Musical Selections in The Wizard of Oz - MGM Soundtrack Album

MGM Soundtrack Album

In 1956 - the year that the film was first shown on TV - MGM Records released their own authentic 40-minute LP soundtrack album from the film. This album featured not only most of the songs, but enough dialogue for listeners to be able to follow the story, almost exactly as heard on the movie soundtrack. There were a few minor edits in this 1956 edition, i.e., Aunt Em's two lines "Dorothy, please, we're trying to count!", and "Dorothy, Dorothy, we're busy!" were turned into the single line "Dorothy, Dorothy, we're busy! Please, we're trying to count!". The songs Optimistic Voices and The Merry Old Land of Oz, and the Tin Man's instrumental dance to If I Only Had a Heart were omitted from the LP release; also gone were half of the orchestral main title music, half of the Munchkinland medley, the entire Professor Marvel sequence, the moments during the tornado scene during which Dorothy sees people - including Miss Gulch - flying past her window, the talking apple trees scene, the appearance of the Witch on the roof of the Tin Man's cottage, the poppy field sequence, the moment when the Lion reads "Surrender Dorothy" in the sky, and the scene in the Haunted Forest in which the Tin Man is mysteriously lifted into the air. Also gone was the moment in which the Scarecrow says "They tore my legs off and they threw them over there", etc., and the Tin Man answers "Well, that's you all over", and the scene in which Dorothy's friends are scaling the cliff to get to the witch's castle, as well as many tiny bits from the film.

This soundtrack recording eventually supplanted the 1940 studio album. Throughout the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, it was constantly reprinted and re-released (each time with different cover art work), and the album eventually appeared in an expanded version on CD in 1989, released by CBS Records instead of MGM. The 1989 release also contained the original deleted film version of The Jitterbug, albeit without its full intro, as a bonus track. In 1998, to coincide with a digitally restored and remastered theatrical reissue, the album was reissued on Rhino Records as The Songs And Story Of The Wizard Of Oz. The album was edited from the reissues digital stereo soundtrack, created from surviving multiple recording stems, and as such was the first album to feature many of the songs in true stereo sound.

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