The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1986 TV series) The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1986 TV series) The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, known in Japan as , is a Japanese anime television series adaptation based on four of the original Oz books by L. Frank Baum. In Japan, the series aired on TV Tokyo from 1986 to 1987. It consists of 52 episodes, which explain other parts of the Oz stories, including the events that happened after Dorothy returned home. In 1987, HBO purchased the rights to the series and dubbed it into English. Production for the English version was done by the Canadian studio Cookie Jar Group (known
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1986 TV series) and has been dubbed in English, Spanish, Italian and numerous other languages. Aside from having the same source material, this TV series bears no relation to the 1982 anime film directed by Fumihiko Takayama and produced by Yoshimitsu Banno for Toho, though both works share the same title in Japanese. However, since the 1982 film was not released in Japan until 1986—the same year in which the TV series was first broadcast—the two productions are often confused. "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" is split into four distinct parts, or story arcs, each loosely based on different Oz books originally written