Butt News Movie Club #28: Return to Oz
Oh Dear, My Thought Has Run Down AND My Action Has Run Down (I'm Depressed)
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I’m a pretty chill and sleepy guy in general—I am not competitive or gatekeepy or territorial about culture and in fact I am happy to defer on most things—however there are a couple of rare subjects that still trigger in me that childish impulse to LET YOU KNOW that THAT’S MINE. You know when a thing means so much to you that it becomes part of your body and then when other people talk about it with a sense of ownership it’s literally disgusting? One of those things for me is the land of Oz and all of its environs and friends! That’s mine!!!!!!!!!!!!
I don’t mean that it’s ONLY mine; it can be yours too; I just mean that I need you to understand how important this is to me and I’m not sure I can adequately express it, which stresses me out, but also I hate the person I become when I feel like I have something to prove, so I’m stressed two ways!! Twice-stressed pork!
No disrespect, but The Wizard of Oz (or The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which is the name of the book, sorry) is probably the least important Oz property to me. L. Frank Baum wrote 13 other Oz books and ALL OF THEM ARE ELITE1. I was never NOT reading these books when I was a kid. I would get to the last one and start right over. They all have the same format, which is that a rotating cast of freaks (my buds) has to go on a Long Walk to resolve some kind of Magical Issue and along the way they encounter Different Kinds of Guys. Like a whole village of guys who are human-sized sentient knives and forks. Or guys such as an aggressive sorcerer who is actually a cabbage. Or a whole mini-country of guys with flat heads who carry their brains around in cans in their pockets and sometimes the cans get stolen. The various guys always try to either help or hinder my buds but then they always reach their destination and have a party at the end. This is the future that liberals want!!!2
Perhaps another time I will do a post in which I re-read and rank all 14 of the Oz books, but today we are here to talk about something else, which is the 1985 queer horror cinema classic Return to Oz. Return to Oz is a melange of two books, The Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz (with a bunch of other crazy shit added), and it is legendary for being creepy as hell. I had (actually, have!) it on a VHS that my dad taped off the TV for me, and I loooooooooooooooooved it soooooooooooooo much.
I kept the Judy Garland Wizard of Oz on repeat as well, of course, but I was one of those pedantic kids who couldn’t not obsess over the ways that the movie changed stuff from the book. Return to Oz changed lots of stuff too, but the VIBE felt way closer to the books for me, because it is unsettling and gross and everyone is constantly QUIPPING! Also, the art direction clearly pulled straight from John R. Neill, the Oz GOAT himself:
Anyway, so even though Return to Oz is kind of scary and lonely and I am allergic to such feelings, this movie was my best friend for my whole young life and I still have it memorized. Clearly you all do as well, because ten million of you requested it for Butt News, and that’s why YOU’RE MY BEST FRIEND TOO! Now that I feel like I have expressed the depths of my obsession, I am no longer threatened! Let’s have fun!
We open in Dorothy’s bedroom in Kansas—she’s lying awake looking at the stars and she is Fairuza Balk now because Judy Garland is 63 years old at this point and also dead. The house is all crazy and messed up because of how their old house blew away in the tornado, and Uncle Henry is not done building the new one yet. Dorothy has not slept in six months because she is clinically forlorn after the comedown from being in Oz. She forgot that everybody in Kansas is a huge dickhead! She keeps trying to tell them about how she flew a house to a party planet, rode a lion, and committed murder TWICE, and instead of saying “wow that is extremely badass” they’re all like “you need to go to the mental hospital” and “please stop bothering us, we are poverty-stricken and trying to stop the farm from turning to dust”???????????? Like, okay?????? Drama queens????????????????
Aunt Em (Piper Laurie with a spooky and sensual read on the blandest farm woman in literature!) comes in and is like “Dorothy, go to sleep,” famously a foolproof cure for insomnia, but Dorothy (forlorn) says no thx. Em goes back downstairs where Uncle Henry (forlorn) is staring at a newspaper clipping for a service called “Electric Healing” by one Dr. J.B. Worley. He tells Aunt Em that they don’t have the Benjamins for that kind of thing, but she’s like LOOK—this kid is driving me NUTS. We have GOT to ZAP THIS SONOFABITCH!
The next morning Dorothy goes out in the yard to bully her chicken.
Dorothy: “Did you lay an egg this morning, Billina? If you don’t start laying again, Aunt Em says she’s gonna stew you up for supper.”
Billina: “Buck buck BUGOCK!”
Aham and Roya had never seen Return to Oz before, nor have they read any of the Oz books, and it brought me large pleasure in this moment to deliver the news that this random chicken becomes a MAJOR CHARACTER ACROSS THE ENTIRE FRANCHISE.3
Dorothy finds a muddy key in the chicken coop and she cleans the chicken shit off of it with her fingers and traces the design: “O… Z… Oz!!!!!” No offense, but it’s a stretch! That is a circle with a line through it!
She runs to show Aunt Em that she has PROOF OF OZ but Aunt Em is like, “it’s just a key to the old house before the tornado—I must have turned it 1000 times.” Which is weird, because it's definitely not that?? Are you Aunt Em (high)????
One thing I like about this Dorothy is that she does not give a fuck about seeming completely batshit in front of everyone all the time.
