Tales of the Wizard of Oz Tales of the Wizard of Oz Tales of the Wizard of Oz is a 1961 animated television series produced by Crawley Films for Videocraft (later known as Rankin/Bass Productions). This is the second animated series produced by the studio, and the first by Rankin/Bass to feature traditional animation. The series features stories derived from characters created in L. Frank Baum's book "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz". Several characters are given additional names, including Dandy the Cowardly Lion, Rusty the Tin Man, and Socrates the Scarecrow. Artistic renditions of the Oz characters created for this series were later featured in the
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz be Australia, or perhaps a magical land in the center of the great Australian desert. Another influence lay in Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". A September 1900 review in the "Grand Rapids Herald" called "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" a "veritable "Alice in Wonderland" brought up to the present day standard of juvenile literature". Baum found Carroll's plots incoherent, but he identified the books' source of popularity as Alice herself, a child with whom the child readers could identify; this influenced his choice of a protagonist. Baum was also influenced by Carroll's belief that children's books should have many