Saturday, August 24, 2019

Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz: Three Friends and a Magic Crystal

Even though it’s not fall, Dorothy and the guys are raking all leaves off the yellow brick road. Turns out, it’s one of Wilhelmina’s traps! But Wilhelmina gets stuck in her own leaf cocoon trap—with Dorothy! The boys go to get help from Ozma, with Frank and Lyman right behind them. Ozma finds out that they need a magic crystal from the Crystal Forest. Despite their doubts, they find the right crystal immediately. Good thin, too, because Wilhelmina’s attempts to get Dorothy and her out of the cocoon has them rolling over a cliff! Good thing Ozma comes along and saves them. Frank and Lyman try to steal the crystal (I don’t know why, they both want to free their friends from the same trap!), but it cracks. As Frank and Lyman fly off to tell Wilhelmina the bad news, a baby crawls out of the crystal! The guys can’t figure out what to feed it, and so once they rescue it from a shark-infested lake (in Oz???), they go to Queen Ozma to figure out what to do. It turns out that the magic crystal was exactly what Ozma needed, because the baby they found was a baby wogglebug, and baby wogglebugs eat leaves! Sure enough, the wogglebug eats the cocoon, freeing Dorothy and Wilhelmina. The leaves were also enough for the wogglebug to grow to adulthood, and he thanks them all for the delicious meal. All’s well, Wilhelmina at least expresses gratitude that the snipers are still safe, and Lyman gets to happily roll around in a bunch of leaves.

Come on, Wilhelmina, haven’t you figured out by now how nice these guys are to you, and that you’d probably be better off just becoming friends with them? Alas, once again her own shortsightedness is her downfall, and Wilhelmina doesn’t get the Ruby Slippers again, she has to stay tied up with Dorothy for a while. On another note, we see the DatWoO debut of wogglebugs, who aren’t much like the esteemed Prof. H. M. Wogglebug, T. E. of the books. Still, we get another piece of evidence that the writers are reading the books! The title of the episode, by the way, is a reference to the movie Three Men and a Baby, as the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion get into some hijinks as they try to deal with the baby wogglebug.

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