Dorothy: “My friends sent it to me on a shooting star.”
Em: “Remember how we spoke?”
Dorothy: “Not to talk about Oz?”
Em: “Why?”
Dodo: “Because it’s just my imagination?”
Em: “I know you don’t want to go to the doctor’s, but you just haven’t slept the night right through since the tornado and then you’re no help to me in the mornings.”
Fair! She’s trying to run a farm over here!
Dorothy says that she knows this key falling from heaven is a sign that her Oz friends are in trouble and need help. Aunt Em, UNDERSTANDABLY, is like dude, I don’t have time for this shit! Winter is coming, we only live in half a house, and your Uncle Henry has some sort of depression-induced psychosomatic leg wound! Em looks over at Henry sitting perfectly still on the porch.
Dorothy: “He broke his leg, Aunt Em!”
Em: “Dorothy, that leg’s mended. It’s mended.”
THIS IS A VERY NUANCED DYNAMIC TO INCLUDE IN A CHILDREN’S FILM! As a kid that line made me feel and think so much!
Aunt Em takes Dorothy to the doctor in Jokic’s pony cart. Toto is not allowed to come, which is too bad because Dorothy could have used some help with biting later!
Dorothy tries telling the doctor all about Oz and he’s like, “uh, sure, kid, are the ruby slippers in the room with us now??” even though her story is CONSISTENT AS HELL! Once again she is undeterred and just keeps saying the craziest shit because Dorothy Gale always speaks her truth even when it will definitely get her electrocuted.
Dorothy Talking Directly to the Insane Asylum Torture Hospital Intake Psychiatrist: “The Tin Woodman used to be made of flesh like everyone else, but then he cut off his leg, but then a witch enchanted his axe, so then he kept cutting off all the other parts of his body, until he was all tin.”
The doctor’s like oooooooooooooh-kaaaaaaaaaaay woooooooooooooow and says he knows just the thing to “cheer Dorothy up.” He explains that the brain is electric and when it gets bonked such as in a tornado it starts producing excess currents that manifest as hallucinations about scarecrows.
Doctor (pointing at horrible machine): “This electrical marvel will make it possible for you to sleep again, and it will also get rid of all those bad waking dreams that you’ve been telling me about.”
That’s a weird thing to say, because this electrocution machine with a face and a creepy little tongue that moves back and forth for no reason has actually been GENERATING nightmares for me for 30+ years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They say that Dorothy has to stay overnight for her treatment so Auntie Em leaves her alone with the scary nurse, even though the movie made it seem like they literally rode a horse all day to get there. You’re going to ride home again tonight and then come all the way back in the morning? The horse is gonna die! The nurse is like “you don’t need your lunch pail,” idiot, and confiscates Dorothy’s snacks! Aunt Em says she’ll be back tomorrow and she’ll bring Toto.
As soon as Aunt Em is out the door this doctor and the nurse start rubbing their hands together and licking alllllll around their lips like JACKPOT CAN’T WAIT 2 ELECTROCUTE THIS KID. (They used to do this to jazz musicians to cure them of heroin too!4)
They put Dorothy in a room and tell her she’s allowed to take a nap. She watches Aunt Em leave from the window and then turns around and there’s some blonde chick in her room holding a jack-o-lantern.
Blonde Ghost: “This is for you.”
I’m good, actually!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Then some patient is like “AAAAAAARRRRRRGH” from the other room and the blonde chick is like GOTTA BOUNCE and disappears.
Dorothy pretends to comb the hair of the jack-o-lantern like the spooky little freak she is. (THANKS BUT I AM GOOD!!!!!!!) It is STORMING outside. Verrrrrry spooky. She turns the electric light on and is like WTF! I think she has never seen electricity before because it is just being invented? She does NOT take a nap.
The nurse comes to the door and says, “Would you like to go for a ride, Dorothy?” and Dorothy’s like yeah ok. Dodo, didn’t they warn you about this exact thing in D.A.R.E.? Actually, maybe Dorothy went on to invent D.A.R.E. because of this moment.
The nurse tells Dorothy to lie down so some orderlies strap can her to a gurney. Then Dorothy absolutely POSTERIZES this bitch:
Dorothy: “Why do you have to tie me down?”
Nurse: “So that you don’t fall off.”
Dorothy: “I came all the way from a farm on a buggy and didn’t fall off.”
They wheel her into a room where the doctor is waiting with his machine and Dorothy lets him have it too!!!!!!!!
Doctor: “Hello Dorothy how are you?”
Dorothy: “I wish I wasn’t tied down.”
STUFFED!!!!!!!!!!!
The nurse gets out some Beats by Dre that the doc says are going to suck all the bad thoughts out of Dorothy’s ears. Dorothy is like uhhhhhhhh I’m not so sure about this, u guyz, but the nurse pops them on her head anyway.
Doc fiddles with his horrible face machine.
He turns knobs
He moves levers
He adjusts dials
He flips switches
“Ready?”
“Yes, doctor.”
But just when he’s about to flip the main switch, POWER OUTAGE!
Doctor: “OH DEAR.”
All the patients in the hospital start screaming. The doctor and the nurse run out of the room to deal with the situation and they leave Dorothy in there strapped to the bed! Luckily that ghost from earlier shows up to rescue her.
