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 own reward." After Baum's death in 1919, Baum's publishers delegated the creation of more sequels to Ruth Plumly Thompson who wrote 21. An original "Oz" book was published every Christmas between 1913 and 1942. By 1956, five million copies of the "Oz" books had been published in the English language, while hundreds of thousands had been published in eight foreign languages. "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" has been adapted to other media numerous times, most famously in "The Wizard of Oz", the 1939 film starring Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr. Until this version, the book had