Magic in the Mirror

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

This is what happens when you want to do The Wizard of Oz on a budget of less than a million.

Mary-Margaret Dennis is an underappreciated young girl with a brilliant physicist for a mother and a Cloudcuckoolander botanist for a father. To make matters worse, her two best friends don't quite appear to exist. Things start to change when she inherits an old hand-crafted mirror from her great-grandmother, and she soon notes that the reflection doesn't match up with the rest of her room.

Soon afterwards, she learns that the mirror actually functions as a gateway to a parallel world, one where Mirror Minders keep mirrors like hers safe from the evil Drakes, a society of giant tea-drinking ducks who are led by a fowl fiend named Dragora. And as for the tea they drink, it's generally made of Mirror Minders When Mary-Margaret asks to be taken to the Mirror World's Queen Hyssop, Dragora and her two henchducks Dabble and Swanson pull out all stops to have her over for some tea...

Meanwhile, Mary-Margaret's mother and her assistant Dr Laszlo Tuttle just so happens to be working on an invention, the Doppelgänger, that is capable of piercing the fabric of Space-Time.

The movie, bizarrely enough, did get a sequel in the form of Magic in the Mirror: Fowl Play. In this movie, a vengeful Dr Tuttle teams up with a similarly vengeful Dragora to kidnap Mary Margaret and her mother.

Tropes used in Magic in the Mirror include:
  • Acting for Two:
    • It's all very Wizard of Oz.
    • Saxon Trainor pulls double-duty as Sylvia Dennis and Queen Hyssop.
    • Eileen T'Kaye briefly appears as Mary-Margaret's school principal, before her bigger role as Dragora.
    • Cristian Motriuc also pulls double duty as Dr Francis Schmott and Swanson.
  • Artistic License Physics:
    • The Doppelgänger is somehow perfectly safe, despite using a beam of antimatter. The most it'll do is give you third-degree burns and blow a hole in the wall of your house. Also, if used on a mirror, it'll simply open the portal and not destroy the mirror.
    • For that matter, Sylvia then studies "Advanced Reflective Surfaces". Which is apparently a proper vocation.
  • Blooper:
    • Due to the two movies being filmed simultaneously and sharing much of the same cast, there are some oddities in the credits. For instance, the character of Bloom is listed in the first movie, but doesn't appear until the second, and the end credits mix-and-match a few of the names (Both Gerritt Graham and David Brooks are listed as Bloom, Eileen T'Kaye is only listed as Dragora, and Cristian Motriuc is listed in both movies as "Dr Schmott", who only appears in one scene in the first movie)
    • Mary-Margaret somehow only uses up three Mirror Berries, despite a minimum of six trips made through the mirror (Bella and Donna twice, the sculpture and Mary-Margaret herself). Later on, Mirror Minder Tansy says that each berry is only good for one trip.
    • Bella and Donna go through the mirror both ways (The dinner scene comes after the first time the portal opens, and they later appear in the Mirror World), and Mary-Margaret just doesn't seem to notice.
    • Mary-Margaret has a magic disappearing ponytail in the second movie.
    • Check out the cocktail glass too--it magically empties as Swanson fills it.
  • Pre-Ass-Kicking One-Liner:

Sylvia, standing behind a primed and ready Doppelgänger: Mary-Margaret, DUCK!
Queen Dragora: Duck?
Sylvia: Roast duck.