Dorothy: “What’s that screaming?”
Ghost: “They’re patients who have been damaged, lost in the cellar! Quick!”
They run down the hallway to escape. They hide in a coat. The nurse catches them and just says, “SO!” which I never understood. They run out of the house into the storm and down through some trees and into the woods and the nurse chases them and they slip in the mud and the ghost girl falls in the river. Dorothy is trying to grab her but then the nurse shows up so Dorothy says “eek!” and jumps into the raging floodwaters! Then the nurse falls in too, haha. The ghost gets swept away.
There’s a chicken coop floating by, so Dorothy climbs inside and goes to sleep, as you for sure would. She wakes up to a familiar sound… buck buck buck baGOCK???
It’s Billina! Apparently this was her chicken coop! Of all the floating chicken coops in all the flash floods in the world, you escape from the electric torture asylum and crawl half-dead into mine. Whoda thunk. And she laid an egg! Now she doesn’t have to be stew! And guess what else—huge development—BILLINA CAN TALK.
When Dorothy stands up looks around, the ocean has dried up into a whole-ass desert.
Dorothy: “Where did all the rest of the water go?”
Billina: “Where did Kansas go?”
BTW, if you have always thought that maybe you would like a talking chicken for a friend, Billina is here to fix that. This woman never shuts up! And she is NOT FUNNY. Stop trying to hard, girl!
Dorothy tells Billina, “If we were in the land of Oz, your talking wouldn’t be strange at all… maybe this IS Oz!” YEAH, GENIUS! MAYBE IT IS!
Billina’s like I’m gonna go look for worms, but Dorothy says STOP. Dorothy uses her Oz knowledge to identify that this must be the Deadly Desert that surrounds Oz: “Anything living that touches it turns to sand.”
Dorothy picks up Billina and goes, “if we stay on these stones, we’ll be all right,” and then hops from little rock to little rock for a hella long distance across the evil sand that kills you if you touch it. VERY BOLD. But they make it! (But also, if a rock is an effective barrier between you and the sand, wouldn’t your shoe also work??)
One of the rocks has an eyeball but Dorothy doesn’t notice.
Dorothy’s like let’s get some food and then we can go see my friend the Scarecrow, the KING OF OZ, not to brag!
They find a lunchpail tree, which is a miracle tree where the fruit is lunchboxes, and Billina is of course an asshole about it for no reason.
Dorothy: “Look, Billina, it’s a lunchpail tree.”
Billina: “What happened to breakfast?”
OH MY GOD, GO GET BREAKFAST WORMS FROM THE CURSED DESERT THEN. MAYBE IF YOU BECOME SAND YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO TALK.
Turns out, ALL the rocks have faces, and they’re watching Dorothy eat. One rock goes and narcs on her to his boss.
Rock: “She has a… CHICKEN WITH HER.”
Rock’s Boss: “A CHICKEN!?!?!?!?”
Dorothy randomly comes across her old house where she committed her first murder. But instead of a bustling Munchkin City, she finds only an overgrown jungle. The yellow brick road is ALL FUCKED UP. The Mayor of the Munchkin City is DEAD(?). And whither the Lollipop Guild?????????? They are never found.
Dorothy freaks the fuck out and starts running. In about five minutes she arrives at the ruins of the Emerald City (how fast can she run????). The Emerald City looks like shit. It’s all destroyed and there’s graffiti everywhere and all the people have been turned into creepy statues.
There’s a graffito that says “BEWARE THE WHEELERS” but Dorothy doesn’t know what a Wheeler is. YET. She finds the stone Cowardly Lion and the stone Tin Woodman and good luck not popping a tear out when she hugs the Cowardly Lion and cries and says “oh Cowardly Lion what happened to you”!!!!!!!
Then the Wheelers show up, and… they’re a New Wave band with weird leather hats and long arms and legs with wheels at the end? I get why people have nightmares about the Wheelers after encountering them as children, but I most confess: even as a child I WAS NEVER CLEAR ON HOW THE WHEELERS HURT YOU. They annoy you to death? Can you kill someone with a pizza cutter??
But they definitely aren’t nice and they chase Dorothy and Billina into a dead end. But then Billina notices a hole in the wall and is like, “The key! The key!” WHY WOULD YOU ASSUME THAT RANDOM HOLE WAS A KEYHOLE? But Dorothy sticks the chicken-shit Oz key into the hole (you kept that with you the whole time at the hospital?) and the wall opens and they jump inside. It worked! Now they’re trapped in a closet! Qapla’!
The Wheelers taunt Dorothy through the door: “You have to come out sooner or later and when you do we’re going to rip you into little pieces and throw you in the Deadly Desert.” That is such a good point, actually—it would be SO easy to be a serial killer in Oz. I’m not into dark re-tellings (I LIKE LIGHT RETELLINGS), however I would accept this showrunner job!
The Wheelers let it slip that the Nome King doesn’t like chickens. Dorothy is like who is that and they say HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAA.
Now it’s time for… TIK-TOK!!!!!!!!!!!! BEST CHARACTER (NOT-)ALIVE! Fat-positive role model and actual Oz GOAT, no offense to John R. Neill!
