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Walt Disney’s Wizard of Oz
Having already written about the visionary author L. Frank Baum and many of the stage and screen adaptations of his works in our L. Frank Baum section, here’s one which fell through the cracks, because it…fell through the cracks.
It seems perfectly natural that Walt Disney would be obsessed with the world of L. Frank Baum’s books. Both men had a mission of creating American fairy tales. And Disney, like Baum, was all about fantasy. Reportedly, he hoped to make an animated version of Baum’s book as his follow up to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938) but MGM snatched up the rights and made their classic. Disney’s 1951 Alice in Wonderland and his many Oz themed phonograph LPs vaguely suggest what a Disney animated Oz movie might have been like.
In 1954 Disney acquired the rights to Baum’s remaining Oz books with the intention of developing them into one or more sequels. In 1956 The Wizard of Oz began being aired on television annually, and this suggested a new direction. He began developing the project as a live action production starring The Mouseketeers. The original idea was a two-part TV special, but it grew into a theatrical film. Designs, scripts, and songs were all worked up, and the film was cast with Annette Funicello as Princess Ozma, Darlene Gillespie as Dorothy, Doreen Tracey as the Patchwork Girl, Bobby Burgess as the Scarecrow, the adult Mouseketeer Jimmie Dodd as the Cowardly Lion, along with Tommy Kirk, Kevin Corcoran, and others. A special preview was presented on the 1957 season opener of Disney’s weekly TV show. It’s available to watch on Youtube! The photo above is from that presentation. But Disney was dissatisfied with the project and it died on the vine. I suspect that reaction to the preview was lacklustre. Matching the magic of the 1939 classic would be a high bar, and while the Mouseketeers were very popular, part of their appeal was that they were “ordinary”. Ya know? How you gonna match Bert Lahr and Billie Burke? So the film that took its place in the Disney pipeline was his 1961 remake of Babes in Toyland, which of course is very similar in many ways. It’s almost like a mash-up: an old Victor Herbert operetta associated with Laurel and Hardy, featuring Ray Bolger from The Wizard of Oz, Ed Wynn from Alice inWonderland, and several Mouseketeers. It deserves to be better known.
After Disney’s death, his studio did actually bring some Oz films to the screen: the dreary, leaden Return to Oz (1985) and the vomit-inducing Oz The Great and Powerful (2013), which we destroyed here.
We have over 50 posts in the L. Frank Baum/ Wizard of Oz section of Travalanche. Some notable ones you may care to peruse in connection with this post:
Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)
To learn more about vaudeville, please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, and for more on early film, please read Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube. And stay tuned for my next book Vaudeville in Your Living Room: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming November 2023.
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