Out of the Disney Vault: Return to Oz

Toto, I think we're not...well, you know.

If I recall correctly, at some point after the release of the 1998 shot-for-shot remake of the quintessential horror film Psycho, the film critic Roger Ebert asked the remake’s director, Gus Van Sant, exactly…y’know, why he would agree to make such a film. Van Sant’s response is remarkable in its simplicity, which is why it’s stuck with me for so long: “So that no one else would have to.”

That studios are unable to resist or unwilling to ignore the temptation to cannibalize themselves is undeniable. The Walt Disney Company is at the top of the list of the studios willing to redo their own classics to squeeze out some more cash, but it’s not just a Disney problem, as evidenced by the example in the previous paragraph. But Disney does enjoy going back to what’s established to have worked before in the hopes that redoing it will continue to bear fruit, financially if not creatively.

Off the top of my head, I don’t know that if you asked legendary, Oscar-winning film editor Walter Murch why he chose for his directorial debut a sequel to The Wizard of Oz, his answer would be the same as Van Sant’s. But in its own way, the 1985 fantasy Return to Oz is a fool’s errand. It’s not as if a lot of people who lined up to see the 1998 Psycho (which was largely seen as a failure, so presume I mean it as a figure of speech that people lined up at all) were expecting the remake to improve upon its predecessor. But there may well have been a touch of curiosity in the mind of the viewer, and the same curiosity is impossible to shake when you watch Return to Oz. On one hand, how on Earth could you top the genuinely iconic grandeur of the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz? On the other hand…it might be worth watching someone try.

And that leads to the most fascinating part about Return to Oz: its strident, defiant unwillingness to be anything like The Wizard of Oz.