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 pictures and be pleasurable to read. Carroll rejected the Victorian-era ideology that children's books should be saturated with morals, instead believing that children should be allowed to be children. Building on Carroll's style of numerous images accompanying the text, Baum combined the conventional features of a fairy tale (witches and wizards) with the well-known things in his readers' lives (scarecrows and cornfields). "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" is considered the first American fairy tale because of its references to clear American locations such as Kansas and Omaha. Baum agreed with authors such as Carroll that fantasy literature was important for