Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Return to Oz

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In this episode we discussed Return to Oz, and the two books it is based on 'The Marvellous Land of Oz' and 'Ozma of Oz'.

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com.

Extra special thanks this episode to Maki Yamazaki, who not only did our intro music, and the intro itself, but also spent an ungodly amount of time re-mastering this episode to fix issues with Ren's recording. What a legend. Find her work at makiyamazaki.com, or if you enjoyed this episode, maybe buy her a coffee. She deserves it.

Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and his band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk

Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find her work at behance.net/lettydraws

The Den of Geek article mentioned in the episode can be found here.

Transcript

Maki: Coming up, your regularly scheduled podcast. But first, a brief introduction by myself, Maki Yamazaki. A room full of disembodied; living heads, a key that decides when it is time for you to think; ham sandwiches. A dream? You may be an adult now, but are you still scared? (diabolical laughter as the theme tune plays)

Ren: Hi Adam!

Adam: Hi, I’ve finished coughing!

Ren: Oh, well done!

Adam: Thanks. I’m ready to pod.

Ren: Oooh yeah. So, I couldn’t remember if it was you who introduced me to Return to Oz. Was it?

Adam: It could have been. I certainly didn’t watch it as a kid. Again, as I’ve said in previous weeks there’s no way, I would have failed early on this one. And to be fair the first twenty minutes of Return to Oz are basically like Wuthering Heights or something, it’s just desolate and gothic. So you know, understandably so, I think.

I can’t remember who introduced me to it though, it’s one of those films that just kind of spreads by whispers in dark alleyways. You’re walking down a street and someone says: (Adam does a shady back-alley whisper) ‘You seen Return to Oz? It’s in the kids VHS section but it’s not really a kid’s film!’ So yeah, I only saw it around the same time you did, if not a little before, sometime in my early to mid twenties. So how did you feel the first time you watched it?

Ren: I loved it. I didn’t grow up with The Wizard of Oz, I’d maybe seen it once? And I think maybe Return To Oz is uncomfortable for people who have fond associations with The Wizard of Oz.

Adam: Oh yeah, I think a lot of Return to Oz is about the fact that it’s not The Wizard of Oz, and you’re not going to get The Wizard of Oz, and you can’t return to The Wizard of Oz. So yeah, if you’re someone who grew up with The Wizard of Oz as a perennial children’s favourite, it would be particularly distressing. Because my understanding is people who loved The Wizard of Oz, and I know Roger Ebert loved The Wizard of Oz, and he loathed Return to Oz. I listened to his review and he hated it. But people who liked the books actually quite like it.

Ren: It’s much more in the spirit of the books, than The Wizard of Oz.

Adam: Yeah, I absolutely agree. So why would you say that?

Ren: Ummm, it’s… (Ren flounders)

Adam: Sorry, this is me going into total lecturer mode, this is what I’m like with my students. They’ll say something kind of loose, right, and then I’m like, okay, well, define exactly what you mean - I was doing this today with them talking about Adam Curtis documentaries. They were like: ‘the music choices were a bit strange’ (Adam does interrogating lecturer voice) ’Strange how?!’ (scared student voice) ‘Oh, I don’t know’ (intense lecturer) ‘In what way??’ (student) ‘I don’t know, leave me be!’

Ren: The feeling of a kind of… I mean, it’s a lot less heartwarming than the delightful adventures of The Wizard of Oz. It’s more just a series of unusual places and people that happen without really any over-arching meaning to them necessarily.

Adam: Yeah, it’s definitely one thing after another. I mean, the original MGM musical is like that, but I guess the way musicals work they have these song-and-dance numbers that hold the whole thing together so they feel more coherent than they actually are.

So my sister said, I didn’t think I’d get Phoebe to watch any of this, to be honest, because she really hates certain analogue special effects like old puppets and that kind of thing. I love this kind of stuff, but my sister really doesn’t. She didn’t like The Wizard of Oz when she was a kid, and found it scary, and I’d shows her the front cover of the DVD, which is probably more troubling than the film itself in many ways.

On mine you’ve got this very odd, slightly glossy looking drawing of the characters and everyone looks slightly like they’re made of porcelain or something. Particularly Dorothy, on the front she looks like one of those Toby Jugs. It looks like they’ve all got an eggshell finish. But anyway, I didn’t think she’d like it, but actually she kind of got into it and said she much preferred it to The Wizard of Oz, and her main reason, which I thought was quite a good observation, was that she found Dorothy a lot more relatable, and she found the characters much easier to get along with.

In the original she felt that the characters were always literally trying to make a song and dance out of things, they were always trying to entertain her as a viewer, and she said she didn’t like it, it felt kind of try-hard. And I guess as a cynical 90s kid she would feel like that. There’s a certain sense of ‘Let’s escape the Great Depression with enforced happiness everyone!!’ in The Wizard of Oz, and I don’t know if it’s partly knowledge of the production after the fact, but she said she didn’t like the original Dorothy because she was just pretending to be happy. And obviously we know that Judy Garland was very much pretending to be happy, it was a really miserable filming experience.

