even less endearing than they were in the source material. The pacing is so fast that we barely get to know them. Billina gets some good funny lines, TikTok has a bit of an arrogant streak, the Gump is grumpy and gets one great pun (“I should have quit when I was a head”) and I honestly can’t remember anything else about their characters.

Something nice that both the book and the movie versions of The Wizard of Oz had that neither The Marvelous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, nor Return to Oz has is that the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion each had a personal goal of their own. Mind you, I don’t think the story would have become a classic if it had just been about them without Dorothy the lynchpin but the fact that she was helping them as much as they were helping her made the bond between them all feel more real. By contrast, Billina, TikTok, Jack Pumpkinhead and the Gump pretty much exist just to assist Dorothy. I guess that makes sense in TikTok’s case, him being a robot, but it doesn’t make for a great relationship. Jack does have a yearning to find his creator, but this isn’t developed. Perhaps it’s telling that while the villains in Oz have counterpart characters in Kansas, the good guys only have objects if that.^[15]There is one big exception, but I don’t want to spoil it.

L. Frank Baum was a genius in some ways. The Oz books are full of creative ideas, exciting plots and fun worldbuilding.^[16]Not consistent worldbuilding, mind you, but fun. But he didn’t have a great writing style.^[17]Not when writing for children anyway. Much children’s literature at the beginning of the 19th century had a condescending tone. It’s been trying to get away from that for a long time. The prose in the Oz books has a flat, stiff, tone weirdly devoid of human emotion and everyone’s dialogue sounds the same. Sometimes this comes across as hilarious deadpan humor as in the Scarecrow’s nonreaction to learning that his city has been conquered in The Marvelous Land of Oz.^[18]One way Baum’s sequels to The Wonderful Wizard improved on it is by having more humor. It also might have come from Baum’s desire to keep from distressing his young readers. But I can’t help feeling it reflects his limitations as an artist. Even as a kid, while I enjoyed the Oz stories quite a bit, I realized they weren’t as well written as, say, the Narnia books or Peter Pan. Not helping was that as the series went on, Oz lost the relative edge of earlier books, becoming so utopian that eventually its denizens were literally not allowed to die.^[19]To be fair, this rule did eliminate questions about why the bad guys didn’t just kill the good guys. It crossed the line between charmingly innocent and saccharine and never looked back. I’ve never finished the series and probably never will.

What do I mean by “weirdly devoid of human emotion?” Well, remember that scene from both Ozma of Oz in which Dorothy is imprisoned by someone who wants to take her head? Well, TikTok tries to defend her, but can’t because his machinery has run down. “Well, it can’t be helped,” says Dorothy with a sigh. That’s a ridiculously calm reaction under those circumstances but it comes across as even more so in Return to Oz, which, as I’ve described above, makes Dorothy’s enemy in that scene much scarier. An even worse instance and one that I should stress doesn’t come from the books is when Dorothy, trying to rescue Jack Pumpkinhead, ends up falling out of the sky. He calls out an apology. “That’s all right, Jack,” she calls back as she tumbles seemingly to her doom, “It can’t be helped.” Fairuza Balk is great in this movie but even she can’t sell that dialogue. And the script’s insistence on keeping Baum’s, shall we say, innocent tone clashes bizarrely with its aspirations of being dark and thrilling. I actually think the best written scenes are the ones in Kansas since they don’t try at all to sound like the Oz books.

What both the literary and cinematic versions of The Wizard of Oz had that The Marvelous Land, Ozma of Oz and Return to Oz all lack is a heart. While Baum’s subsequent Oz books had more humor and arguably even more creativity, none of them is considered the classic that is The Wonderful Wizard, and I believe that is because of the emotional resonance of Dorothy’s goal. She can see Oz is infinitely more colorful than her humdrum home but, like Odysseus preferring Penelope to Calypso, that’s what she wants. And MGM’s The Wizard of Oz made this theme even more compelling by making Dorothy’s relationship with her aunt and uncle more complicated, having her initially want to leave Kansas and giving her more of a character arc while still maintaining her most important personality traits from the source material. Theoretically, Return to Oz also has an emotionally compelling theme in that Dorothy’s goal is to save her friends. But as mentioned above, the movie is too fast paced to develop a bond between her and her new friends and it’s hard to worry too much about her old ones when we’ve never met them in this continuity.^[20]Presumably, we’re supposed to project our memories of either the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or the movie but it’s hard to say which. On the one hand, Return to Oz includes details … Continue reading I almost wish the filmmakers could have just adapted The Wonderful Wizard. I know I’ve just described the movie as improving upon it, but there are also memorable images and ideas exclusive to the book. Even if it didn’t end up being as iconic as the MGM version, a Wizard of Oz movie in the style of Return could have had its own charms. But I can also sympathize with Baum fans who are tired of the first Oz book being the only to be adapted. As it is, less familiar source material does give this sequel a special appeal.

Rather than improve on the original story, Return to Oz actually makes the resolution depend more on luck than it does in Ozma of Oz. To be fair, the happy endings of Oz books, including that of The Wonderful Wizard-especially that one in fact-depend on coincidences and convenience. But at least the Nome King’s defeat in Ozma was accomplished more through the heroes’ cleverness and quick acting, not just lucky guesses and good luck. This, combined with the lack of an uplifting theme, makes Return to Oz‘s happy ending feel less cathartic and more tacked on than it should. My problem with the movie isn’t that it indulges in, to use Baum’s terminology, “heartaches and nightmares.” Those are fine. My problem is that it lacks “wonderment and joy.”

I’m sorry to end on such a negative note. There really is a lot to love about Return to Oz. In the past, I’ve defined a cult classic as something that really isn’t good enough to be a classic but is too good or at least too interesting to be dismissed and forgotten. I think that summarizes this movie very well.