Movie reviews : Thoughts on The Wizard of Oz at 70

Wizard of Oz

It’s impossible to watch The Wizard of Oz today without feeling, within minutes, some kind of mystical connection to people you will never know. When Judy Garland sings Over the Rainbow, there’s the sense of participating, just by watching, in some beautiful shared human experience. Yet, when it was released in 1939, the film’s ultimate status as a timeless piece of Americana was hardly assured. The reviews were mixed-to-friendly, but not rapturous, and the box office was disappointing.

Television is what turned The Wizard of Oz from an interesting old movie into something like a secular sacrament. Fifty-three years ago this week, on Nov. 3, 1956, it debuted on national television, and starting in 1959, the movie was shown annually, in prime time, mostly the Sunday before Thanksgiving. If you were a child in the 1960s — and there are a whole bunch of us — you saw The Wizard of Oz on a black-and-white TV every year. You were scared of the Wicked Witch of the West and the Flying Monkeys, and you were astonished when adults told you that, in fact, the Oz portions were shot in color.

Today, in the days of home video, a child can watch The Wizard of Oz around the clock on a five-foot plasma screen. Yet it was scarcity that gave that earlier experience its value: You knew this was your only chance to see the movie for an entire year (and when you’re 5 years old, a year is an eternity). And you knew — and this was a big part of the excitement — that other people were watching it, too. You could feel it.

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