The world of Oz is deeper, richer, and weirder than MGM would lead you to believe. Munchkinland seems completely unpopulated between the one village and the Emerald City, there’s not much to the land of the Winkies, and while there is a Good Witch of the [I genuinely can’t remember if the Glinda in the movie is the one of the North or the South], we never see the lands of the Quadlings and the Gillikins. The later books would go into great detail on the subject, filling out all four lands with a cast and landscape that can only properly be done in animation. But in 1985, Hollywood took another stab at it.

The two books came first. The Marvelous Land of Oz takes place not long after the events of the first book. We start with a young boy named Tip who is the servant of the witch Mombi; frankly his role reminds me a lot of the “home children” who come up in L. M. Montgomery’s work. One day, to scare her, he makes a man out of wood and gives him a carved pumpkin for a head, then sets him in the road. Far from being scared, Mombi uses the man to test the Powder of Life she’s been given. It works, and the man is named Jack Pumpkinhead. Tip overhears Mombi saying that she’s going to turn him into a marble statue, and he promptly runs away, turning a wooden sawhorse to life to let Jack ride on it. He falls in with Jinjur, a young woman who plans to overthrow the Scarecrow and rule Oz for herself.

In Ozma of Oz, Dorothy and Uncle Henry are on their way to Australia for Uncle Henry’s health. There is a terrible storm, and Dorothy is washed overboard. She survives by clinging to a chicken coop. As they float toward shore the next morning, the last surviving hen begins to talk, cluing Dorothy in to the fact that they are near an enchanted kingdom. It turns out to be the land of Ev. The queen and her ten children are captives of the Nome King. Dorothy herself becomes a captive of the regent, Princess Langwidere. Ozma, the now-queen of Oz, arrives in Ev to free the captives, and she frees Dorothy almost incidentally and brings her into their company to rescue the prisoners from the Nome King.

The movie combines these stories along with a few details from the MGM movie despite being a Disney production—they had to license the trademark of the Ruby Slippers for a large sum, just for starters. At any rate, it is a few months after the events of the first movie. Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) won’t stop talking about Oz, and Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) is worried about her and worried that the new house won’t be ready by winter. She takes Dorothy to get what is doubtless electroshock from a quack named Dr. Worley (Nicol Williamson). Dorothy escapes and ends up, somehow, in Oz.

It is, however, a desolate Oz, more reminiscent of the Cair Paravel in Prince Caspian than the Emerald City from any of the Oz books. The various citizens have been turned to stone, and only the Wheelers and Tik-Tok are still there. And Mombi (Jean Marsh), who controls Oz. Dorothy must go into the realm of the Nome King (Williamson again) to free her friends. Ozma (Emma Ridley) is revealed and made queen, but in a very different way.

A lot of people my age will tell you that the movie scared the bejeezus out of them as children. The Wheelers get cited a lot, and also Mombi and her heads. However, Mombi is therefore a conflation of two characters and irritated me. There’s Mombi, who held Tip captive for [spoilers], and there’s Princess Langwidere, who was the niece of the king of Ev and had thirty heads and one dress and changed her heads with her mood. And the head that locked up Dorothy had a fiercer temper than the others. And she tried to persuade Dorothy to trade hers for one that she never really liked. So I was well ready for the movie, having already read both books.

Baum managed to portray the dark weirdness of Oz in a more lighthearted way, presumably because, you know, tone matters. Director Walter Murch—in his only directorial effort, though he has a long career in sound work and editing—clearly chose to capture a darker feel, as was the style at the time. The choice of invoking electroshock is intense all by itself. I’ve known people to be helped by electroconvulsive therapy, but not in the way people were doing it at the turn of the last century.

And after all we readers of the books know that Dorothy is completely sane. One of the many problems I have with the 1939 movie is the “it’s all a dream” ending. It’s not all a dream; Oz is real and Dorothy really went there, and Uncle Henry and Aunt Em at the very least know she was somewhere. In The Emerald City of Oz, also the next book to feature the Nome King, the Kansas family moves to Oz permanently because times are hard and they’re losing the farm. I have taken to referring to it as “the one where Dorothy slips into irrevocable psychosis.” But that’s a joke, because she’s not crazy. In-universe, Oz is simply real.

Is Oz real here? That’s a question. All of Dorothy’s adventures seem to have happened in no time at all, and there’s the “people have Kansas and Oz equivalents.” So probably not. But maybe? After all, Narnian adventures don’t take any time, either. L. Frank Baum carried the pretense far enough to call himself the Royal Historian of Oz and insist he was receiving the stories from Dorothy and Ozma from the then-new wireless telegraph. Obviously the movies didn’t do the same thing. Fairuza Balk is a talented actress who would go on to be in The Craft. Piper Laurie already had a decades-old career and would go on to get an Oscar nomination the next year. There’s limited pretense possible here.

It’s a bit astounding that this movie—Nome King effects by Will Vinton, and that’s just for starters—lost Best Visual Effects to Cocoon. (As did Young Sherlock Holmes and its early CGI.) The only way to properly convey the weirdness of Oz is animation, so they got an animator. Oh, it’s still not perfect, but the Wheelers are very well done, and for 1985, the whole thing is very convincing. Oz is fun but can also be scary; I haven’t described the half of what happens in any of these works. But it’s still closer here than in the 1939 version.

Next month, if I can find the relevant works, we’ll be getting into a work written by the author of The Apple Dumpling Gang, starring Burl Ives, and helped to the screen by Brigham Young University with Baker’s Hawk! It appears to be one of your standard A Boy And His Animal works, and we’ll all find out together. Help me acquire the works in question by supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!