LEGENDS OF OZ: DOROTHY’S RETURN ENCOURAGES EMPOWERMENT
Yet another spinoff from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, this time a musical animation, Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return begins with the desperate Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Man warning Dorothy (voiced by Lea Michele) about something dreadful going on in Oz. The road from Kansas to Emerald City runs past a region of an English-accented nobility and a China Princess (Megal Hilty), but at the end of the road Emerald City has been taken over by the Jester (Martin Short), with the Wizard of Oz nowhere to be found. After false starts and a struggle, Dorothy wrests the Jester’s magic scepter from him and smashes the object. She returns to Kansas to tell her neighbors not to believe presumed government officials, who have condemned their houses as uninhabitable due to the latest tornado and are trying to compensate them in an apparent land grab. In other words, directors Will Finn and Dan St. George tell an anti-Obama Tea Party story that bad government is the enemy of ordinary people. MH