I caught a few minutes of the second part of The Witches of Oz on an Encore channel the other day, where I saw a taxi floating in the air inside of a bubble while the wicked witch and her monkeys are causing chaos in the streets of New York. The scene caught my interest, but I had to leave at the time and the movie wasn’t going to be on again. Luckily, I happened to stumble upon it for under ten dollars and of course I had to buy it. Little did I know that the movie was 164 minutes! After a little googling, I found out it was original intended as a mini-series, but ended up being cut down to 100 minutes with 15 minutes of new special effects added and released to a limited (very limited) run in theaters earlier this year. Why in the world would they send the longer version to DVD and to Encore?

The Witches of Oz is set in our time and involves twenty-something Dorothy Gale getting a publishing contract for her OZ children stories; therefore she leaves her family farm and heads to New York. As strange situations occur, Dorothy’s memory slowly returns and so do the evil Wicked Witch and her followers (Princess Langwidere, Nome King, an army of Winked Monkeys and a powerful dragon.). Soon Dorothy’s friends from Oz return too, including Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, Frick & Frack, the good witches, and Oz himself, as they try to help her defeat the wicked witch once and for all.