Then, in 1980, The Wizard of Oz was released simultaneously on Betamax and VHS, the two rival home-video formats.
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“ The Wizard of Oz was just the tiny little crack in the dam,” says Maltin, whose TV movie guides from 1969 to 2014 were a standard reference work.
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In 1961, partly in response to the success of Oz, NBC Saturday Night at the Movies became the first weekly prime-time TV series to showcase big, recently released feature films. Meanwhile, Oz jump-started the whole idea of movies as prime-time TV fare. For its first nine showings, it captured an astounding 49 percent or higher of the viewing audience. CBS, then NBC, then CBS again, took turns as the host network for lengthy stints. “Television - any television - looks awfully ordinary after The Wizard of Oz, ” gushed media critic John Crosby of the New York Herald Tribune.įrom 1959 to 1991, it was broadcast annually - usually in January or February - almost without interruption (there was, unaccountably, no broadcast in 1963). It wasn’t, however, until 1959 that CBS repeated the experiment.
“It was tops in entertainment, and the network should make provisions for making an annual out of it.” The first screening was a ratings smash: 13 million sets, 45 million people, 53 percent of TV viewers that night were turned to Oz. “It defies both time and the diminution to the home screen,” Variety wrote. Those kids would have been 10 years old when The Wizard of Oz made its TV debut. New births, averaging around 2.5 million a year in the 1930s, had risen to 3.47 million in 1946, the first year of the baby boom. The other key component of TV’s Oz breakthrough: the sheer numbers of kids back then. “There are other great musicals, other great fantasies. "It’s absolutely one-of-a-kind,” Maltin says.
It was the yearly TV showings, starting in 1956, that turned it into the iconic thing it is today. And The Wizard of Oz had not been a smash hit when first released to theaters in 1939, though it was successful enough to help turn Judy Garland into a star. Movies - other than the most dismal low-budget Westerns and “B” pictures - were not typical TV fare back then. CBS paid $225,000 to MGM for the rights, with an option to rebroadcast. In any event, that original Wizard of Oz broadcast - part of the network’s Ford Star Jubilee anthology series - drafted Bert Lahr, the film’s Cowardly Lion, as the first of the film’s many hosts, with an assist from Judy Garland’s then-10-year-old daughter, Liza Minnelli. Another is that CBS was trying to answer the success of the live-broadcast NBC musical Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin, with a kid-friendly special of its own. One is that CBS had first negotiated with MGM for the rights to broadcast Gone With the Wind MGM balked and offered The Wizard of Oz instead. How did The Wizard of Oz make its momentous leap to television? There are several stories. “The program has become a modern institution and a red letter day in the calendar of childhood,” remarked Time magazine in 1965. Some of us never saw The Wizard of Oz in color until we were well into our teens.īy the mid-1960s, The Wizard of Oz had become for kids what the newly minted Super Bowl was to their parents. For those of us who had only black and white sets - the majority, until the late 1960s - it was a mystifying remark. He would remind us not to be afraid of the wicked witch and caution that there was “nothing wrong with your TV sets” - the first part of the movie was supposed to be in black and white. Generally a kid-friendly “host” - Danny Kaye, or Dick Van Dyke - would introduce the movie against an elaborate backdrop featuring a yellow brick road slaloming into the distance. On the big day itself - usually a Sunday night - all plans had to end abruptly at sundown, as we hurried home to prepare for The Big Event. For weeks in advance, TV commercials heralded the arrival of Dorothy, The Scarecrow, The Tin Man, The Cowardly Lion.
3, 1956 - was a day to anticipate, dream about, count down to. In those days before DVDs and downloads, that single yearly presentation - starting on Nov. … I was certainly there, planted firmly in my seat to take it in like everybody else.” “Families looked forward to this with keen anticipation. “This was the ultimate appointment-television for decades,” says film critic Leonard Maltin. Those too young will hardly believe what a big deal it was, once upon a time, when The Wizard of Oz came on the air for its annual network showing. One that, for baby-boom kids, rivaled birthday and Christmas as the most eagerly awaited day of the year. Sixty years ago Thursday, a new American holiday was born. Watch Video: Dorothy's ruby red slippers need your help
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