Ren: This might be a good point to give a little summary. So, Return to Oz is set six months after The Wizard of Oz, and we come back to Kansas and everything is not going very well at all. Obviously the house got destroyed in the hurricane, and Uncle Henry is in kind of a funk, and he isn’t building the new house as fast as he should be, and Aunt Em can’t cope with all the farm chores, and Dorothy can’t sleep and she keeps telling people the stories of Oz and they don’t believe her, and even Billina the chicken isn’t laying eggs and is being threatened with being cooked up. So it’s a fairly bleak set-up. And they’re unable to work out what to do with Dorothy, so they take her to a doctor for ‘electric healing’.

Adam: ‘What you need is a little electric healing!’ My sister made a very mortified face at that line.

Ren: Yep. And as Dorothy and Aunt Em leave the farm to go to the city to see this doctor, Toto doesn’t come with them, and he kind of howls mournfully at this misty field, and it’s pretty grim!

Adam: Though as my sister cheerfully pointed out, the real Toto would be long dead, so it’s a fake Toto anyway.

Ren: It’s just a replacement Toto, it’s fine.

Adam: So Dorothy’s taken off to this very gothic looking Victorian style hospital, and the sort of superciliously friendly avuncular doctor talks very patronisingly to Dorothy and says ‘I know just the thing to cheer-‘

Ren: (interrupts) Oh god, he’s the Nome King isn’t he?

Adam: Yeah yeah, he’s the same guy!

Ren: Okay right, yeah, sorry, just got that. Yes.

Adam: The outer world mirrors the inner world of Oz! Woaaah. Was it because of my Nome King voice?

Ren: It’s because you said ‘avuncular’, and I was thinking about how the Nome King has this avuncular-but-sinister manner.

Adam: He does! It’s funny because many uncles must also be fathers, but there are uncle-y uncles. It’s a specific type isn’t it, like can you imagine having an uncle for a father? That’s not the thing.

Well anyway, he says: ‘I know just the thing to cheer Dorothy up: electrocution!’ it turns out to be. And his EST machine has a face which he delights in showing Dorothy, and of course we talked about how he ends up becoming the Nome King in Oz, and the electric shock therapy machine becomes Tik-Tok, Dorothy’s loyal soldier friend. It’s nice that even the EST machine gets its own starring role in the land of Oz too.

Ren: Ah yes. So there’s a number of quite ghoulish touches when Dorothy is at the hospital. I particularly enjoyed Dorothy re-telling the quite macabre story of the Tin Man to the doctor and Aunt Em, who’s sitting there looking ashen-faced. And this is pretty much kind of verbatim from the book The Wizard of Oz: ‘and then he accidentally chopped off his right leg, and then he replaced it with a tin leg. And then he accidentally chopped off his other leg, and he replaced that with a tin leg’.

Adam: I think it’s very good in that it re-casts the events of The Wizard of Oz in a troubling new light to a lot of viewers, because that stuff is there in the original, but I guess because the MGM musical is so happy and bright you wouldn’t think ‘Hang on a minute, that’s pretty worrying’. Weirdly, this whole framing narrative of a character coming back from a fantastical world and no-one believing them, and them being diagnosed as being mentally unwell was copied nearly verbatim by American Mcgee, for his early 2000s edgelord goth-fest American Mcgee’s Alice, which was his 18 rated — did you play it?

Ren: No, but I think I’ve heard you talk about it.

Adam: It’s like imagine if Alice from Alice in Wonderland was actually just cra-haazy, and all this stuff was products of her twisted mind, but maybe it was real, and I found it funny that Disney had released a film two decades earlier with exactly this plot-line. So edgy enough for an 18 rated game and edgy enough for a PG rated kid’s film.

Ren: So yeah, Dorothy spends the night in this little cell-like room, with peeling paint on the walls and a tiny window, and it’s raining outside, and she can hear the screams of other patients and so on —

Adam: — who we are informed are locked in the basement.

Ren: Yes, they were damaged and they were locked in the basement, we get informed helpfully. (Ren hyperventilates a little bit)

Adam: Just in case the kids thought everything was okay. Just in case they thought that the screaming was a normal part of the treatment.

Ren: Yeah. And then the nurse, the very austere terrifying nurse who becomes Princess Mombi, comes to take Dorothy to her treatment and she has to lay down on the gurney and be strapped down, and she’s taken to the machine, and it’s about to be turned on, and then — there’s a power cut!

Adam: Hooray!

Ren: And, I suddenly had this realisation while watching this that it reminded me very much of Brazil.

Adam: That’s really interesting because I totally thought of Brazil! ‘Oh, I might bring up Brazil because I know it’s one of Ren’s favourite films’, but then I thought, ‘It’s a bit of a tangent so I don’t think I will’. So I’m really glad you said that because I also thought ‘Huh, it’s kind of like grubby steampunk in the way that Brazil is’.

