The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, known in Japan as Oz no Mahōtsukai (オズの魔法使い), is a Japanese anime television series adaptation based on four of the original Oz books by L. Frank Baum. In Japan, the series aired on TV Tokyo from 1986 to 1987. It consists of 52 episodes, which explain other parts of the Oz stories, including the events that happened after Dorothy returned home.

Dubbing History
In 1987, HBO purchased the rights to the series and dubbed it into English. Production for the English version was done by the Canadian company Cookie Jar Entertainment (known then as Cinar). Actress Margot Kidder was hired as narrator, and the Canadian band Parachute Club provided songs for the series, which aired as a mini-series. The English version attempted to completely occlude the show's Japanese origins, going so far as to remove all Japanese names and studios from the credits and to credit key aspects of the animation to Westerners, which applied primarily to the CGI opening sequence.

To give it a secondary market, episodes of the show were later re-edited into four films and released in the United States on VHS and Laserdisc (and later DVD), in which major plots and storylines are removed in favour of cutting each story-arc down into their retrospective book-canon story.

Additional Voices

 * Harvey Berger
 * Maria Bircher
 * Mark Denis
 * Carol Ann Francis
 * Gayle Garfinkle
 * Susan Glover
 * Arthur Grosser
 * Terrence Labrosse
 * Linda Lonn
 * Liz MacRae
 * Gordon Masten
 * Steve Michaels
 * Carla Napier
 * Linda O’Dwyer
 * Barbara Poggemiller
 * Rob Roy
 * Michael Rudder
 * Howard Ryshpan
 * Vlasta Vrána
 * Tim Webber
 * Jane Woods

Video Releases
* Also released on Standard Definition Blu-Ray.