For years, Walt Disney dreamed of adapting L. Frank Baum’s Oz books for the movies. In the thirties, he negotiated with Baum’s widow Maud for the rights to make an animated Oz film, but lost out to a rival bidder (whose project never got off the ground).
In the early 1950s, Disney decided to adapt the Oz books for his Disneyland TV series, making each book into a two-part specials. He took the precaution of buying the rights to all 13 Baum books, to prevent anyone putting out a competing adaptation
The script
Screenwriter Dorothy Cooper wrote a script outline for Dorothy Returns to Oz, then a finished script for Rainbow Road to Oz, based on Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz. Patchwork Girl—which Baum had adapted for the screen in 1914—tells how the animated rag doll Scraps helps a young orphan lift the spell that turned his beloved uncle to stone.
Disney decided Rainbow Road would cost too much for a Disneyland special and chose to make a big-screen musical instead, probably starring the Mouseketeers of Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club.
Disneyland
A master of marketing, Disney devoted part of the Disneyland 1957 anniverary special to promoting Rainbow Road to Oz. The Baum Bugle (the International Wizard of Oz Club magazine) says that at the opening of the segment, the Mouseketeers give Disney a book called Rainbow Road to Oz, then suggest he cast them in a movie adaptation.
To sell Walt on the idea, Bobby Van, Doodles Weaver and Gloria Wood perform the number “Patches,” in which the Scarecrow picks patches of cloth from a tree to repair Scraps’ dress. Then the Mouseketeers perform a scene in which the Cowardly Lion, now the king of Oz, has been turned by magic into a cruel, conceited tyrant. His friends try to break the spell by convincing him to dance the”Oz-Kan Hop.”
Disney agrees to make the movie and the Mouseketeers tell him he can now have some cake—which leads to a big song and dance number around a giant birthday cake.
Goodbye yellow brick road
After all that fuss, the studio dropped plans for the movie shortly afterwards. No-one knows why: The budget may have been too high; the studio may have worried the Mouseketeeers couldn’t support a big-screen film; or it may have been that with the MGM Wizard of Oz beginning its long run on TV, Disney may have worried a new film couldn’t compete.
Songs of the Rainbow Road
Two of the songs from Rainbow Road showed up on Disney’s book-and-LP set of 1969, The Cowardly Lion of Oz (which has no relation to Ruth Plumly Thompson’s book of the same name).
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