Remembering Return to Oz

In 1985, Walt Disney Productions released Return to Oz, a sequel to the beloved 1939 film.

In actuality, the film is merely a spiritual sequel to the 1939 landmark. Director Walter Murch gave Return to Oz a darker, far more sinister feel that is closer to the tone of the original books from L. Frank Baum. The film turned out to be the subject of much controversy due to the horrific nature of many of the situations that Dorothy finds herself in. The film was pulled out of theaters prematurely and was a box-office and critical flop.

Years later, the film developed a strong cult following, and fans have been clamoring for a proper making-of documentary for a long time. In 2021, that documentary, Remembering Return to Oz, finally arrived. Unfortunately, the final product is a disaster of epic proportions, as it has been haphazardly cobbled together by highly incompetent amateurs.

Director and editor, Aaron Schultz, and his co-editor and producer, Aaron Pacentine have taken a golden opportunity and squandered it, utterly and completely. The film, as it stands now, seems to have been edited with a chainsaw. The whole of the film is comprised of interview segments with the majority of the cast and crew of Return to Oz, but in the hands of Schultz and Pacentine, these segments have been edited in such a careless manner that it becomes positively infuriating. Audio drops in and out of sync throughout. Interview segments are abruptly cut while the interviewees are in mid-sentence. The generic score overwhelms the dialogue, completely removing us from the film while drowning out important information. The audio that is here is fuzzy and sloppily mixed. There are awkward transitions, horribly rendered PowerPoint animations that pop up out of nowhere, and several instances of terrible dissolves in between clips.

This goes on for the entire runtime.

Yes, there are some gems to be found here. The interviews are revealing (when you can hear them) and very touching at...