Hold on to your chickens, because Return to Oz (1985) is the Greatest Movie EVER!
Click on the movie title or the poster above to download our review of the film, featuring Gerard (from Canada).
Review in a Nutshell: Sporting strong performances and impeccable production design and special effects, Return to Oz (1985) nonetheless failed to find its audience despite (or perhaps because of) serving as a sequel to the much-beloved 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz.
The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast 
Perhaps I misheard, as I listened to this episode in several installments over the day, but did you guys decide that the theme of the original Wizard of Oz film was leaving home to find yourself? Really? “Although Over the Rainbow” has been adopted as a theme by people who feel alienated in the communities they are born to, the original film explicitly rejects that idea. Even if we ignore the fact that Dorothy doesn’t make it past her first encounter with a person beyond the farm before regretting her decision to leave home AND we disregard that her only expressed desire while in Oz is to return home AND we ignore the 3-4 emotional breakdowns she has during the film when presented with even the idea that she might not be able to return home….even with all that, the film still has the kindness to come out and state it’s theme at the conclusion: “There is no place like home, no place like home. There is no place like home, no place like home.”
This discussion was a pretty clear example of something that frustrates me with media analysis. A work pulled from its context is of no value. Death of the author is a fundamentally lazy, narcissistic excuse. If you are not interested in trying to understand who created a piece of art, why they created it, and the world they lived in, then what is the point of your analysis? The best example I have for this is Guernica, by Picasso. Without context it is a sloppy, childish drawing. With context, it is one of the most moving anti-fascist pieces ever made. The Wizard of Oz might not be Guernica, but the ethos of GME has always been that any film is worthy of being treated with the respect of any other, and film is art. Can we please not sink to the level of stripping art from all context just to justify out personal point of view in its analysis?
You could have stopped at “perhaps I misheard”, because at no point in our discussion did we state that was our interpretation of The Wizard of Oz (1939).
I don’t think there’s any merit to the theory that Baum wrote the Oz books to promote bimetallism. As far as I’m aware, nobody ever suggested it until long after Baum was dead and readers were ignorant of how the bimetallism debate was actually carried out.