How Did This Get Made? · Earwolf and Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, Jason Mantzoukas

Return to Oz

January 30, 2026·1 hr 2 min·5 clips

Paul plays the chilling clip of a doctor humanizing an electroshock machine to a child Dorothy, calling it insidious malice.

Traumatized sets the temperature. Paul introduces Return to Oz as Disney's 1985 follow-up to The Wizard of Oz, and Jason and June sound rattled almost immediately. TikTok is not the app here. The robot turns into the kind of odd detail the room can latch onto, repeat, and use to bleed off tension. Then the movie keeps getting worse. June is the most bothered by how harsh it feels, especially beside the clean emotional shape of The Wizard of Oz. That 1939 contrast gives the conversation some bite. The panel wonders whether the earlier movie softened older, darker source material because audiences wanted color, songs, and a little mercy after hard years. This Oz does not hand out mercy. Kansas sounds miserable, Oz sounds worse, and the horrifying machine somehow starts to look like the reasonable exit. That is where the joke lives. Every time they try to find Dorothy a safe place, the movie yanks another option away. June misses the clearer journey. She points back to the original's lesson about there being no rescuer behind the curtain, then argues that this sequel muddies Dorothy's emotional path. Jason and Paul keep tripping over stray weirdness. A mysterious girl, a vain witch, the gnome king, and the wrecked magical land all become reasons to pause and ask what on earth is happening. Nobody wants to move there. The episode is funniest when disbelief takes over. They are not politely assessing Return to Oz. They are poking at its nightmare logic until it makes a noise. Even the ending does not feel settled. By the close, Paul is still half-joking about digging for hidden answers while pointing listeners toward corrections, not opinions.

As heard by us

A funny, unsettled Oz sequel autopsy that finds real critique inside the nightmare fuel.

Return to Oz drops into How Did This Get Made? as a Disney sequel that leaves Paul Scheer, Jason Mantzoukas, and June Diane Raphael sounding less enchanted than lightly injured.

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Why you'd press play

The 1985 Disney film that traumatized a generation finally gets the panel therapy session it deserves.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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