The Wizard of Oz (1939 Film) - Television

Television

The film was first shown on television November 3, 1956 by CBS, as the last installment of the Ford Star Jubilee, making it, historically, the first uncut Hollywood film shown in one evening on a commercial television network. The Oz scenes were shown in color (posters still exist advertising the broadcast and they specifically say in color and black-and-white), but because most television sets then were not color sets, few members of the TV audience saw the film that way. An estimated 45 million people watched the broadcast. However, it was not rerun until three years later. On December 13, 1959, the film was shown (again on CBS) as a two-hour Christmas season special at an earlier time, to an even larger audience (commercial breaks were much shorter then, enabling the film to run in a two-hour time slot without being cut). Encouraged by the response, CBS decided to make it an annual Christmas tradition, showing it from 1959 through 1962 always on the second Sunday of December. The film was not shown on December 8, 1963, the second Sunday in December of that year, as might have been expected. This was perhaps due to the proximity of the John F. Kennedy assassination, which had occurred on November 22 of that year and plunged the U.S. into a period of mourning. Others say that there was no room on the schedule, because by then there were other Christmas specials on television, though not nearly as many as there would be in later years. A Charlie Brown Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and Frosty the Snowman, all first shown on CBS in the 1960s, were still more than two years away, NBC did not premiere Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer until December 1964, and telecasts of The Nutcracker were quite infrequent then.

Whatever the reason, the telecast was moved from December 1963 to the evening of January 26, 1964. The 1964 broadcast marked the end of the Christmas season showings, but The Wizard of Oz was nevertheless still televised only once a year for nearly three decades. Beginning in 1967, showing of the film was moved to February, and after that the date of the showings would constantly shift, rather than always occurring in the same month. That same year, the film was bought for annual TV showings by NBC, whose telecasts of it began in April 1968, but by 1976, it had reverted to CBS. CBS dropped its broadcasts of the film in 1998; the rights are now in the hands of Turner Entertainment (through Warner Bros. Television), and the film is now shown several times a year (rather than annually) on or just before several notable holidays (including Easter, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and/or Christmas). Turner Classic Movies cable channel, TNT and the TBS Superstation now often show the film during the same week "in rotation."

For the film's first nine telecasts, all on CBS, the film featured on-camera celebrity hosts, who provided commentary (often comic) and information about the making of the film. The hosts for these telecasts were a young Liza Minnelli, Bert Lahr, and Justin Schiller (Oz historian and the founder and first president of "The International Wizard Of Oz Club"), all hosting the first telecast, Red Skelton and his daughter Valentina, (the second telecast), Richard Boone and his son Peter (the third telecast), Dick Van Dyke and his children (the fourth and fifth telecasts), and Danny Kaye (the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth telecasts).