Ren: And it is a bit of a tangent, but I do want to go in to it because Brazil is one of my favourite films.

Adam: Okay sure, I’m interested in where this is going!

Ren: Okay. Also released in 1985, by the way, directed by Terry Gilliam. In that film the main character, Sam Lowry, is a low-level bureaucrat in a kind of 1984-esque dystopia who escapes reality through fantastical romantic daydreams. At the end he’s arrested and strapped to a chair in the depths of an old power station and he’s about to be tortured by his old friend, Jack, and Jack’s coming towards him, and just then these rescuers abseil down the walls of the power plant, they kill Jack and escape with Sam, and he runs away to the countryside to live in the countryside with the woman he loves, until it’s revealed that this was just another fantasy, and the film ends with him still strapped to this chair, and he’s entirely lost connection with reality.

Adam: No, no, no it doesn’t Ren. The American version is canon, my friend.*

Ren: (deadpan) Oh no, I’m sorry, he runs away to live in the idyllic cottage with the woman he loves and then the theme tune plays.

Adam: And then Terry Gilliam had the audacity to change it! Like a fool. So are you trying to suggest that maybe this ever-so convenient power cut was all a little bit too convenient?

Ren: It’s a little bit too convenient! There’s a power cut and then there’s a mysterious little girl, and she takes Dorothy by the hand, and they escape, and they go to the river, and they get washed away —

Adam: — and the little girl drowns in the river.

Ren: The little girl drowns, yeah.

Adam: I mean, we hear at the end of the film that everyone apart from the doctor, who dies trying to rescue his beloved EST machine friend survives, but the way it’s phrased suggests it was everyone who was in the building survived, and the mysterious unnamed little girl wasn’t in the building. Last time we see her is struggling in the river, so it is left quite disturbingly open as to whether she does drown.

I think it’s unfair to say that Dorothy has nothing when she’s left in the cell. Because Ozma first turns up when she’s in the cell, she suddenly appears there, the door’s locked and this little girl is magically in the room and she gives her a little pumpkin, and then Dorothy, she doesn’t have much to do, but she does find a way to occupy herself. She combs the imaginary hair of the pumpkin.

Ren: She does!

Adam: Which I thought was very charming. If you’re locked away in a gothic Victorian hospital, combing the imaginary hair of a pumpkin is definitely a good way to occupy your time.

Ren: It’s a good touch! It’s Fairuza Balk playing Dorothy.

Adam: So they go to the stream —

Ren: They’re washed away, Dorothy manages to clamber onto a piece of wood, the other girl presumably drowns, we don’t know. And then when Dorothy wakes up she’s in the deadly desert in Oz, and she has Billina the chicken with her.

Adam: Who can talk! Although Toto never talked, right?

Ren: I don’t think so, I don’t remember The Wizard of Oz well enough!

Adam: I’m 80% sure, to be fair i’ve watched The Wizard of Oz in the last two years, so I really should remember, and unless I’ve repressed some kind of Toto voice from my head like (Adam does a wise-cracking sidekick voice) ’Hey Dorothy, let’s keep on going down that road!’ But I don’t think that happened.

Ren: In the book The Marvellous Land of Oz, when Billina talks she says that her name is Bill, and Dorothy finds that insufficiently feminine and calls her Billina. But we don’t get that backstory in the film.

Adam: Which is a shame because there’s a lovely bit in the third book where we meet Billina again, and she ends up being put in a chicken coop basically and within just a day of being away from Ozma and Dorothy she has reverted to calling herself Bill and acting like a chicken and getting into fights, and Dorothy is quite annoyed and upset by this. And either Dorothy or Ozma is like ‘Oh look at you, you’ve got half an eye out, and blood all over you, and your feathers are all over’ and Bill goes ‘you should see the other one! come on then!’

Ren: So maybe we should call her Bill as that is her preferred name.

Adam: Yeah I’m fine with calling her Bill. Did you want to talk briefly about some of the gender play in the books?

Ren: Oh yeah, shall we?

Adam: Yeah, I think we can digress a bit on our path through the plot of Return to Oz for a bit with a digression.

Ren: Okay, it’s great. Basically in The Marvellous Land of Oz the character we’re introduced to is a boy called Tip who is under the guardianship of the old witch Mombi, and is put to work by her. And this is a different iteration of Mombi than in Return to Oz. And there’s a pretty delightful twist at the end of the book where it turns out this character, Tip, has been Princess Ozma after all, enchanted by Mombi to be a boy, and all the gang of misfits reassure Tip that they will like him just as much when he’s a girl. And I’ve drawn this quote out because it’s great, when he’s transformed back into Ozma he says;

‘I hope none of you will care less for me than you did before. I’m just the same Tip, you know; only— only—‘

‘Only you’re different!’ said the Pumpkinhead; and everyone thought that it was the wisest speech he had ever made.’

