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 University Press of Kansas's "Kansas Centennial Edition", illustrated by Michael McCurdy with black-and-white illustrations, and Robert Sabuda's pop-up book. Baum wrote "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" without any thought of a sequel. After reading the novel, thousands of children wrote letters to him, requesting that he craft another story about Oz. In 1904, he wrote and published the first sequel, "The Marvelous Land of Oz", explaining that he grudgingly wrote the sequel to address the popular demand. Baum also wrote sequels in 1907, 1908, and 1909. In his 1911 "The Emerald City of Oz", he wrote that he could not