Two children’s films came out in 1985. One was a big Disney production with a claymation villain and a nine-year-old lead. The other was a Quebec film about a bald kid whose hair gets turned into paintbrushes. Neither of them should have been shown to children, and both of them were, constantly, on cable and VHS for about a decade.
We put them side by side on this one because we had help. This episode is part of our childhood trauma series, and we brought in Annie and Caroline from the Drawn to Darkness podcast to do the damage with us. Annie picked Return to Oz. Caroline picked The Peanut Butter Solution. They picked separately and did not compare notes, and both films landed on 1985 anyway. As Annie put it:
Utter fever dream, both of them.
Why 1985 Kids’ Movies Were Allowed to Be This Dark
This was the first time our childhood trauma series covered films that were actually made for kids. Everything before this was horror that kids found by accident. These two were aimed directly at the seven-year-old demographic and still came out looking like this.
Disney was in a strange mood in this stretch. The Black Cauldron, The Black Hole, Willow, and the animation side were no gentler; Annie brought up The Secret of NIMH, which she loved as a kid and now recognizes as genuinely bleak. There was a whole eighties attitude of scaring children on purpose to toughen them up. Arthur is living proof it worked:
It did harden me up, so I’m afraid of nothing.
Both of us were watching Return to Oz and The Peanut Butter Solution for the very first time, which turned out to be the right way to do this episode. No nostalgia softening the edges. Just two adults going, “What is happening right now?“
Return to Oz Opens in an Asylum, Not Over the Rainbow
Walter Murch’s Return to Oz is a loose sequel to the 1939 MGM film, but it draws from L. Frank Baum instead, blending The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) and Ozma of Oz (1907). Baum published 14 Oz books before he died in 1919, and other writers kept the series going after that. Over 120 years later, we are still getting adaptations, still arguing about them, still coming off a Wicked cycle. That franchise refuses to die.
The film opens with Dorothy suffering from insomnia six months after the tornado. Aunt Em and Uncle Henry decide the fix is to hand her to Dr. Worley for experimental electroshock therapy. This is the first thirty minutes. There is a silent nurse in a spiky black dress that is very much not scrubs, a dark hallway, a creaking cot, restraints, and other patients screaming somewhere off camera.
Meaghan’s read:
Got insomnia? Let’s shock you about it.
Annie caught something we missed on the first pass. The doctor’s pitch is not that Dorothy will feel better. It is that she is no good to anyone tired. She is being repaired so she can work. That is the actual logic of the scene, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it.
Here is the part that got the biggest reaction from the table. The electroshock therapy is not in the books at all. Baum gave us Mombi, Billina, the Wheelers, and the Nome King. Disney came up with the asylum. Arthur’s theory is that the treatment actually worked, since the power cuts out right as they flip the switch and the storm sends her straight back to Oz. Wink.
Fairuza Balk was nine or ten when she filmed this, and it changes everything. Judy Garland was about 16 in 1939 and read older. Balk matches the age of the character in the books, so when the nurse walks her down that hallway, the stakes feel real in a way the original never attempted.
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Mombi, the Wheelers, and the Nome King: Where Return to Oz Becomes Horror
Jean Marsh plays Nurse Wilson and Princess Mombi, and she is the reason a generation has trust issues. Mombi keeps a hall of interchangeable heads in glass cases, swapping them out as it suits her. Annie clocked her immediately as an Elizabeth Báthory figure: keeping age at bay through the suffering of young women, collecting trophies. The scene where Dorothy sneaks past the sleeping Mombi and the crazy eyes snap open, and she starts screaming is horror filmmaking, full stop. There is no children’s-film cushion on it.
The Wheelers were Annie’s specific childhood trauma. Long arms, maniacal laughter, clown-coded, closing in on a small girl and threatening to tear her apart. In the book, they get defanged within a few pages; one of them admits they only pretend to be fierce because they are so helpless. The movie leaves them scary. It also upgrades them, because in the book their wheels are made of the same substance as fingernails and toenails. Sit with that one for a second.
Nicol Williamson doubles as Dr. Worley and the Nome King, which is the film’s neatest trick: the people who traumatize Dorothy in Kansas are the ones hunting her in Oz. The Nome King unhinges his jaw to eat characters, has hellfire behind him, is a self-appointed environmentalist with a grievance about stolen emeralds, and looks fabulous in ruby slippers. The claymation in the final act is the best work in the movie.
