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Someone described the modern difference as such: Fear is knowing that a werewolf is hunting you. Terror is when you see it and it charges at you. Horror is realizing that your feet are stuck to the floor.
lust is
I’d like to thank the brave sniper that stopped that final comment
Ok, First of all, Dorothy Gale is played by a young Fairuza Balk.
These pictures do not do justiceto the raw Traumatized Child energy she brings to this role.
A bit of plot: Dorothy Gale won’t sleep. She’s always talking about Emerald Cities and Talking Scarecrows and Ruby Slippers. At her wit’s end, Aunt Em decides to commit her to the sanitarium for electroshock therapy.
Disney made this.
It is strongly implied that her journey back to Oz is a hallucination caused by the electroshock treatment. Herr Doktor flips the switch, lightning flashes, and the supernatural part of the movie begins.
Ok. So. Dorothy gets to Oz by almost drowning in a flash flood. She rides to safety in a produce crate with one of her family chickens.
This is where one of the core Uncanny elements of the film first appears; this movie does not share continuity with the 1939 Judy Garland film.
It is a much more faithful adaptation of L.F. Baum’s Books, but despite being a sequel both objectively and canonically, it really just pretends the ‘39 film doesn’t exist.
They land in a desert that turns people to stone called the Deadly Desert. They get food from a Lunch Pail Tree. The chicken can talk. The Scarecrow is King of Oz, allegedly.
But, like,
Here’s her house from the first movie.
The one that landed on a witch? Right smack dab in the middle of a whole dang Munchkin Village?
There was literally a whole song and dance!
Where did the Munchkins go, you might ask?
Well, while Dorothy was away,
There was an Apocalypse.
OZ HAS FALLEN
And this is where we meet the nightmarish Eldritch spawn of Roller Disco and David Bowie:
The Wheelers
Alright. The fuckingWheelers.
I don’t-
What is-
What these pictures don’t convey is that, as they move, they make the exact same sound the gurneys in the sanitariums make. The Wheelers are played by the same actors who play the orderlies. Oz is the sanitarium.
Now, let’s discuss JackSkellington Pumpkinhead
This is one of the Good Guys
He’s just a guy. Like, really, very much, Just A Guy of a character. His entire personality, such as it is, is comprised of
His quest to find his Mom (we’ll get back to that) and
Commenting on his lifelessness. For example, when faced with death, he comments calmly that he won’t miss eating or sleeping, since he does neither.
His mom ends up being this girl:
We’ll get to her.
I had this fever-dream memory of the Army of Oz in the Hall of Ornaments from when I was a kid as well and I gotta say it’s kinda nice to finally put that memory in some kind of context. A horrible, terrible, awful context, but a context nonetheless.
One and the same, friend.
I LIVE TO PLEASE
Ahem. Sorry. Anyway.
So. I mentioned an Apocalypse.
Behold! The citizenry of Oz!
They have been turned to stone by the evil Nome King! Why, you ask?
For stealing his Emeralds, of course!
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I forgot to introduce The Army of Oz, affectionately referred to as Tik-Tok!
This guy
That’s… apparently the whole army?
He’s spring-wound. Has 3 winding keys: one for moving, one for talking, and one for thinking. At one point his thinking gears wind down while his action and talking gears are still tight and he creates a lot of trouble. He has a… spin attack…
I really don’t know what to make of him to be honest.
Ok so like fully half of what makes The Wheelers so unsettling is the audio so I found a clip:
Hospital gurney noises and echoing, mocking laughter. The way it’s cut doesn’t help. Nor does the… craft store kitsch of the Wheeler outfits. I genuinely have no idea what they were going for. David Bowie vibes, a little bit, but not in a good way.
Oh this film. This isn’t even the end of it.
This is one of the few films that tried for, and managed to succeed for the most part, at capturing the same sort of dark magic of films like Labyrinth, the Dark Crystal, or the Secret of NIMH. That time when some creators were willing to tell stories to children that reflected the darkness that we already saw in the world.
It’s got some problems, but Return to Oz is honestly great. I also never felt like it was patronizing me when I watched it as child, which seemed like an awfully hard ask for most movies.
Yeah this is absolutely of its era, when it comes to terrifying 80’s children’s films.
I used get dad to rent this film for us when I was 8 or so. Mostly because I knew it was the only film my tough little sister was visibly scared of. Children are brutal.
This breakdown doesn’t even touch on Mombi, who scared the living daylights out of me. She is played by the same actress who plays the nurse at the sanatorium. And she is the reason the citizens of Oz up there are missing their heads. She keeps the still living heads locked in glass cabinets in her palace and swaps them out for her own head depending on her mood.
There is a later scene where all the heads are screaming as Dorothy makes a run for it. Mombi’s original head bellowing ‘Dorothy Gale!’ It is genuinely disturbing. I love this film so much.
I’m going to shatter you into a gongulquideus pieces for defending these SludgeNumbers
i got this new anime plot. basically there’s this high school girl except she’s got huge mussols. i mean some serious bibols. a real set of bibbols. packin some geegols. massive goosextols. big ol’ gongulquideus. what happens next?! transfer student shows up with even bigger double-hyper-godkubikgathors. humongous tethracross-turreted-dustaculated-tethracubors.
Our son Sam has told us that the D&D art file we use for a screensaver on various devices bothers him.
Because it makes him frustrated that he can’t look at some of them longer. He wants to know what is happening in some of them.
I told him that is one of the reasons we play Dungeons & Dragons, so we can go find out together, in our collective imagination.
Not really D&D related- but I feel compelled to add to this that not only are these GORGEOUS pixel arts- they are also in fact not animated. There are no frames used. There’s no extra pieces of art. Just one layer.
These pieces are so old that they stem from a time where animating cost way too much memory and/or only 256 colors could be used at one time, so the motion is achieved by ‘color cycling’. Half the available colors would be reserved for that very color cycling. It’s mchecking bonkers, please go watch this video if you feel like learning the technical details of how these artworks were made! They were screensavers that would match the actual time of day that you were in. Somehow. Just by cycling color palettes. Wild shit.
(Especially relevant time stamps for color cycling: 5:50, 9:55, 37:26, at 49:54 he gets into the technical side of HOW this even works)
Yup.
I’ve always enjoyed how they depicted some of the landscapes at different times of the day/weather/season.
Like these two areas. Daytime and nighttime at the village by the waterfalls.
And the high mountains hidden by rain in one and visible in the other.
