Richard Dumont

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, known in Japan as Oz no Mahōtsukai is an anime adaptation based on four of the original Oz books by L. Frank Baum. In Japan, the series aired on NHK then 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 first left Oz.

In 1987, HBO purchased the rights to the series and dubbed it into English. Production for the English version was done by the Canadian studio 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. This 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. Currently the English dub of series airs in the United States on the Cookie Jar Toons block on This TV.

The series has been aired in many countries outside Japan 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.