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 (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