Which I just cannot not read that as an affirming trans narrative, I am incapable of not seeing it like that, so it warmed my heart.

Adam: It was definitely something that was very charming about the books, that as with Bill the chicken, or hen, it seems very on side with the idea that identities are inherently unstable and in states of flux and that’s okay, and we should kind of have an on-the-moment kind of DIY approach to things.

Like one of the reviews said negatively about Return to Oz, which I really disagreed with, they said ‘this band of misfits’ or something like that, in a derogatory way, ‘are too weird for kids to like. And they’re weird enough that you can’t tell them apart from the bad guys’.

But that’s what makes Return to Oz really charming, which is probably why it connected with a lot of odd outcast kids, because these characters are kind of making up their identity as they go along and dong their best at it. And the villains in the Oz books, and this comes across in Return to Oz a bit, are those who insist too strongly on the stability of identity. It tends to be those who kind of get obsessed with certain status symbols, for instance —

Ren: — like, you’re only a scarecrow, you can’t possibly do that?

Adam: Yeah, or like the Nome King gets pretty caught up in this quite labyrinthine argument about why it’s okay to turn people into objects. And it’s quite patently immoral to turn people into objects, and yet he manages to almost convince himself it’s okay for him to do this, and otherwise they’d be slaves and they’re happier as objects. And most of the villains speak from authority but don’t have any actual way of backing up what they’re saying.

Whereas the heroes seem to speak from a place of love and compassion. The heroes are kind of pragmatist in the kind of William Jamesian, American pragmatism way, their philosophies are basically built on what’s needed in the moment, and they approach these things with a swing in their step and an honourable smile and decency, basically. Resilience and decency are not taking yourself too seriously, I guess.

Ren: And I think the Gump is quite representative of that.

Adam: How do you explain the Gump, for those who haven’t seen it?

Ren: How do I explain the Gump. The Gump is a creature who was made in a hurry to escape, different situations in the book and the film, who is made of a couple of sofas pushed together and tied together, and some palm leaves for wings and the head of a creature called a Gump which is a sort of antlered beast.

Adam: A moose like creature.

Ren: A kind of moose-like thing. And these are all hastily tied together and then the Powder of Life sprinkled on top to become a kind of creature. And the Gump is just sort of amiably confused by existence, by being this Gump that he is now, having last he remembered being a moose-like creature running through a forest. But is kind of accepting of this turn of fate, and just kind of gets on with it.

Adam: Yeah, like when they ask the Gump to fly, he’s like: ‘Well, I haven’t done it before, but hey, I’ll give it a go’. It actually reminds me a bit, less tragically, of the whale in Hitchhiker’s. In Hitchhiker’s the infinite improbability drive creates a whale in space out of nothing, and it spends most of its short existence as it plummets towards an earth bemusedly remarking on how curious it is to be alive.

Ren: I feel like Douglas Adams probably read these books. I have no proof of that, but.

Adam: They do have a Douglas Adams-y sense of humour. I found them a lot funnier than I was expecting.

Ren: The bit that also reminded me of Douglas Adams was the character of the Hungry Tiger in ‘Ozma of Oz’.

Adam: I really like that Hungry Tiger!

Ren: The Hungry Tiger’s great.

Adam: Have you got the whole eating babies bit?

Ren: I do, I have it here. So he’s a character who’s constantly at war between his hunger and his conscience —

Adam: Aren’t we all!

Ren: Aren’t we all. It’s the final part of the book, and the Nome King’s like:

‘What more do you want?’

And the hungry tiger says ‘A fat baby. I want a fat baby,’ ‘A nice, plump, juicy, tender, fat baby. But of course, if I had one, my conscience would not allow me to eat it. So I’ll have to be an ornament and forget my hunger’.

Adam: And then you get stuff about the unfair assumptions that come with stable identities, because Dorothy says to the Hungry Tiger: ’It seems like you’re a very good tiger’ and he says ‘No, no, I’m not a very good tiger. If I was a good tiger I’d be eating babies, because that’s what’s expected of a tiger. I’m actually a very bad tiger’. So you have a lot of these characters who are kind of forced to fit into a certain role and they don’t really do it, so they kind of muddle along the best they can and that’s all really charming, and I do think that’s something that Return to Oz does manage to preserve. I do really like how damn rickety Jack Pumpkinhead looks, for instance.

Ren: Oh yeah, I mean I find it a little bit disturbing how the sticks of his knees are broken and barely connected together, but it is a good effect, he looks incredibly ramshackle.

Adam: He really does look jumbled together. They do this, I’m not sure if it’s a video effect, I spent quite a lot of time during the film trying to work out how they did different special effects, and one thing I liked that suits this DIY approach, it has bits of stop-motion in there, apparently courtesy of Will Vinton, famous american stop-motion animator, it has blue screen in bits, it has some video editing trickery, I think, just throws loads of different special effects at the screen and hopes for the best, basically.

Ren: It looks great though!

