Though Return To Oz takes its cue from The Wizard Of Oz, rather than Baum's books, in portraying Dorothy's trip to the magical land as a dream, the framing device it uses is more sinister.
There are now over 50 novels based upon Baum's original Oz saga. Baum characterized Oz as a real place, unlike MGM's 1939 musical movie adaptation, which presents it as a dream of lead character Dorothy Gale. According to the Oz books, it is a hidden fairyland cut off from the rest of the world by the Deadly Desert.
In the movie, Dorothy gets knocked out by a flying window during the cyclone scene. She eventually lands in Oz but by the movie's end, she wakes up in her bed with her family surrounding her. This reassures the viewer that the whole ordeal was simply a dream. In the book, however, there is no dream.
In the plot, an insomniac Dorothy returns to the Land of Oz to find it has been conquered by the wicked Nome King and his accomplice Princess Mombi. Dorothy must restore Oz with her new friends Billina, Tik-Tok, Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Gump.
Like in the original Baum novel, Oz is not a land for dreams, it is reality and the main character has actually entered this land, he did not stumble upon it in a dream. or inspiration, this prequel is unlike anything seen before.
In the Oz movies made by Baum and others from 1910 to 1933, either a cyclone blows Dorothy to Oz or she is already there. MGM's The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939) is the first movie to present the trip to Oz as a dream. It is often said casually that the Kansas sequences are in black and white and the dream is in color.
TIL that the reason why in the Wizard of Oz movie Dorothy's adventures were all just a dream, unlike in the book where Oz was real, was because the producers felt that 1939 audiences were too "sophisticated" to accept a " straight-ahead fantasy".
At night, Dorothy sneaks into Mombi's closet to steal the powder so she can escape on her moose plane, but the headless witch awakens, along with her hall of heads, who scream after her. To this day, I consider this one of the scariest scenes ever put to film.
With Dorothy and the boy Zeb, he falls through a crack in the earth; in their underground journey, he acts as their guide and protector. Oz explains that his real name is Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs.
The Nome King is the main antagonist of the 1985 Disney dark fantasy film Return to Oz, which serves as an unnofficial sequel to the iconic Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
What mental illness did Dorothy have in The Wizard of Oz?
Histrionic Personality Disorder (HPD)
We're no shrinks, but it seems like Dorothy could be suffering from HPD, a disorder that manifests itself through attention-seeking behavior, intense theatricality, and a shallow array of emotions.
While it is implied that Oz is merely Dorothy's dream since she awakens in bed at the end, Dorothy is convinced that her journey was all in fact real. In Disney's 1985 fantasy adventure film Return to Oz, Dorothy is played by then child actress Fairuza Balk.
Baum does not present Oz as some figment of Dorothy's imagination, but as a real place (one to which, a few books later, Dorothy, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry will move) – and this accounts for a dozen or so sequels.
The Wiz: All four witches remain, but they get new names. The Wicked Witch of the East becomes Evvamean, the Good Witch of the North becomes Addaperle ("Miss One" in the movie version) and the Wicked Witch of the West becomes Evillene, while Glinda gets to keep her name.
It came out three years after a major Surrealism exhibition opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and the way its scenario spirals into a frantic fever dream of flying monkeys and green-faced guards is nothing if not surreal.
Why is there no witch of the south in Wizard of Oz?
In the original books, Ozma, queen of Oz, explains to the Wizard how four wicked witches took over Oz. One for each direction. But Glinda conquered the bad witch in the south and the other good witch conquered Mombi, the wicked witch of the north.
Toto knocks over a screen, revealing that Oz is only a common man. However, he fills the Scarecrow's head with bran and pins and needles, saying that they are brains; he puts a silk-and-sawdust heart into the Tin Woodman; and he gives the Cowardly Lion a drink that he says is courage.
Even Dorothy had hope that "The Great and Terrible Humbug," as she called him, would find a way to send her back to Kansas, and if he did she was willing to forgive him everything.
Who was the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz?
One of the iconic charterers in the film is the Wizard himself, the Man Behind the Curtain. Dorothy was in need of a champion, someone who had the power to help her get to her home. Toto pulls back the curtain revealing the Wizard to be a fraud, all smoke and mirrors and no real power.
The baddies are as scary, the heroine as determined, but the subject matter touches down in some much darker places. There's no singing, either, putting Return To Oz closer to Baum's strange turn of the century stories than the happy clappy '30s film in many ways.
The Wizard wanted to appear to be a powerful and ruthless tyrant, even though he was actually a weak and unassuming little man. So, he hid behind a curtain, amplified his voice and projected a scary image onto the far wall when Dorothy and her friends entered the Wizard's castle.
While the movie was much truer to Baum's book series than the original, its tone and imagery were far too dark and frightening for children and it flopped as a result.
In conclusion, the Cowardly Lion in “The Wizard of Oz” represents courage and the journey to find it. His character teaches us important lessons about the nature of fear, the importance of self-confidence, and the transformative power of confronting our insecurities.
What does Dorothy say at the end of the Wizard of Oz?
In the end, Dorothy learns that the secret to getting back to Kansas is to click the heels of the Ruby Slippers together three times and say, "There's no place like home; there's no place like home . . ." (129). The film's interest in home is certainly not accidental.
In the movie The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy (Judy Garland) meets up with the Lion, the Tin man, and the Scarecrow. Each wants a gift from the great Wizard of Oz. The Scarecrow wants a brain.
