Television
The film was first shown on television on November 3, 1956, by CBS, as the last installment of the Ford Star Jubilee. 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. Encouraged by the response, CBS made it an annual Christmas tradition, showing it from 1959 through 1962 always on the second Sunday of December. Beginning in 1964, The Wizard of Oz was televised only once a year for nearly three decades. In 1998, the rights converted to Turner Entertainment (through Warner Bros. Television), and as of the early 2010s, the film is shown several times a year on or just before holidays.
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Famous quotes containing the word television:
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“In full view of his television audience, he preached a new religion—or a new form of Christianity—based on faith in financial miracles and in a Heaven here on earth with a water slide and luxury hotels. It was a religion of celebrity and showmanship and fun, which made a mockery of all puritanical standards and all canons of good taste. Its standard was excess, and its doctrines were tolerance and freedom from accountability.”
—New Yorker (April 23, 1990)
“The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.”
—Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)