Return to Oz

Episode 35: Return to Oz (1985)

Theme: Creepy Movies for Kids
Hosts: Oz & Curtis

This week, Oz and Curtis hop back over the rainbow into Return to Oz — the Disney sequel that looked at the 1939 classic and said, “What if we kept the singing, but replaced the joy with electroshock therapy, psychiatric trauma, and wheel-based nightmare fuel?”

Join your two favorite sanity-questionable Kansans as they unpack:

• Why this movie feels like The NeverEnding Story, Labyrinth, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest all got tossed in a blender and poured over a crumbling Emerald City.
• How the Wheelers are still some of the most upsetting henchmen ever put on film — half rollerblade squad, half anxiety attack, all shriek.
• Why Princess Mombi’s walk-in closet of interchangeable heads is the greatest argument against Victorian interior design… and basic sleep hygiene.
• How the Gnome King slowly morphing from claymation rock face into full-on Excalibur Dad somehow makes him more unsettling every time he upgrades.

And of course, the fact that a single chicken egg is apparently plutonium to rock people, making Bellina the most powerful WMD in all of Oz.

From taxidermy moose aircrafts, to wind-up depression robot Tik-Tok, to Aunt Em casually signing Dorothy up for Brain Lightning Round 1899, Oz and Curtis dig into the rare kids’ movie where the therapy is scarier than the fantasy realm.

Final Verdict:

Oz — A dozen poisonous chicken eggs (only toxic if you’re granite-based life-form)
Curtis — 20 heads in glass cases (neatly labeled, mildly screaming)
Both — Still more creeped out by the sanitarium than by anything in Oz.