The Night The Wizard of Oz Came Home: Oz on TV at 70
Before streaming, before cable, and before most families owned a VCR, there was one night a year when the whole country followed the yellow brick road together. That tradition began on November 3, 1956, when CBS aired The Wizard of Oz on television for the very first time. Seventy years later, it's hard to imagine the film's place in American culture without that broadcast.
From Modest Hit to Prime-Time Event
MGM first released The Wizard of Oz in theaters on August 25, 1939. Critics loved it, but its first theatrical run was only a modest financial success, and for years it was simply one admired film among many. Television changed all of that.
In 1956 CBS paid MGM $225,000 for the right to air the movie, with an option to show it again if audiences turned out. The network was answering NBC, which had scored big with its color broadcast of Peter Pan the year before. Oz aired as the final installment of the CBS anthology series Ford Star Jubilee, and it was shown uncut, a rarity for a Hollywood feature on network TV at the time.
A Cowardly Lion and a Very Young Host
The broadcast came with a wonderful bit of family history. Hosting duties went to Bert Lahr, the film's beloved Cowardly Lion, alongside 10-year-old Liza Minnelli, the daughter of Dorothy herself, Judy Garland. The show was a ratings smash, drawing a 53 percent share of the TV audience that night.
CBS broadcast the film in color, but in 1956 very few homes had color sets. Most viewers watched the whole thing in black and white, missing the famous moment when Dorothy steps out of her farmhouse into a Technicolor world. Catching that magical switch on a color set was a treat many viewers had to wait years for.
An Annual Tradition
The film returned to the airwaves in 1959 and became a yearly event in an earlier evening time slot. Over the years a parade of stars introduced it, including Dick Van Dyke, Richard Boone and Angela Lansbury. The film also spent a stretch on NBC.
By 1999 Oz had moved to Ted Turner's cable networks, which had acquired the old MGM library, and the once-a-year special became a movie you could catch many times each season. Home video, and later DVD and Blu-ray, put it on shelves everywhere.
Still, for generations of fans, The Wizard of Oz will always mean gathering around the living room TV for one special night. That 1956 broadcast turned a well-loved film into a shared national ritual, and it proved that television could give a classic movie a second life bigger than its first.
Did your family have a Wizard of Oz night when you were growing up? Tell us in the comments whether you first saw it on TV, in a theater or on home video, and which character scared you most.