INTJ: Tik-Tok, “Return to Oz”

The Mastermind, The Strategist, The Futurist

My twin sister and I were not allowed to see Return to Oz when it debuted in 1985. Reports were it was way too scary for kids. Not that the Wicked Witch of the West and her flying monkeys didn’t inspire a few nightmares in their day, but Return to Oz tapped into some of the darker reserves of L. Frank Baum’s imagination.

Jim Henson and his crew were really a perfect match for this style of Oz. When we’d last paid a visit in the 1939 MGM version, Oz was more glitzy and glamorous. Now we saw headless witches, screaming Wheelers, grasping gnomes, a creepy mental asylum, a deadly desert, and a bad guy death scene that makes the Wicked Witch of the West’s passing look like a gentle, compassionate affair.

Needless to say, when I finally saw it, I was hooked, and I became one of those 80s kids that makes up the cult following of Return to Oz.

In the middle of all this fantastical scariness, however, stands one bright and brave figure. Calm, collected, and always thinking—at least when he’s wound up—Tik-Tok marches into the scene to save the day, joining Dorothy as her first new companion in this round of her journey. According to his Wikipedia entry, Tik-Tok is “widely considered to be one of the first robots…to appear in modern literature, though that term was coined after Baum’s death.”

So not only is Tik-Tok a great robot character, he’s also one of those rare INTJ heroes in fiction. And his wind-up mechanisms make great metaphors for the cognitive functions of the Mastermind. Let’s take a look and see what makes him tick.

Dominant Function—Introverted Intuition/Ni, “What Will Become”

When Dorothy finds Tik-Tok, the first thing she winds up is his Thinking. It’s a sensible decision, since he won’t be able to do anything with his Speaking and Action if he can’t think first. It also reflects the way all Introverts start with their dominant function—be it Sensing, Intuition, Thinking, or Feeling—before they interact with the rest of the world (hi, I’m an INFP!).

In this story, the mechanism is called Thinking, but I believe it’s best described as Intuition in this case. Tik-Tok isn’t designed so much to offer careful analysis of a situation as he is to strategize. He’s called “The Army of Oz.” And as the only member of that Army, he has to figure out what to do for himself.

Dorothy winds him up, and he immediately sizes up the situation. He takes Dorothy’s lunch pail and uses it as a weapon against the Wheelers. Later, Tik-Tok easily grasps Dorothy’s inventive plan to build a flying creature to escape Princess Mombi. When Jack Pumpkinhead asks him if he understands it, he says, “I understand it better than you.”

Near the end of the movie, Tik-Tok comes up with a clever strategy to help them beat the Gnome King. They’re tasked with entering a room full of knick-knacks and trying to guess which one is the lost Scarecrow. If they fail, they turn into an ornament themselves. One by one, Dorothy’s friends enter the room and are transformed. Tik-Tok, however, pretends to wind down so that Dorothy will have to enter the room to wind him up. As she pretends to do so, he tells her that if he guesses incorrectly, she’ll be able to see what kind of knick-knack he’s turned into, and from there figure out how to find the Scarecrow.

Not a bad plan, although the Gnome King cheats and ruins it. But still, that’s Introverted Intuition at work. Tik-Tok dismisses the rules of the Gnome King’s game, and re-works them in his favor.