Line #7 Fridge/ReturnToOz


1	[[AC:FridgeHorror]]
2	* When Dorothy arrives in Oz, she appears on the edge of the Deadly Desert, which abruptly segues into a lush forest area. Geography freaks might be quick to point out this makes no sense, which would be true... with any other desert. Eventually, you find out how the desert got its name when a Wheeler unintentionally falls into it from a ridge. He promptly morphs into sand after a short, panicked struggle. Now think how a desert like that could possibly expand its boundaries to get so huge...
3	** The books confirmed this as the major reason why Oz has rarely been invaded. Without flight capability, massive digging efforts, powerful magic, or acts of nature, it's nearly ''impossible'' to cross the Deadly Desert.
4	* That movie was stuffed with fridge horror, particularly of the Freeze-By-Time variety. For example, Jack Pumpkinhead's... head. He asked Dorothy to check him at the beginning of the movie for signs of spoiling. Sure, he was fine right then. But how long is it going to be before rot sets in?
5	** In the books, Jack ends up keeping a pumpkin patch where he grows replacement heads, so apparently getting a replacement head isn't a big deal for him.
6	** That leads to the question when Jack throws his old head away and puts on a new one, is Jack himself being thrown away to rot with a new person taking his place?
7	*** He appears to be the same old Jack regardless of the head, retaining the same personality and memories. Of course, there's an incident in the books where Jack attributes being cleverer than usual to the current pumpkin having smarter seeds. Plus, swappable heads seem to be a possibility in Oz; Mombi certainly retains the same personality no matter which head she's wearing. Her victim's personalities don't manifest at all.
8	** That depends on which canon we’re talking about here. In the books, Dorothy’s first meeting with Princess Langwidere (the partial inspiration for Mombi) goes poorly because the head she chooses to wear has a bad temper and that carries over into how she acts. And in this film, Mombi forgets she has Jack Pumpkinhead locked away because the head she was wearing at the time hasn’t been used since then, and the women whose heads she stole recognize Ozma in the end, seemingly because they’ve retained some of Mombi’s memories from when she wore their heads.
9	* Then there's the girl from the mental hospital whom Dorothy later recognizes as Ozma. Since the movies played it so that Dorothy was only dreaming of her trips to Oz, with every Oz character being inspired by someone she knew in real life, that means the girl really did drown in the river after she helped Dorothy escape.
10	** When Dorothy meets Ozma, she says "I thought you had drowned". Considering the girl in the hospital appears and disappears at will, it was almost definitely her. This film doesn't portray Oz as a dream - Dorothy's old house is still there when she goes back.
11	* It's a ''children's movie'' and Dorothy narrowly escaped being given ''primitive shock therapy.'' [[OrWasItADream Or did she?]]
12	** She did. Whether or not Oz was real, the storm, her escape, and the raiding and arresting of the hospital staff definitely were.
13	* Mombi stealing the dancing girls' heads is creepy enough. But even though they're turned to stone, she likely beheaded them ''before'' she petrified them.
14	** Alternatively, she may have petrified them first, which made it easier to remove the heads and then unpetrified the heads.
15	** She almost certainly petrified them first, the headless, petrified dancers Dorothy comes across are frozen mid-dance.
16	* Dorothy may have managed to escape electroshock therapy, but there are those "damaged" patients in the cellar that [[spoiler: Ozma]] talked about. Auntie Em says that [[spoiler: everyone but the doctor was rescued from the storm]], but can we really be so sure they thought to look in the cellar? And even if they did, depending on how much the shock therapy messed with their minds, those patients may not be that much better off...
17	** The head-nurse being taken away by the police at the end of the movie would suggest they found the patients because why would she have been arrested otherwise? Their physical and mental states, however, are still another matter.
18	* Even though Dorothy escaped the doctor's and knows Oz is real, she still can't talk about it to anyone.
19	** Which might not be so bad now that she can contact and visit Ozma and the others whenever she likes, plus knowing that they're at least safe from the Nome King. If I'm correct, her issue before was that she could sense that her friends were in danger and couldn't do anything to help them.
20	** Also, Ozma tells Dorothy before sending her back to Kansas that she can bring her back to Oz whenever Dorothy desires.
21	* The presence of the search party at the end suggests that the emergency probably forced Aunt Em and Uncle Henry to divulge at least some information to their neighbors about who was approximately where that night and why. Dorothy will have to come of age in the early twentieth century with the rest of the community knowing she needed to spend some time in the bin as a child.
22	* When Dorothy enters the ornament room, you can see several ornaments that are or have [[spoiler: green]]. Considering that [[spoiler: residents of Oz are turned into green ornaments]], what if there are more Ozians that were turned by the Nome King that ''didn't'' get rescued?
23	** She wished for ''everyone'' from Oz to be returned there safely. We saw this bring Tik-Tok even though he was still an ornament at the time.
24	* Similar to the above: during the grand party celebrating Dorothy at the end of the film, we see hundreds of Ozians cheering for her. There are far many more than just the inhabitants of the Emerald City. That leaves the rather-terrifying question of what happened to ''everyone else in Oz'' during the Nome King's reign. Since the film borrows a lot from the books, presumably all of those various peoples--the Munchkins, the Gillikins, the Winkies, the Quadlings, the various talking animals, and the other towns and their unique populations--were subjected to horrible fates during that time...
25	* Had Dorothy failed the guessing game, turned herself into an ornament and the Nome King [[TheBadGuyWins succeeded]]. Oz would have become a desolate wasteland, the truth about it and its original state would have been lost forever, and every single non-Wheeler or Nome inhabitant would have either been permanently trapped in stone or trapped as an ornament forever.
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27	[[AC:FridgeBrilliance]]
28	* When you see the Wheelers stopping at the edge of the Deadly Desert (and probably other times if you're really paying attention), the one Tik Tok interrogated earlier is still missing his helmet that got knocked off before. Of course he couldn't put it back on...he has wheels for hands.

Context Fridge / ReturnToOz