The supporting cast is a substitution puzzle. Billina the hen (voiced by Denise Bryer) is the Toto stand-in and split the room; Meaghan and Arthur loved her, Annie and Caroline did not. Tik-Tok replaces the Tin Man and is a wind-up toy that claims a thousand-year charge and dies roughly every ten seconds, with the winding key on his back where he cannot reach it.
Jack Pumpkinhead (performed by Brian Henson, son of Jim Henson) is adorable and directly responsible for Jack Skellington, and he will not stop calling Dorothy “mom,” which is a choice. The Gump is a mounted moose head bolted to a flying sofa who mostly wants to be dismantled. In the book, he actually asks for it, in a speech about being ashamed of his conglomerate personality that reads like a suicide note in a children’s novel.
Meaghan’s summary:
This is like the Temu cast of characters.
Verdict was consistent across the table. Three severed heads out of five. The pacing sags; you could cut twenty to thirty minutes, and Annie is right that it holds up as an artifact of what it was like to be an eighties kid.
The Peanut Butter Solution Is a Montreal Fever Dream
Then we watched The Peanut Butter Solution, and we went in completely blind, and then the opening credits rolled, and we realized we were about to watch our own city.
Michael Rubbo’s film is the second entry in Tales for All (Contes pour tous), a Quebec children’s series that now runs to 27 films, the most recent being My Stepmother Is a Witch in 2025. When Annie searched the series, the description that came back called it generation-defining, award-winning, family-friendly, and nonviolent. Meaghan, immediately:
Family-friendly is a weird choice for a guy kidnapping a bunch of kids.
The plot, and we want you to know we are not embellishing. Eleven-year-old Michael (Mathew Mackay) visits a recently burned house where unhoused people died in the fire. He experiences a “fright” so severe that all his hair falls out overnight; the medical term the film invents is Hairem Scarem. The ghosts of the fire victims visit him with a recipe to grow it back.
He overdoes the peanut butter, five tablespoons instead of one, and his hair starts growing and never stops. His best friend Connie (Siluck Saysanasy) applies the mixture to his crotch in a bid to fake puberty. Then his former art teacher, The Signor (Michel Maillot), kidnaps him along with a factory’s worth of neighbourhood children and forces them to harvest his hair into magic paintbrushes.
The Signor wears a jacket made of the hair. His dog wears a matching one.
Arthur, appraising the look:
It was just haute couture.
Caroline had recurring nightmares about this man throughout her entire childhood, waking up screaming on a family trip to Arizona because she thought he was in the room. Meaghan’s diagnosis:
He was your sleep paralysis demon.
What Both Films Actually Get Right About Childhood Trauma
For a movie that plays like a campfire story where each kid adds one sentence, The Peanut Butter Solution is weirdly full of good instincts. Suzie, Michael’s slightly older sister, runs the household finances and carries herself like a 45-year-old who needs a cigarette.
The dad is a working artist whose paintings are genuinely terrible, which the film lets you see. Nobody calls the mother in Australia, ever, because Dad is convinced he can fix it before she gets home. The kids’ escape plan involving a bag of sugar and a funnel is a legitimately clever setup and payoff.
And then there is the accidental Céline Dion trivia. She has two songs in this film, and “Listen to the Magic Man” is her first English-language studio recording. She was 17.
The through line between both films is the one Annie named early: the myth that children are resilient. Return to Oz is a rare sequel that admits its protagonist came back damaged. She has insomnia; nobody believes her, and the adults respond with electricity. Compare that to how sitcoms handled it, where a character develops an addiction in one episode and is completely fine the next week. That reset never happens here, and the film is better for it.
Whether the film knows what to do with that acknowledgment is another question. Dorothy ends up in a mirror with Ozma telling her to keep quiet, or they will send her back to the asylum, which lands as: if you are traumatized, tell nobody. Not a great message for a seven-year-old.
Annie did want to note, fairly, that ECT is unfairly stigmatized and can genuinely help people now, which is worth separating from what a fictional 1899 quack was doing with it.
The Peanut Butter Solution is not really trying to say anything. It is a series of strange scenes attached to a plot that barely holds, with tonal whiplash from scene to scene, Roald Dahl absurdity around the edges, and adults who are alarmingly relaxed about a child going bald. It is also one of the funniest things we have watched all year.
Arthur gave it four peanut butter jars out of five, with a caveat:
I can’t eat that many jars of peanut butter, but it’s definitely four.
Meaghan could not settle on a number at all.
If you have not seen either, go find them. Return to Oz is worth it for Mombi alone. The Peanut Butter Solution barely feels like it should exist, and more people should have to know that it does.