Tik-Tok is a copper military robot whose job it is to be helpful and make Lindy West laugh. He debuted in Ozma of Oz before the term “robot” was even invented!!!!! (That’s true! That’s not me doing a bit!)
Dorothy reads Tik-Tok’s label: “Patented clockwork mechanical man, does everything but live.” “Everything” is a stretch for a guy who can’t pick something up off the floor, navigate stairs, or get up if he falls over, but okay! Neither can I, really!
Dorothy winds up his thinking and he starts going tick tick tick and EVERY TIME I remember being like “I cannot believe she touched those cobwebs.”
Then she winds up his speech and he says his famous catchphrase, “Good mor-ning lit-tle girl.” He asks if she’s Dorothy Gale and she says yep, completely unfazed that this dead robot she found in a closet was expecting her.
Tik-Tok: “Pleased to meet you, I am Tik-Tok, the Royal Army of Oz. His Majesty the Scarecrow locked me in here and told me to wait for you.”
Tik-Tok says that everything was fine until one day all the people in the Emerald City started turning to stone and he doesn’t know why. Tik-Tok says he was not turned to stone because he is not alive “and never will be, thank goodness.”
Dorothy’s like dude what are we supposed to do about the Wheelers? And Tik-Tok says “these Wheelers can be tricky customers” but luckily he has a great plan because she wound his thinkworks extra tight: “You run up the stairs. I will take care of them.”
His plan is to hold Dorothy’s lunch pail and then spin around real fast so that all the Wheelers get clonked on the head. Somehow, it works!!! The Wheelers are too stupid to not run dome-first into the lunchpail over and over! He dashes their brains with Dorothy’s ham sandwich!
Tik-Tok keeps one Wheeler alive for interrogation. Who else has this guy’s fuckin’ face burned into their retinas for all of time?
Wheeler: “You’ll be sorry for treating me like this, I’m a TERRIBLE person!”
Tik-Tok: “I am only a machine, so I cannot be sorry or happy, no matter what happens.”
The Wheeler tells them that some guy named the Nome King conquered the Emerald City and turned everyone to stone and kidnapped the Scarecrow and only one person knows where the Scarecrow is and that’s Princess Mombi.
They go to Princess Mombi’s house and she’s sitting in her living room playing her ukulele and to this day I am obsessed with this outfit (does anyone ever cosplay this?) and also I think this actress is soooooooooooooooooooo PRETTY.
Mombi’s like oh hey Dorothy Gale nice to meet you, and then she says, “I think I’ll put on something more… appropriate... your friends can stay here,” which feels like a sex thing to say but okay, you assume she just means she’s going to take off her DRESS MADE OF SWORDS so she doesn’t accidentally butcher Billina by turning around too fast. (Oh no… don’t… hurt… Billina… :-\)
Dorothy says, “We’re really here for the Scarecrow,” because Dorothy is all business all the time, but Mombi ignores her. Dorothy follows Mombi into her boudoir where we find out what she really means by “put on something more appropriate,” which is A NEW HEAD!!!!!
Turns out that Mombi is not a princess, she is a witch, and she has A BUNCH OF LIVING HEADS ON LITTLE PEDESTALS IN LITTLE CABINETS and then she TAKES OFF HER HEAD AND PUTS ON A DIFFERENT ONE! (I don’t know why you’d EVER take off that first lady’s beautiful head if you had the choice, unless maybe it was so you could KISS IT!)
Mombi tells Dorothy that “the Nome King took the Scarecrow and all the emeralds back to his mountain and turned everyone else to stone” and left her there to govern (i.e. play her ukulele for the Wheelers). Dorothy is starting to be like, hm, this seems like it might be going badly for me.
And she’s right! Mombi pinches Dorothy’s chin and says her head is too tiny right now but she has “a certain prettiness” so she’s gonna lock her the tower for a few years until her head is ready for chopping and wearing and putting in the cupboard.
Dorothy doesn’t like that idea, but luckily Billina and Tik-Tok come to her rescue!
Tik-Tok: “I AM COMING, DOROTHY… Oh dear, my action has run down.”
Mombi: “LOL.”
Me: “Also LOL.”
Mombi takes Dorothy and Billina up to the tower and throws them in and leaves them there. Dorothy looks around the dusty room. She looks out the window and sees the Nome King’s mountain. Dorothy looks at a beautiful portrait of the tin man and the scarecrow and the lion. Then a voice goes, “Mom?”
It’s a guy with a pumpkin for a head, and his name is Jack Pumpkinhead, and he thinks Dorothy is his mom! A NORMAL MOVIE!
Billina: “What is this? A man or a melon?”
:-/
Dorothy tells Jack that she is not his mother and he says okay. Jack asks Dorothy to reattach his limbs (which are sticks) and check his head for signs of spoiling: “I’ve been alive for such a short while and I’m afraid of spoiling before I can see the rest of the world.”
Jack says that Mombi stole all the heads from the headless dancing girl statues they saw outside in the garden. His real mother built him to scare Mombi, but it worked TOO GOOD and she got SO MAD that she was going to “destroy [him] with her stick.” But instead “she decided to test some Powder of Life that she just bought from a magician.” You just sprinkle it on something and the thing comes to life.
