
Unlike several of the other Oz telecasts, apparently no stills were taken during the hosting sequences in 1956.

Lorna Luft, Minnelli's half-sister, did not appear as she was only four years old at the time, although she did have her picture taken with Minnelli in a promotional photo.

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The 1956 television debut of the film marked the only time any actor who had appeared in the movie was selected to host the broadcast: Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion (and his Kansas farmhand counterpart Zeke) in the film, appeared alongside the daughter of Judy Garland, a then 10 year-old Liza Minnelli, and young Oz expert Justin G. The main reason that CBS arranged for a host for the film was that at 101-minutes, the film was not considered long enough to run in the allotted 120-minute slot at that time, even with commercial breaks, without additional content to pad the entire telecast out to two hours.

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As part of this trend, CBS bought the rights from MGM to telecast The Wizard of Oz.įor the first TV broadcast of The Wizard of Oz, the normally 90-minute Ford Star Jubilee was expanded to a full two hours to accommodate the entire film, which, in addition to having commercial breaks, was celebrity hosted. Its enormous success on television ushered in a temporary "fad" of mostly live family-oriented specials based on fantasy tales, such as Aladdin (1958), Alice in Wonderland (1955) (a live-action version), Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella (1957), The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1957), and Pinocchio (1957, no relation to the Disney film). Peter Pan had first been shown live on TV by NBC in 1955, and been repeated (again live) by public demand in 1956. This 1956 broadcast was shown as CBS's response to the successful color telecast of the Broadway musical Peter Pan with Mary Martin, which had been re-staged especially for TV at NBC Studios as part of the anthology series Producers' Showcase. The network paid MGM $225,000 for the rights to televise the film and committed to showing it again for the same price with an option to re-broadcast if the telecast was a success. The original asking price of $250,000 was negotiated by MGM attorney, later company president, Frank Rosenfelt. The first telecast took place on Saturday, Novemas part of the final program in the soon-to-be-canceled CBS anthology series Ford Star Jubilee – a rotating potpourri of highly budgeted but low-rated specials, including a well-publicized debut hour hosted by Judy Garland. The Wizard of Oz, which had been a critical but only modest financial success during its theatrical run, was chosen to be the first Hollywood film to be shown uncut in prime time on a coast to coast television network.

It has never been licensed to any local affiliate broadcast TV station. Since that telecast, it has been shown respectively by CBS, NBC, The WB, and several of Ted Turner's national cable channels. The film was shown as the last installment of the CBS anthology series Ford Star Jubilee. It was first broadcast on television on Saturday, November 3, 1956. The Wizard of Oz, produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was first released in theatres on August 25, 1939, then re-released nationwide in 1949 and again in 1955.