Adam: Yeah, it does! It was directed by Walter Murch who worked on a lot of Francis Ford Coppola’s films in the ‘70s so he had a kind of prestige career, he did the sound design for The Conversation with Gene Hackman, and he also did the director’s cut re-edit for Apocalypse Now, so he’s not coming from a traditional kind of background you’d expect, he’s coming from the New American Cinema of the ‘70s, which is generally known for ushering in an era of good cinematography, good lighting, to American cinema, and I think that’s all on display in Return to Oz, I really do think it looks very good.

Especially the lighting, theres some great lighting in it, particularly Mombi, this witch, she has casements of heads so she switches out her heads to suit her identity, I mean it mostly seems to be very fickle in her case, based on how she wants to look, but there’s a bit where Dorothy and friends have to sneak into this cupboard of heads and the lighting in this scene is incredible. You’ve got this lovely low-key lighting with great pools of darkness, and it’s very dark and expressionistic and makes it all the scarier. And the costumes, do you want tot talk about the costumes? Like the Wheelers.

Ren: Oh, the Wheelers. well.

Adam: So in the original illustrations the Wheelers just have a spotty shirt on and a ruff.

Ren: I haven’t actually seen the illustrations, because I was reading the Projekt Gutenberg on my kindle.

Adam: Well, if you look at the right Projekt Gutenberg download you can see the pictures. You get the different formats.

Ren: So I haven’t seen any of the pictures but they are described in ‘Ozma of Oz’ as being clothed ‘most gorgeously in embroidered garments of many colours’ and wearing straw hats perched jauntily on the sides of their heads. And also as ‘all clad in splendid tight-fitting garments’. And then in the film, they’re kind of like Adam and the Ants.

Adam: They are like Adam and the Ants! Kind of like if a group of spider monkeys went to a junkyard and tried to set up an Adam and the Ants tribute band.

Ren: Yeah. They have these masks that they flip down over their face or wear on a top of their head that are connected with wires, and they have wheels at the end of all their limbs, which are incredibly long.

Adam: But apparently, according to the books, obviously you don’t get this in the film, the wheels are made of bone, basically.

Ren: That’s what I was going to say, yeah. Their wheels ‘were of the same hard substance that our finger-nails and toe-nails are composed of’.

Adam: Which is great, just imagining your fingernails curling round to make little wheels.

Ren: So the Wheelers are, for people who didn’t see return to oz as kids —

Adam: So the Wheelers are the first antagonists. So Dorothy, to get back onto the yellow brick road, finds herself in the deadly desert and basically plays a kid’s game of lava to get to the end of the desert without stepping on the sand and turning horribly to sand. She sees a message, which says ‘Beware’, it’s graffiti in the film, it’s written in the sand in the book, that says ‘Beware the Wheelers’ and very soon after seeing this message the Wheelers appear.

Ren: And it’s particularly horrible sounds when they appear, these screeching wheels and cackling, and I was just reading an article on Den of Geek that points out that the sound of the Wheelers is the same as the creaking hospital trolleys as they trundle through the corridors.

Adam: Oh wow, that’s really clever! You can imagine them being called colloquially ‘wheelers’, can’t you? like: ‘get the wheeler for a patient in block 6’.

Ren: And they chase Dorothy into a little room which is where she finds Tik-Tok. Who then beats them off.

Adam: Tik-Tok is the kind of one-man or one-robot army of Oz.

Ren: Yes, who is controlled by clockwork and he has his three winches, one to control his action, one to control his talking, one to control his thought. And they can all wind down at different times, and Dorothy has to keep winding him up in various ways.

Adam: It’s really sad, I feel, that he’s dependent, there’s a real horror in that, the idea of his movement running down but his thoughts still running, and he’s dependent on someone else to solve this for him.

Ren: And Dorothy says ‘why didn’t they make it so you could wind yourself up?’. He manages to beat off the Wheelers, with a lunch pail and then the next antagonist is Princess Mombi.

Adam: Of the many heads.

Ren: Of the many heads. Who is a kind of amalgamation of two characters from The Marvellous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz, so there’s the old witch Mombi in The Marvellous Land of Oz who seems to basically have the personality of Princess Mombi in the film, very malevolent, and then there’s the character Princess Langwidere in Ozma of Oz who is the character who wants to take Dorothy’s head, and has a collection of heads, although she’s rather more scatter-brained and vain rather than actively evil.

Adam: Yeah, she’s quite easy to placate, doesn’t seem to really wish Dorothy any real harm. Well, she does want to take her head off, but apart from that.

Ren: She was going to give her another one.