Dorothy’s like I GOTTA get my hands on that powder.
Jack tells her that the powder would be “in cabinet 31 with her original head.” That’s all Dorothy needs to know—she has a plan.
They sneak out of the tower using Jack’s long wiggly arms to unlock the door. They creep through Mombi’s palace.
Jack: “Dorothy, may I call you mom, even if it isn’t so?”
Dorothy: “Uhhhhhhhh, sure.”
They find and wind Tik-Tok and Dorothy tells him to go upstairs with Jack and he’ll explain everything. Dorothy sneaks into Mombi’s bedroom to steal the key to the head cabinets. The key is RED, which seemed SO GLAMOROUS TO ME as a child and Mombi keeps it on a ribbon tied around her wrist, even when she’s sleeping, a physical sensation that would make me die.
Upstairs Tik-Tok, Jack, and Billina are making a fort (Billina is not really helping).
Dorothy gingerly unties the key ribbon from Mombi’s wrist. Mombi is snoring. She should do a sleep study! Maybe she needs a CPAP! They could probably make a custom one that attaches directly to your neck-hole!
Upstairs, everything is going great with the fort. Then Tik-Tok says that “now it’s time to tie Jack’s feet together,” and Jack’s like, “Okay, cool!!!” But hey, wait a minute! That doesn’t make any sense! Tik-Tok’s thinking has run down and he’s saying a bunch of crazy shit! (This scene wasn’t in the TV edit of the movie I had as a kid so I just saw it for the first time and BOY I LAUGHED.)
Dorothy goes into the head closet and all the heads are asleep. She finds cabinet 31 and opens it and sees Mombi’s original head—and omg it’s the evil nurse’s head!!!!!
Dorothy reaches in for the powder of life and immediately knocks a little bottle over, which is INSANE—dude you had one job—so of course the head wakes up and starts screaming. “DOROTHYYYYY GAAAAAALE!”
Mombi’s body hops out of bed and starts shambling around like a mummy. One cool thing about Mombi is she likes to sleep fully clothed but headless.
Dorothy has trouble navigating Mombi’s hall of mirrors, but a shimmery vision appears on one of the mirrors that shows her which way to go. She gets upstairs and discovers that the thingy they’re making is only partly finished! Dorothy’s big plan was for them to make two couches pushed together with four palm fronds and the taxidermied head of a Gump (which is a kind of sarcastic green moose) stuck on it. How could this fail???
Dorothy: “It’s not done!”
Billina: “Bok bok Tik-Tok went berserk!”
Lmao!
They don’t have time to spare, so Dorothy sprinkles the Powder of Life all over the Gump-couch but it doesn’t come to life at all. Billina’s like READ THE DIRECTIONS CHUMP and Dorothy locates the magic words: “weaugh teaugh peaugh.”
The Gump comes to life and they fly out the window!
Mombi wakes up the Wheelers: “BRING BACK THAT CHICKEN.”
Dorothy, Billina, Tik-Tok, and Jack fly over the land of Oz in the Gump, and no offense but I just am not certain that the aerodynamics of this would hold up. I have never seen an airplane get off the ground with just four palm fronds! You need six at least!
Dorothy goes STRAIGHT to sleep, and I know she hasn’t slept in six months, but I simply don’t think I would be able to fall asleep while flying in the rapidly disintegrating Gump. That said, I have been obsessed with this scene all my life. There is quite literally nothing I want more than to push two couches together and take a nap in my little flying nest with my pet chicken while using a pumpkinhead-man’s vest as a blanket! I’m not joking!
Billina: “Well, it’s better than coach!”
:-\\\\\\\\\\\
Important discovery: Billina has the same voice actor as the junk lady from Labyrinth!!!!!
Mombi (forlorn) is at home playing her ukulele when the ghost girl from the asylum appears in the mirror. Mombi’s like good luck getting rescued, bitch, nobody even knows you’re in my mirror!
Meanwhile the Wheelers are chasing the Gump on the ground, but then they are so stupid that they roll directly into the Deadly Desert and turn to sand.
Up in the sky, the ropes holding Gump together start breaking. Now Tik-Tok is holding the Gump together with his bare hands! Jack’s head falls off! Dorothy wakes up into absolute chaos! They fly down to try and catch up with Jack’s head, but then the whole thing falls apart and they plummet to their deaths.
Jack: “IIIII’M SOOOOORRYYY MOOOOOM!”
Okay actually they all fall into the snow and live.
Tik-Tok is stuck upside down in the snow: “PICK ME UP PICK ME UP PICK ME UP.”
Jack’s head lands on his neck upside down: “Why are all of you standing on your heads?”
The rocks alert the Nome King—who is the most important talking rock, the boss that the other rocks were reporting to before—that Dorothy has reached their shores “with a small army,” but “NO SIGN OF THE CHICKEN.” (She’s hiding inside of Jack’s head! Buk buk!)
They put the Gump back together against his protestations that he longs once again for the cool embrace of death.
The Nome King’s face appears on the wall and he starts buttering her up like, “not THE Dorothy Gale from Kansas????” but of course it doesn’t work on Thunberg-Coded Love-on-the-Spectrum Girlboss Dorothy. She tells him that she wants him to release the Scarecrow and restore the Emerald City, please.
