Is Return to Oz (1985) the Most Traumatizing Children’s Film Ever Made?

Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is another subscriber request! This film was chosen by Edward Bowser, a long lost coworker-turned-actual-friend of mine who is always “busy” because he works for the Mayor, but not too busy to be a committed pop culture hound. You can usually find him complaining about the current state of hip-hop and R&B over at Soul in Stereo (where I occasionally contribute a movie review!). I thought he was gonna assign me a kaiju movie or an anime classic, but he surprised me with this pick, which I was pleased to revisit after nearly two decades. Anyway. Want to request a film for a future issue? Subscribe to the paid version!

A lot of my movie-watching friends are having kids these days. Many of them have been raising their kids for years now. And so I often find myself—willingly and gladly, I might add—in the midst of conversations around what movies are or are not “appropriate” for children of a certain age.

Of course, nuance is necessary for such a discussion. Some kids might watch The Shining in kindergarten and be totally unphased (and eager for more). Other kids might watch Coraline at 11 or 12 and be sufficiently spooked. I think I was somewhere in the middle.*

I think one of the most interesting test cases for this sort of thing is Return to Oz, a movie that is super fun and well-crafted and also a movie that perhaps should never have existed.

Released 46 years after The Wizard of Oz,** Return to Oz doesn’t really make sense. There are no songs whatsoever, the main Oz characters from the original film are almost entirely absent, and Dorothy Gale is (for some weird reason) noticeably younger.*** The biggest difference, though, is that the original is magical and pleasant and the sequel is dark and terrifying.

Once Dorothy returns to Oz (the title is apt), she encounters all manner of demented creatures. There’s a desert that will kill you if you touch the sand, a band of humanoid creatures called Wheelers that have wheels instead of hands and feet, a hoard of demon rock creatures commanded by a larger demon rock creature called the Nome King, and an evil princess with a removable head.

And that’s not even including Dorothy’s friends, who are equally demented. There’s a talking chicken named Billina, a gangly jack-o-lantern boy named Jack Pumpkinhead,**** a mechanical mustachioed soldier guy named Tik-Tok,***** and a severed moose head that is for some reason called “the Gump.” As if that wasn’t enough, the Scarecrow does actually show up at the end, and he looks disturbing too.

But the real trauma of this film doesn’t come from the Oz scenes. It comes from the beginning of the film.

You see, Return to Oz picks up right where The Wizard of Oz leaves off. Dorothy won’t stop talking about and obsessing over her adventure in Oz, so much so that she can’t sleep, and her parents think she’s simply gone mad. So, as you did in those days, they take her to a sanitarium where she is given electroshock therapy. As a preteen! I mean, you can hear the screams of other “patients” from the floor below. Another girl tells Dorothy that they’re “patients who have been damaged, locked in the cellar,” as if that’s just a normal thing for a children’s film.

That’s the really dark stuff, I think. It’s one thing for kids to be spooked by monsters and psychos when they accidentally see a PG-13 or R-rated movie at too young an age. It’s another thing entirely for kids to watch a PG movie—a sequel to a beloved family-friendly classic, no less—and see a young girl being brutally punished for having an overactive imagination. Ghouls and madmen can give you nightmares, but something like that, a more deep-seated fear, can rewire an impressionable young brain entirely.

As a grown ass man who’s not afraid of anything, I really dig this movie. But if your kids stumble upon it while scrolling through Disney+, well, you’ve been warned.

*One day, if it hits a streaming service or two, I may write about seeing Cujo around 9 or 10 and how it shaped my understanding of what a “villain” is.

**Is this the longest gap between a film and its legasequel? I’m not going to look it up.

***Fairuza Balk was 11 when Return to Oz was released, whereas Judy Garland was 17 when The Wizard of Oz was released. Six years might not be a big difference in some cases, but it really stands out when Dorothy is suddenly prepubescent.

****While doing “research” for this newsletter, I learned that Jack Pumpkinhead was voiced and puppeted by none other than Brian Henson! (Yes, that’s Jim’s son.) Also, this character has to be a direct inspiration for Jack Skellington.

*****Seriously, Walter Murch should sue somebody.

Return to Oz is available on Disney+, and it’s available for rent elsewhere.