Adam: That’s true, it’s not like she was going to leave her with no head, she’s not a monster. She was, to be fair, going to chop her head off and replace it with an old head she didn’t want. But Dorothy is obviously quite particular about having her own head, and so refuses this. So this is where, in Return to Oz, she meets Jack Pumpkinhead up in the attic of Mombi’s castle, and then together they make the Gump. And then it’s really just on to the Nome King. I really like Return to Oz, but it has a very long beginning and a very long end, so there’s not all that much incident, once she’s met the characters, once the central party have got together, it’s off on the back of the Gump to get to the Nome King’s rocky palace. They have a bit of misadventure on the way there, because the Gump falls apart —

Ren: Yes, and it seems like they might land in the deadly desert for a moment, but they don’t. But yeah, it’s fairly one thing after another, one antagonist after another.

Adam: Although it works, I think. That’s kind of what you want in a kid’s film, there’s no real down time, there’s always something happening to catch your attention.

Ren: And the Nome King, as we mentioned earlier, is an interesting villain because he’s very avuncular, and in the book he keeps talking about how he’s extremely kind and merciful while actually being very cruel and calculating.

Adam: Yeah, and he’s very good at justifying, or seeming to justify, his cruelty by using legalistic language. One thing I kind of liked about the Oz books is that you get the sense that Baum is very much on the side with the spirit of the law rather than the letter of law, you know generally if he feels like the characters are being kind and decent, let them get on with it, whereas the Nome King who has the power to write the laws, and is very able to back up all his cruelty legalistically, but he’s obviously not acting out of any compassion or genuine kindness.

Ren: So the Nome King has transformed the Scarecrow into an ornament, and he gives the assembled crew a certain number of guesses to go in and guess which ornament is the Scarecrow, and if they get it right they can leave with the Scarecrow, and if not they also get turned into an ornament. Which is again bringing up this theme of fluidity between people and objects and what is consciousness.

Adam: What does it mean to be a being with agency, to be afforded that right?

Ren: There’s also, in the film, all the inhabitants of the Emerald City have been turned into statues.

Adam: In a scene that’s very reminiscent - because this isn’t in the book, as far as I’m aware, at least not the two we’ve read, and it seemed very reminiscent of Narnia to me.

Ren: It was very reminiscent of Narnia. There was even a lion.

Adam: Although luckily Dorothy’s too decent to draw a comedy moustache on the stone lion, unlike that Edmund, urghhh!

Ren: Urghh, edmund.

Adam: But don’t worry, he’s reformed, he’s not as bad as Susan. I head she likes parties.

Ren: Urgh, susan. I heard she owns a fur coat and it does’t go down to her ankles.

Adam: Well, all her siblings are going to die and she’s not going to go to heaven. I don’t know why I’m imagining C.S. Lewis being so catty. But basically I grew up with the Narnia books, and I kind of wish now that i’d grown up with the Oz books, because I think there’s a lot more human warmth and kindness and decency in the Oz books than there ever were in the Narnia books, frankly.

Ren: I feel like it’s a shame they’re not so much read anymore, because I think they definitely hold up.

Adam: Yeah, they’re really charming! I don’t know if it’s because the musical so far overtook the fame and popularity of the books, or because they’re lumped in with late-Victorian era kid’s literature, but it’s very different from something like, The Water Babies is a bit earlier and we might end up doing that on a later podcast, it’s all kinds of horrible. But it doesn’t have that kind of school-teacherly, hectoring tone that say The Water Babies has. It’s just really nice. Which is kind of odd because it’s quite morbid and melancholy in its way, but there’s something genuinely good-natured about them that I found really charming.

Ren: Yeah. I’ve actually just go the complete collection now, so I’m going to read more of them.

Adam: I know Patchwork girl of Oz is meant to be one of the best ones. It was made in part into a hypertext game, Shelley Jackson combining it with bits of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I wasn’t sure if you were going to say anything about the re-appearance of the ruby slippers?

Ren: Yeah, I didn’t know quite what to do with that.

Adam: Neither did I! It seems like it’s the only gender play you get in the film, which is a shame because the gender play is very refreshing in the books, and for very old books now, it’s really well done, and it’s a bit creepy, or made to be a bit creepy, in the film.

Ren: It doesn’t have the same matter-of-fact acceptance it’s more just ‘he’s wearing these feminine shoes’, — this is the Nome King —

Adam: And it’s done in this sort of odd way, where his feet are kind of veiled, so they’re kind of hidden by the costume or the throne, and he kind of wiggles them out like ‘oh ho ho I’m wearing the shoes’, and then he wiggles them back and hides them again. Like a tongue, kind of pokes them out. It’s done in this weirdly, not exactly lacivious, but sort of, it’s very odd and I don’t know quite what they were trying to do with it.

Ren: No, me neither. And as you say, it’s a shame that that’s sort of the only gender play that we get.

Adam: I mean the film definitely adapts a lot more from Ozma of Oz than the second book, so we only meet Ozma as Ozma, we don’t know that Ozma has lived out a large part of her life as Tip, for instance. So I guess we don’t get any of that, I thik the film generally does quite a good job at getting the best bits from the two books, but it was a shame to miss that. And then things sort of end, right?

Ren: So we have the bizarre defeat of the Nome King, which we find out that Nome Kings are allergic to eggs.

