Princess Mombi is the secondary antagonist of the 1985 movie Return to Oz. She is based on an amalgam of two characters from L. Frank Baum's Oz books - Mombi, the Wicked Witch of the North from The Marvelous Land of Oz and Princess Langwidere from Ozma of Oz. Mombi is played primarily by Jean Marsh, who also plays Nurse Wilson in the Kansas scenes of the film. Sophie Ward and Fiona Victory play two of Mombi's youthful disguises.
Fictional character biography[]
Mombi, a dark-haired, deranged and evil middle-aged sorceress. She made a deal with the Nome King to trap Princess Ozma in her enchanted mirror. In return, he would make her a princess of the conquered Land of Oz. He also gave her the power to detach her head from her body and not be killed. Mombi was also given 30 female heads which she can change dependent on her mood, and can transform heads as easily as ordinary women wear different hats.
She lived in the Emerald City palace after the King took away the emeralds, with the Wheelers as her enforcers. Mombi also guarded the Powder of Life. When Dorothy Gale arrived at the palace, Mombi developed a fondness for Dorothy's head and locked her in a tower, planning to remove her head and take it once the girl reached adulthood. Dorothy, with the help of another prisoner, Jack Pumpkinhead, managed to escape from the tower and steal the Powder of Life. Mombi's true head was awakened by Dorothy in the process, alerting Mombi's headless body. Dorothy, Jack, and Tik-Tok the Mechanical Man managed to escape in the flying Gump. Donning her true head, Mombi sent the Wheelers after Dorothy. When this failed, Mombi had the Wheelers pull her chariot in a tunnel to the Nome King's palace. Being a coward at heart, Mombi groveled before the King and begged for her life. He imprisoned her in a magical cage for failing him. After the Nome King was killed by Billina's egg, Dorothy used the Ruby Slippers to restore Oz to its rightful state of being. The heads which Mombi had stolen were restored to their rightful owners. Ozma was soon discovered in her mirror prison, and restored to the throne of Oz. Mombi was brought in custody to Ozma's throne, while the two women whose faces she had once worn served as her captors. Ozma stripped Mombi of her powers, but chose not to prosecute her any further.
Mombi bore a remarkable resemblance to Nurse Wilson, the chief assistant of Doctor J.B. Worley (who resembled the Nome King) at a mental clinic in Kansas, where Dorothy had briefly been a patient. After a flash flood raged through the town, damage to the clinic revealed that Worley and Wilson had been performing inhumane experiments on inmates, causing permanent brain damage. Nurse Wilson was arrested by the sheriff. Dr. Worley perished in the storm while trying to evacuate his expensive equipment.
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