Nome King: “If someone steals something you think the right thing is to give it back?”
Dorothy: “Yes, your majesty.”
Nome King: “And what if they don’t want to give it back?”
Dorothy: “Then we are here with our army to conquer you and force you to give it back.”
Nome King: “Ha ha ha ha hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo haa haa ha ha ha.”
He laughs so hard he makes an avalanche and the whole mountain collapses and Dorothy falls into the pit.
Nome King (monologuing throughout): “All the precious stones in the world are made here in my underground pavilions. All made for me by my nomes. So imagine how I feel when someone from the world above digs down and steals my treasures?? All those emeralds in the Emerald City really belonged to me! I was just taking back what was mine to begin with!”
Dorothy: “You have so much!”
Nome King: “That is not the point! I am not the thief! Your friend [the Scarecrow] is the thief!”
Uuuuuuuummmmmmmmm, I am not sure how to contextualize this in our current climate!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Goodbye!
Dorothy plops into a cavern and lands on the Scarecrow but then he immediately disappears. The Nome King says, “I transformed him into an ornament, into an amusing and beautiful ornament for my palace.”
Dorothy starts crying: “He never stole the emeralds—they were there when he came!”
0_____o
The Nome King uses his creepy rock had to comfort her and then says that since the Scarecrow means so much to her he’s going to give her an opportunity to get him back. She and her friends just have to play a little fun game! They each get three chances to find the Scarecrow—they just have to go into the Nome King’s curio room and touch the right object and say the word “Oz.”
Dorothy’s like I don’t trust u bitch but ok we accept!
Nome King points at the Gump and goes, “Why doesn’t the sofa go first?” and boy do I still lol!
While they wait, Dorothy eats some limestone pie and hot melted silver and she’s like “it’s good.” They hear a rumble of thunder. That means the Gump failed the game and got turned into an ornament too! The Nome King absorbs the Gump’s personhood and grows slightly more corporeal. Dorothy is PISSED OFF ABOUT IT.
Dorothy: “That’s not fair! You didn’t tell us about [getting turned into ornaments if we fuck up]!”
Nome King: “You didn’t ask! Perhaps you’d like to visit my FIERY FURNACE?”
And then he points to his fiery furnace, which is very fiery.
Jack is up next, and he says he wouldn’t mind being an ornament as he already doesn’t eat or sleep. Tik-Tok probably wouldn’t mind either!
Jack: “Tik-Tok’s not even alive.”
Tik-Tok: “I have always valued my lifelessness.”
Dorothy tells Jack “good luck” and then she whispers “good luck” to Billina too. But why would they know to keep Billina a secret? Because that random Wheeler said that the Nome King doesn’t like chickens? Why would they care?
Jack leaves and Tik-Tok is like, look, I like Jack but he’s a fucking idiot. He is definitely getting turned into an ornament. (He’s right.)
For some reason Mombi is on her way to the Nome King’s Mountain through a secret tunnel underneath the Deadly Desert. She has a Wheeler chariot that’s pulled by Wheelers and she’s whipping the Wheelers with her Wheeler whip!
Jack fails, obviously, and now it’s Tik-Tok’s turn to go in. Dorothy’s like hey it’s too bad they didn’t make it so you could wind yourself up, and yes, that is a MAJOR DESIGN FLAW! But not the time for troubleshooting, ma’am.
At this point the Nome King has absorbed so much personhood that he is fully just a regular human covered in mud.
The Nome King and Dorothy are totally alone now, and he’s like why tf are you really here? “You came all this way for a Scarecrow?”
She’s like YES and he’s like, “Are you sure you didn’t come back… FOR THESE?”
LOOK AT HIS LITTLE FEET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If you’ve written a Queer Studies dissertation about this please send it to me this instant!
A rock comes and whispers in the king’s ear and the king is like, “Your army has stopped guessing and is standing perfectly still in the middle of the room.”
Dorothy’s like, oh, his action must have run down and the Nome King says she can go in and wind Tik-Tok up. But when she gets in there Tik-Tok is like GUESS WHAT—I was only pretending to be run down—I have one guess left, and if I get it wrong you can watch and see what I get turned into! A great idea!
However, he says, his brain must not be working that good because he has had trouble guessing correctly. Then Tik-Tok cries ONE GREEN OIL TEAR BECAUSE HE LOVES DOROTHY SO MUCH AND HE WANTS TO SAVE HER SO BAD.
He touches a silver goblet and says “Oz” and he guessed wrong so he disappears. But there are so many ornaments in there—Dorothy has no idea which one is new!
She decides to just go for it. She touches an urn and says “Oz” and nothing happens (whose ashes is that, though???).
Meanwhile, Mombi has arrived and the Nome King makes her prostrate herself on the floor in a perverted way.
Nome King: “LOWER! HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE.”
Dorothy touches a crystal and says “Oz.” Nope!
Mombi whines to the Nome King that Dorothy stole her valuable antiques which she made into a flying sofa, and he’s like don’t even worry about it—I took care of it. You mean you had my antique furniture shipped back to my house? No, I transformed your sofa into a rock as part of a twisted game to torture a child. Oh, thanks!
