Episode Description
Return to Oz and The Peanut Butter Solution both came out in 1985; both were sold as children's movies, and both are genuinely upsetting. Meaghan and Arthur team up with Annie and Caroline from the Drawn to Darkness podcast for a Childhood Trauma double bill made entirely of films that were technically made for kids.
RETURN TO OZ: THE DISNEY SEQUEL THAT STARTS IN AN ASYLUM
- The first thirty minutes are a straight horror film. Dorothy has insomnia, Aunt Em hands her to Dr. Worley, and we get a silent nurse, a dark corridor, restraints, and screaming from other rooms.
- The electroshock therapy is a Disney invention. It appears nowhere in L. Frank Baum's Oz books.
- Fairuza Balk was actually the right age for the character in her feature debut, which makes the stakes land harder than the 1939 version ever did.
- The lightning cuts the power right before the machine fires. Everyone on this episode thinks it worked anyway.
THE OZ BOOKS, MGM'S COPYRIGHT, AND WHAT DISNEY COULD NOT USE
- The film combines The Land of Oz (1904) and Ozma of Oz (1907). Baum wrote fourteen Oz novels before he died in 1919.
- MGM owned the 1939 designs, so Disney paid for the ruby slippers (silver shoes in the book) and left the gingham dress alone.
- Book two is a girls' revolt fought with knitting needles, and the messaging has not aged into anything coherent.
- The Gump's reward for saving Ozma is asking to be taken apart. That is in the novel.
PRINCESS MOMBI, THE WHEELERS, AND THE NOME KING
- Jean Marsh plays Nurse Wilson and Princess Mombi, the same doubling trick the 1939 film used. She also played Bavmorda in Willow.
- Mombi's hall of heads is Elizabeth Bathory logic in a Disney film. Trophies, kept young, screaming.
- The Wheelers sit between Freddy Krueger's stretched silhouette and Biff's gang in Back to the Future Part II. The book defuses them. The film does not.
- Nicol Williamson plays Dr. Worley and the Nome King, so Dorothy's real trauma follows her into Oz wearing a different face.
THE PEANUT BUTTER SOLUTION AND QUEBEC'S TALES FOR ALL SERIES
- The second Tales for All entry, directed by Michael Rubbo and produced by Rock Demers. The series now runs to twenty-seven films and markets itself as family-friendly.
- Michael gets a fright, loses his hair, ignores the ghosts' measurements, and everything after that is consequences.
- The art teacher kidnaps a neighbourhood of kids for a paintbrush sweatshop and wears Michael's hair as a jacket. His dog gets a matching vest.
- Celine Dion recorded her first English-language songs for this soundtrack at seventeen.
MONTREAL ON SCREEN AND TRAUMA THAT ACTUALLY STICKS
- Three characters are brothers with three different accents, none French Canadian, which contradicts a claim made on the How Did This Get Made episode.
- Return to Oz earns real credit for admitting the first film broke its protagonist, then tells her to keep quiet or go back to the asylum.
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Background music by: Steve Swisher from the Producer's Chair Podcast
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