After creating the New Adventures of Pinocchio cartoons, the Rankin-Bass company—best known for stop-motion specials such as Santa Claus is Coming to Town—followed up with Tales of the Wizard of Oz in the early sixties.
130 five-minute episodes (and a 1964 special, Return To Oz) told the adventures of tough-minded Dorothy, dimwitted Socrates, heartless Rusty and timid Dandy (Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Lion, respectively) as they thwarted the Wicked Witch with the help of the goofball Wizard.
Like Pinocchio, the syndicated series was created to fit a standard kid-show format of the day in which a local host and some children would watch cartoons along with the at-home audience, then push the sponsor’s products during breaks.
Rankin-Bass modeled the look of Tales on the minimalist UPA cartoons of the 1950s, a style that was fresh at the time but now looks crude. They’re also filled with dated references (beatniks, the space program, the draft) and the show is really, really bizarre so it’s no wonder it’s faded into obscurity.
Missed opportunities
Several other 1960s Oz series were proposed, but never came to pass: MGM wanted Judy Garland to voice Dorothy for a cartoon adaptation and Hanna-Barbera and Depatie-Freeling both thought of doing an Oz series. Hanna-Barbera tried again in the eighties, even buying the animation rights to the books, but nothing came of it then either.
Off To See the Wizard
The opening to this 1967 ABC series had Dorothy and Toto sliding down a rainbow to rejoin their friends in Oz and watch one of the family-friendly movies the series showcased. Legendary Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones handled the opening and closing sequences, but the series folded after a year.
Japan takes a shot.
1984 gave us a 52-episode Japanese/American production, the Wizard of Oz, which adapted The Wizard of Oz, Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz and Emerald City of Oz with varying degrees in faithfulness. It aired in the USA, then Japan, then Canada, then on HBO, and can now be found on video in the form of four 90-minute specials.
ABC tries again
In ABC’s 1990 Wizard of Oz series, the ruby slippers bring Dorothy back to Oz, where the winged monkeys have resurrected the Wicked Witch. The Witch has stolen the watch, diploma and medal from Dorothy’s friends, convincing them they’re once again heartless, stupid and cowardly and the Wizard has gone into hiding, forcing Dorothy & co. to find him while thwarting the Witch’s schemes.
This series had the look of the Judy Garland movie and tried to duplicate the voices, but it had none of the charm of the original.
Another series that never was
In 2000, a production company developed the syndicated pilot Lost in Oz, in which a group of Kansas residents are carried by tornado to Oz, which has fallen apart since the Wizard mysteriously disappeared. The pilot was probably never produced, but a variation on the idea surfaced in a WB 2002 pilot, Lost in Oz, which is out on DVD but never made it to series form. The pilot had a young, heroic woman transported to Oz where she finds herself fighting against the latest Wicked Witch.
