Sunday, July 25, 2021

Tales Of The Wizard Of Oz


As I grow older I have greater and greater fondness for this cartoon. It was all all the time with the New Adventures of Pinocchio on Canadian TV. We didn't have a whole lot of choice for daily cartoons back then. This one had great voices and a goofy sensibility that even a four year old could understand.

The series features stories derived from characters created in L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Several characters are given additional names, including Dandy the Cowardly Lion, Rusty the Tin Man, and Socrates the Scarecrow. In this adaptation, rather than being dropped by a tornado, Dorothy and Toto are blown in from Kansas through a hole cut out of the landscape. Each episode is a brief vignette about an adventure that the characters are involved in, often centring around the Wizard's attempts to fulfil the characters' wishes. This is the second animated series produced by the studio, and the first by Rankin/Bass to feature traditional animation.

1 comment:

Debra She Who Seeks said...

I must have watched every episode of this goddamn cartoon at least a thousand times when I was young. Got sick to death of it eventually.