If you surf the web long enough, things you’ve forgotten about will come up eventually. I remember back in the 60’s This stuff playing during “Cartoon Carnival”. It was just strange as hell, and even when I was a kid I knew it was bizarre.
Enjoy.
Ah, yes. I remember watching these on TV as a kid. They ran them on kid’s shows.
It’s early work by the folks at Rankin-Bass. Three years later they took the same voice actors but completely redrew the cartoons images and made the TV film Return to Oz
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057453/
(Larry D. Mann, who did the voice of “Rusty the Tin Man” was a character actor in a lot of TV shows. He later played the Conductor in The Sting)
Alfie Scopp ("Socrates, the Scarecrow) played other characters in Rankin-Bass specials, including the Charlie In The Box in Rudolph the Red-Nosed REindeer.
Carl Banas (“Dandy Lion, the Cowardly Lion”) was the Head Elf AND the Spotted Elephant in Rudolph.
Lots of the voice actors on that show are familiar from other shows in Canada.
Bernard “Bunny” Cowan was famous as the announcer on Front Page Challenge and Wayne & Shuster.
Paul Kligman (the cowardly lion) is instantly recognizable as J. Jonah Jameson from the 60’s Spider-Man cartoon, but he was also part of Wayne & Shuster’s company of actors.
Larry D. Mann (who died recently; there was a thread here at the time) was famous for a series of commercials for the phone company. “We make grapple-grommets?” “23,000 a day!” “Awesome!”
All that aside, I found it irritating how often they’d repeat the theme song. It was definitely way, way down on my list of cartoons to watch.