Adam: Which to be fair is in the book.

Ren: It’s not any less odd in the book.

Adam: That perhaps was the one thing they shouldn’t have kept from the books. Because it always feels like it was maybe anti-comedy 100 years too early, it’s the kind of thing Tim and Eric would have done. It feels like a joke without a punchline. Like the Armando Iannucci joke, ‘What’s big and small at the same time? A big egg!’. We all know and appreciate that eggs are inherently funny, so.

Ren: Yes, they are. And also in the book Dorothy turns lots of the Nome King’s warriors into eggs, and they just roll around the floor.

Adam: It’s a shame they didn’t do that actually, that was quite good. And then I like the fact that the warriors are quite decent and so they stop and go ‘Oh my god, I don’t want to step on my comrades who have now turned into eggs’.

Ren: She doesn’t turn them back either, they’re just eggs now.

Adam: Maybe being an egg’s not so bad, i’d rather be an egg than an ornament.

Ren: You can hatch, maybe?

Adam: What would you hatch, another egg? Infinitely forever. A series of infinitely nesting hatching eggs. What a life. Better than the life of poor Jack Pumpkinhead. In the books there’s quite a lot of talk, and Jack laments that as his head’s a pumpkin it’s probably going to spoil after a couple of weeks so he’s not going to live very long. And everyone else just gives him the brush-off about this I feel.

Ren: Yeah, they are not particularly concerned with his plight.

Adam: They’re normally quite a compassionate bunch really, but they have a bit of a blind spot when it comes to pumpkin-head people.

Ren: I think Tip says that he’ll can Jack’s head before it spoils, but I don’t know if that’s really…

Adam: I don’t think the idea is that his consciousness would be preserved in the can, it’s for posterity, like saying ‘don’t worry, I’ll give you a really nice gravestone, so don’t sweat the fact that you’re really ill’. It doesn’t seem to reassure Jack any, he doesn’t like the idea.

But I did find it quite tragic, genuine pathos in the fact that in the book, this doesn’t happen at all in the film, in the second Oz book there’s a point where they’ve got this box filled with Powder of Life, which is what is used to bring Jack to life, and it’s got a secret compartment, a hidden bottom, and underneath it are three pills, and they’re wishing pills, you take one and make a wish, basically.

And they find these, and this is essentially a genie’s lamp, these can do anything, and when they find them Jack says ‘I can make a wish to make sure my head won’t spoil’, and they’re like ‘Oh yeah, yeah, you can do that. Maybe later mate, okay’ and then they end up in a giant nest, being attacked by birds, and they’re like ‘Right we’d better use one of these pills to wish that we were somewhere outside of this giant nest.’ Okay, fair enough, it’s a present danger.

And I assumed that what would happen at the end of the book was that they’d have these pills and Tip, because he’s Jack’s friend, would use these pills to give Jack a different head, or a non-mouldy pumpkin head or something. But no, it just turns out that the Scarecrow loses the pills, and Jack’s like ‘Do you have any more’ and he says ‘You know what, mate, I think I just left them in the nest. You know those pills that were the most powerful thing in the universe and could do anything, I just left them in a nest.’ And instead of getting upset, everyone else is like ‘Oh well, there you go. Too late too worry about it now.’ So that’s it! Jack doesn’t get to live for any more than a week, or a month or however long it is, because the Scarecrow lost the pills. I think it’s to Jack’s credit he doesn’t just throttle the Scarecrow right there, because if I was him I’d be really upset, to be honest.

There’s not all that much of the Scarecrow and the Tin Man in the second and third book, but there’s definitely not very much of them in Return to Oz. One thing I think that fans of the original might have found scary is that their faces look very different to the original faces.

Ren: They do, even I noticed that, and i’m not very familiar with the originals but i did think ‘ooh, they look a bit wrong’.

Adam: But that’s because they look much, much closer to the original drawings. So obviously it’s not an MGM film, so it’s quite clearly making it obvious that these are based on characters from the Baum books, which are owned at that point by Disney, and they have the rights too, not the MGM musical. So I wonder if there was a slight legalistic aspect to it, like ‘Nope, you can’t sue us because these aren’t the same characters’. The Scarecrow I think looks a bit creepy, because he’s got a gloopy, goofy, watery face I don’t know, it looks like it’s going to run off his face at any point, like an egg has been splatted on his face. But the Tin Man looks pretty cool —

Ren: — definitely very shiny.

Adam: The Lion’s a bit creepy but we only see him for ten seconds, so it doesn’t really matter. It might have been a bit of a disappointment, I guess, for any kids who were really looking forward to spending lots of time with their old friends the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion, because they’re not really…considering they’re on the front cover of the DVD.

Ren: Oh, are they?

Adam: Yeah, so my copy has Dorothy with her strange Toby Jug-like face, which is only the drawing, I must point out, Fairuza Balk does not have a face like a Toby Jug. But it’s got her, and Billina is tucked under her arm, and then we’ve got Tik-Tok and Jack and then right next to them and taking up just as much space are the Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow, and they’re all on the yellow brick road.

