Friday, April 2, 2021

Return to Oz

After having returned from Oz, little Dorothy is having trouble sleeping, her parents believing the care for her insomnia lies in electric shock therapy.

She's transported to a local institution hell bent on legitimizing experimental theory, the radical idea no doubt having been spearheaded by bored opportunistic sadists.

Another patient warns her of the horrors and they make a dashing escape together, during a forbidding storm no less, the "doctors" trailing in hot pursuit.

Dorothy awakes the next haunting morning to find herself having returned to Oz, amidst a lugubrious transformation ill-disposed to posit welcome.

She's remembered with distraught reverence by the absolutists who have brought about ruin, and as she attempts to discover what's happened tribulation maniacally sets in.

Fortunately, she quickly makes friends who are none too fond of totalitarianism, and seek to assist her altruistic endeavours to facilitate reanimated prosperity (I am not saying the COVID-19 measures in Canada are totalitarian. I support them and the ways in which they will save the lives of frontline workers).

But an evil queen and gnome king flourish in the bland malaise.

The bourgeoisie having been crushed.

Along with craft and celebration.

A bit of a puzzle as to how Walt Disney gave this idea the green light, why did executives think the sequel to a cherished family classic should be cultivated through mass depression?

The Wizard of Oz was once perhaps the most popular film, and it festively aired every year on television, even 40 years later in my youth, it was still mesmerizingly reverberating.

Why then did Disney decide to produce a calamitous morose successor, Dorothy has only aged 6 months, and has yet to be tested by practical independence?

From the point of view of teasing or distressing mad comedy it indubitably succeeds, bizarro decisions blended with inane guidance through the art of dysfunctional aneurism. 

It's just so strange to see Disney emphatically promoting what's usually reserved for art house mischief.

No Cowardly Lion, no Tin Man, hardly any Scarecrow, sure let's make a sequel without them!

It's like Newt and Hicks perishing before the beginning of Alien 3.

Instead there's a decapitated moose who talks, a wise robot, a pumpkin man, and a chicken (no Toto in Oz).

Perfect for cynical head wounds.

Otherwise somewhat dismal. 

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