DVC: Korkis Korner

Walt and The Wizard of Oz

While watching Kermit the Frog as the Scarecrow, Fozzie Bear as the Cowardly Lion and the Great Gonzo as the "Tin Thing" on ABC's "Wonderful World of Disney" presentation of The Muppets Wizard of Oz, I was reminded of the many efforts to bring the land of Oz to the world of Disney.

As far back as 1937, a few years before MGM Studios began production on their film The Wizard of Oz, Walt Disney, who was just finishing work on his first animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, started looking for possible material for future projects and inquired about the copyright status of the L. Frank Baum's stories about the land of Oz.

For a variety of reasons, Walt didn't pursue the project at that time. However, on November 16, 1954, he did purchase the rights to 11 Baum Oz books from Baum's son. Then, in 1956, Walt acquired the rights to Dorothy and The Wizard of Oz from Lippert Pictures at a cost that nearly equaled the cost of the other 11 titles combined.

Walt hired Dorothy Cooper to write a rough draft titled "Dorothy Returns to Oz" with the intention that elements from the books might be used as a two-part episode for the "Disneyland" television series. Walt also intended to use some of the performers from "The Mickey Mouse Club" television series as the stars.

As Walt's team continued to add new ideas, it became apparent that the project would be too expensive to recover costs as just a television show. So, on July 24, 1957, Walt announced that he was starting production on a multi-million-dollar, live-action musical film to be titled The Rainbow Road To Oz.

Bill Walsh would produce (as he later produced Mary Poppins) and write a new version of the script, while Sid Miller would direct and write some original songs with Buddy Baker and Tom Adair. Walsh and Miller had worked on "The Mickey Mouse Club" show, and it remained Walt's intention to cast Mousketeers Annette Funicello, Darlene Gillespie, Bobby Burgess, Tommy Kirk, Kevin Corcoran and Tim Considine to play key roles in the finished film.

To generate awareness, Walt decided to shoot three short possible sequences from the film that he could broadcast through the "Disneyland" television series on Sept. 11, 1957. At a cost of $6,000, Walt built three sets to showcase: the first meeting of the Patchwork Girl (Doreen Tracy) with the Scarecrow (Burgess), the attempt by Dorothy (Gillespie) and Ozma (Funicello) to break the spell on the Cowardly Lion with a new dance called "The Oz-Kan Hop," and a final production number in which all of the characters sing and dance around a huge birthday cake.

Eventually, however, Walt feared that the Oz titles not owned by the Walt Disney Studios might result in some other studio producing a low-budget film before the Disney epic was finished. Walt also was troubled by the project's continued rise in costs, and by the lackluster box-office performance of a recent film featuring some of the Mousekeeters. In addition, he wasn't completely satisfied with the script and knew that it would have to be outstanding to compete with the popularity of the earlier MGM film.

Walt shelved plans for the film in 1958, but clever Disney historians know that the Walt Disney Music Company released a record entitled "The Cowardly Lion of Oz" (Disneyland Records ST-3956) that features two songs written by Adair and Baker for the unmade film: "The Ozphabet" and "The Pup-Pup-Puppet Polka."

Even though Walt never made the film, he did consider creating an Oz attraction for Disneyland® Park. In 1959, Walt Disney Imagineers began working on ideas for an addition to the Storybook Land attraction. Guests' boats would enter the Big Rock Candy Mountain and find themselves in the land of Oz just in time for a birthday party for Dorothy. Like the film, however, this ambitious project was eventually shelved.

Finally, in 1985, The Walt Disney Company produced Return to Oz, a live-action film that utilized elements from Baum's Ozma of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz. In the film, Dorothy returns to Oz to find her old friends in trouble. She has to defeat Princess Mombi and the Gnome King with the help of new friends like Tik-Tok and Jack Pumpkinhead.

Years later, the Disney-Oz connection continued with The Great Movie Ride at the Disney-MGM Studios, which features a Wizard of Oz scene that includes an uncanny likeness of the Wicked Witch of the West, as portrayed by Margaret Hamilton, threatening the land of Oz. The witch is one of the most sophisticated "human" Audio-Animatronics® figures Walt Disney Imagineering has ever created. Interested in more Disney-Oz stories? Perhaps another time!