Ren: Which, by the way, is broken up when we encounter it.

Adam: Yeah, you really can’t go home again. So it does suggest, I think, that the film is going to be rather more like The Wizard of Oz than it actually is. I mean personally I enjoy it more than The Wizard of Oz, which is probably sacrilege to say, and they’re doing very different things, to be fair, but I think why I like Return to Oz is it makes Oz into a very inhabitable world. I like the fact that lots of it takes place in slightly scrubby environments or bleak looking woodland, it gives an earthiness to the fantasy, for all the special effects it feels quite earth-bound for a fantasy film.

I guess for me I’ve always struggled with fantasy, particularly in film rather than reading because I sometimes can’t take it that seriously and it doesn’t feel like a real place to me. I do like the Lord of the Rings films, but there’s times where I don’t really believe in the world for some reason, maybe it’s the use of CGI or something, but there’s times when the world looks too perfect. Maybe New Zealand is just too perfect. Maybe that’s the issue. New Zealand looks too good to be true. I’m too used to run down English countryside or something. That’s probably the real issue. Bascially, a lot of Return to Oz looks kind of dreary and run-down and being British that suits me just fine. That’s our aesthetic.

Ren: Yeah, we love it. Well, no we don’t, but it’s all we know. We can’t believe in anything else.

Adam: It’s all we know and we’re small-minded, masochistic people. So it’s all we want to know. Is there anything else you want to say about this curious film?

Ren: I think we’ve covered it all.

Adam: I don’t know if I’ve got across quite how odd it is, it really is quite odd.

Ren: So after the Nome King, Ozma gets released from the mirror and I’m a little bit vague about what actually happens… I did watch this recently.

Adam: Well, it does finish in a fairly perfunctory way to be honest. so there’s a bit of a parade and we see the Lion for five seconds, there’s a bunch of people in green so they’re obviously Emerald City people, and then Dorothy’s like ‘Right, better go guys’ and they put up a bit of a token resistance, like ‘Ahhh, don’t go’ but she gives everyone a hug and off she goes. And then she’s back by the river bank.

Ren: And Toto’s there, yapping away.

Adam: We get a great Toto point of view shot, we get Toto point of view through the undergrowth, it’s like something from Blair Witch. Got a camera going right down through the grass.

Ren: Yeah, and he finds Dorothy and Aunt Em wraps her in a blanket and we see that the hospital’s burnt down, and the nurse being taken away in a wagon.

Adam: The back of a police wagon.

Ren: And it’s back to the farm and Uncle Henry’s working on the house again.

Adam: Although it does have a slightly melancholy note because Dorothy sees Ozma in the mirror back in her bedroom, and she calls to Aunt Em, and then Aunt Em calls back up and says ‘yes?’ and the Ozma in the mirror goes ‘shhh’ at Dorothy and Dorothy says ‘oh no, its nothing’ and tilts the mirror, and when Aunt Em comes into Dorothy’s bedroom she says ‘oh, don’t tilt the mirror Dorothy’ or something like that, ‘go outside’, and it felt to me that Dorothy’s just learned from her traumatic experiences that she must keep Oz to herself, she’s got to keep this as a private space, not something she can share with her family.

Ren: Because otherwise it disrupts everything.

Adam: Yeah, and she’s taken away for electric shock therapy!

Ren: And as I haven’t read any further in the series, I don’t know about Dorothy’s continuing involvement in Oz. Er, scariest moment?

Adam: Probably the screaming heads. What did you find scariest?

Ren: I think I have to go for the Wheelers, because I did actually jump when the first Wheeler appears and cackled near Dorothy’s face. But there’s plenty of candidates.

Adam: I think I don’t find the Wheelers scary because Tik-Tok’s not very impressed by the Wheelers. Because they’re obviously so try-hard, just bratty punks who are like ‘Yeah, we’re the wheelers!’ like shut up, go away ‘the Wheelers’.

Ren: So, you can find us on twitter at @stillscaredpod or email us at stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com, our opening music is by Maki Yamazaki, our ending music is by Joe Kelly of Etao Shin, our artwork is by Letty Wilson, and I’ll put all the details as usual in the show notes. Do you have a sign-off for us, Adam?

Adam: Oh I don’t know, I feel like it should be some sort of egg-based pun because of all the egg humour. I’m just thinking of the big egg joke again.

Ren: What’s big and small at the same time? A big egg.

Adam: Egg-ementary my dear Watson. That’ll do. Bye.

Ren: That’ll do. See ya.

  • We’re referring to the notorious ‘Love conquers All’ edit of Brazil, in which the devastating end reveal never happens, and audiences are left believing that escape is possible.

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About this podcast

A podcast in which one film lecturer and one scaredy-cat discuss creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and tv.

by Ren Wednesday, Adam Whybray

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