Mombi: “But if he guesses right and finds out about Ozma…”
Nome King: “Ozma—you haven’t let her escape as well???”
Mombi: “NO!!!!!!!”
Nome King: “Soon there’ll be no one left who remembers Oz, and I will be completely human!” (WHY WOULD YOU WANT THAT????? YOU ARE A MAGIC SHAPESHIFTING SENTIENT ROCK WITH FEET. MEANWHILE I, A HUMAN, JUST HAD A PERIOD CRAMP SO BAD I THOUGHT I NEEDED TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL.)
For her final guess, Dorothy decides to shut her eyes and spins around and lets intuition guide her. She runs into a table and opens her eyes and sees a big emerald. She picks that one and says, “Oz.” The Scarecrow appears!
Dorothy: “Maybe people from Oz turn into green ornaments!”
They try it out and they find the Gump! Her theory is correct!
Now the Nome King is turning back into more and more into a rock. He says, “I’ll take care of you LATER!” to Mombi and locks her in a tiny cage, also perverted.
The Wheelers are like fuck this and they wheel back home through the tunnel. Now the Nome King starts ruining his whole palace because he’s so mad.
But they still haven’t found Tik-Tok, Jack, and Billina! Don’t get me started on the logic of Billina turning into one single object WITH JACK simply because she is hiding inside of his head! Makes no sense!
The Nome King breaks through the wall and now he is a giant rock monster. He eats the Gump’s couch body but Jack, Dorothy, and Scarecrow manage to rip its head off first and save its amazing personality.
Next up to get munched: “PUMP! KIN! HEAD!”
The Nome King reaches out for Jack. They try to run away, but he calls his nomes, which are scary rock monsters like gargoyles! They block all the exits! The Nome King gets Jack in his hot littel fingies and dangles him over his mouth.
But then…
“BOCK BOCK BUGOCK! OHHHH DEEEAAARRRR!!!”
Billina is still inside Jack’s head, and she’s so scared that she lays an egg! It rolls around and around inside the pumpkin before it falls out Jack’s eye-hole and down the Nome King’s gullet.
Nome King: “An… egg?”
The Nomes, Chanting: “POISON! POISON! POISON! POISON!”
Nome King: “Don’t you know that eggs are poison?”
Billina (indignant): “Poison indeed.”
Nome King: “Poison, poison to nomes.”
Then he crumbles into a pile of rocks and explodes.
PRETTY CONVENIENT!
Deus ex chickena!
The whole building starts collapsing so Dorothy grabs the ruby slippers and wishes them OUTTA THERE: “I wish all of us from Oz to return there safely, and for the Emerald City and all the people in it to be restored to life.” Click click click!
Everyone in the Emerald City gets turned back into meat. All the emeralds come back and it’s green again.
Suddenly someone’s like, “Where’s Tik-Tok? Where’s Tik-Tok?” and someone else is like, “We never found him.” HOW DID YOU NOT NOTICE THAT? HE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE WORLD. Someone notices that there’s a green medal on the Gump’s antler so Dorothy touches it and says “Oz.” It’s Tik-Tok! Phew!
PRETTY CONVENIENT AGAIN BUT ANYTHING FOR MY BOY.
Now they get to have a big parade and a party in the Emerald City and Dorothy rides on the Cowardly Lion and Mombi is paraded through the streets in her cage, presumably… to be publicly executed?
EVERYBODY is screaming that Dorothy should be the new queen of Oz. Does that means she’d have to marry the Scarecrow?
Dorothy: “You’re the best friends anyone’s ever had, but I have to go back.”5
Everyone: “We understand, Dorothy.”
Dorothy: “I wish I could be in both places at the same time.”
Billina: “BUGOCK! Look! Behind you in the mirror!”
It’s Ozma! The ghost girl who saved her at the electric hospital and the apparition in the mirror earlier! Dorothy and Ozma walk toward each other and Ozma says, “Help me step through the glass Dorothy!” They touch hands and Ozma comes out of the mirror and it’s VERY (chaste, childhood) girlfriend/girlfriend-coded!
Jack: “MOM! MY REAL MOM!”
Ozma is like “oh hi my son i love you” except was she even around when he got sprankled by the Powder of Life? Wasn’t she already trapped in the mirror? Wouldn’t she be SURPRISED THAT THE STICK-MAN SHE MADE IS ALIVE AND TALKING AND IDENTIFIES AS A PLACENTAL MAMMAL? I can’t answer these questions because none of this is how it happens in the books. Not to brag.
Someone (I forget) explains that Ozma’s father was king before the wizard came and deposed him and then she grew up as “Mombi’s slave” until the Nome King offered Mombi 30 beautiful heads if she imprisoned Ozma in the mirror. But now Ozma forgives Mombi because she lost her magic powers in the kerfuffle and that’s got 2 suck.
Billina’s like fuck Kansas—I’m staying here! THE ONLY LOGICAL CHOICE.6
Then Ozma clicks her heels and is like ok get outta here, ya big lug. Like, Dorothy doesn’t even get to stay ONE NIGHT FOR THE PARTY? She has to say goodbye to her ONLY FRIENDS in five seconds before she disappears?
Dorothy wakes up on the riverbank in Kansas and Toto finds her! What a good boy! Best part of the movie: TOTO-CAM!
Toto says “yarp yarp!” and then Uncle Henry finds her too! And then Auntie Em finds her! They do not apologize for sending her to be experimented on by an evil doctor because she wouldn’t stop info-dumping about scarecrows!
Uncle Henry carries her back to the buggy and they tell her that “the clinic was hit by lightning, it burned to the ground.” Everyone was rescued except the doctor—“he ran in to rescue his machines.” Then the cops go by with the nurse/Mombi in the back of the squad buggy.
And now Dorothy’s back home on her shitty farm! Fast forward a few months(?) and Uncle Henry is almost done with the new house. Being worried about Dorothy cured his fake leg injury! Dorothy is bored. Then Ozma appears in the mirror, but Aunt Em cock-blocks their Zoom happy hour!
When Dorothy looks back at the mirror, Ozma is gone.
Em: “Come on, you two, it’s too nice a day to stay inside.”
So Dorothy and Toto run outside to… run around in the dirt?
SURE IS BETTER THAN BECOMING IMMORTAL AND LIVING IN A MAGIC LAND IN A PALACE MADE OF EMERALDS WITH ALL YOUR BEST FRIENDS AND YOUR FUTURE LESBIAN WIFE WHO IS A QUEEN WITH MAGIC SHOES AND A MAGIC BELT THAT *BOTH GRANT WISHES*. YEAH YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY STAY IN KANSAS, USA, SO THAT EVENTUALLY YOUR SONS CAN DIE IN WORLD WAR 2 AND MAYBE IF YOU’RE VERY LUCKY YOUR DAUGHTER CAN MARRY BOB DOLE BEFORE SHE BLEEDS TO DEATH IN CHILDBIRTH.7
My Oz obsession is not comprehensive—I am into Baum-era Oz books only. There are a million sequels by other authors, some of which are accepted as canon by the Baum estate, but those always gave me the creeps for some reason! Like a puppeteer playing with my friend’s corpse!
These books were released between 1900 and 1920 so I can’t tell you there are ZERO racist tropes in there, and I have just discovered that the “Racial Views” section of Baum’s Wikipedia is EXTREMELY GRIM!!! But mostly the adventures are just whimsical and weird and the conflicts are about power-hungry losers trying to steal stuff from women and then the women kicking their asses. Baum was really into woman suffrage, at least! [Tugs collar boy is it hot in here?]
(PS In my women’s history course in college the professor was like DON’T CALL IT WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE, THE TERM IS WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND NOBODY SAYS IT RIGHT, so I have always tried to follow that rule because I am a Good Girl, but the thing is that “nobody says it right” is true to such an extent that literally if you google “woman suffrage” it turns up almost nothing except texts from 1904??? Ma’am I think the tide may already have turned on this one!)
In one of the books, when the buds wander into a village called Bunbury where all the guys are made of bread, Billina EATS A BUN MAN ALIVE.
Yes I know that they still use electroconvulsive therapy for various mental disorders with moderate success, but that’s not the same as hooking jumper cables up to a ten-year-old’s ears so she’ll stop having an imagination, okay!?
Do you????????? WHY!? DID YOUR THINKING RUN DOWN? It’s giving season 2 of Picard! If u know u know!
DO NOT GIVE UP LIFE IN THE 25TH CENTURY WHEN ALL DISEASE AND POVERTY HAVE BEEN ERADICATED TO MOVE TO 2024 LOS ANGELES, I AM LITERALLY BEGGING YOU.
The only thing I don’t love about this movie is that it leaves the door open for the possibility that Dorothy actually is kookaburra and Oz isn’t real and that’s just not what I’m looking for in my fantasy properties! For the record, in the books, not only do Dorothy and Toto eventually move to Oz full-time, SO DO AUNT EM AND UNCLE HENRY. IT’S CALLED ADVENTURES, PEOPLE.
I love the shit out of this recap. My friend, Pons Maar, played the Lead Wheeler/doctor assistant. What’s burned in my mind from childhood was The Wheeler’s whimpering and promises to “behaaaave” while laughing his way home. Pons also provided the movements for the claymation-animators to animate The Nome Messenger, which got him the gig of providing movements and the voice of Domino’s Pizza’s classic character, The Noid. From there, he was one of the Dinosaurs from the Jim Henson show.
Oh! And you may enjoy this episode of Midnight Mass with Peaches Christ discussing the absolute fucking queerness of this movie, and just how goddamn *drag* the Nome King is:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/midnight-mass/id1571382053?i=1000640407031
Oh god yes!! This movie is lodged so deep inside my childhood brain it’s hard to tell where that brain stops and the movie begins. I love it so much! Two fun trivia things I learned as an adult:
The director, Walter Murch, was primarily a sound designer and this is the one movie he ever directed. That made SO MUCH SENSE when I learned it because so many of my strongest memories of RTO are sound-based: Dorothy combing the pumpkin, the swooshing of the Gump’s palm fronds, Princess Mombi playing that lute or whatever when we first meet her…
For the overall set design, Murch was deeply influenced by the book Wisconsin Death Trip which is an extremely fucked up reference for a kids’ movie. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip
w👑a👑l👑t👑e👑r m💓u💓r💓c💓h