The Wizard Of Oz

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Starlight99

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This is going to sound like the dumbest question ever, but I might as well ask it. Does anyone here have a VHS of The Wizard Of Oz?
 
I do not, why VHS?
 
I have it as a .mp4
 
Watched it many times on vhs growing up, but I doubt i still have the tape but I can check.
 
Well, on the original VHS, there's rumored to be a scene you can't get anywhere else. When The Wizard Of Oz was first made, it was 121 minutes long, but due to the runtime and negative reaction, 20 minutes of scenes were cut. There's only one scene known to survive completely (an extended version of If I Only Had A Brain), and the songs only survive as soundtracks with stills. (All of these scenes can be found on multiple video releases and on YouTube.) The dialog scenes and one of the songs (an extended version of If I Were King Of The Forest) don't survive at all. However, when the film went to television in 1956, the print included one of these "lost scenes". After the Witch was melted, as Dorothy and her friends were about to go back to the Wizard with the Witch's broom, the guards stated that the Haunted Forest was too dangerous, and they proceeded to lead them through the forest, with a reprise of Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead playing. As the gates of the Emerald City opened, the entire city devolved into song and dance, celebrating the death of the Witch, and the guards and the residents of the Emerald City led the group with the broom into the Wizard's chambers, where he began to berate them some more (and that's where the not-missing part of the film begins again). My mother vividly remembers the scene, as do many other people alive in the 50s and 60s. However, the scene is officially lost, and the soundtrack, some pictures, and roughly a second of footage from the theatrical trailer are all that is known to survive. Even though there were 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm copies of The Wizard Of Oz sold throughout the 60s and 70s, the first releases on a video format came in 1980. The print used was a TV print of the movie, and since I have no way of locating a TV print or even figuring out what format the print is in, these tapes are the only chance that there is to find that scene. There's four copies from 1980: a VHS and Beta made for the executives of MGM, CBS, and MGM/CBS Home Video (in brown cases with gold letters; no pictures of these has surfaced, and it's unknown if these tapes still exist), and a VHS and Beta in silver cardboard cases that flip open with a black plastic tray inside. There's also a videodisc from 1981 that's relatively easy to find (they're basically records with a movie on them, in a giant plastic case, and the machines are really hard to find), and that's rumored to have the print, but I'm unsure as to when exactly they got a better quality print in (sometime between 1981 and 1983), but the 1983 Beta and VHS are said to have a better quality print, but that tape doesn't have this scene on it, and no later copies do. (I rented a 1985/1988 copy from my library (same tape, different boxes), and that doesn't have the scene. I also own multiple copies released from 1989 to 2005, and they only have the reconstruction of the scene, not the actual scene.) As for the one I'm looking for, there's only a few hundred copies of the tape known to exist, and it can go for a lot of money. I know that there's a lot of people on here that were around during the early days of home video, and I know that this is a very little-friendly movie, so I figured I should ask around here. I'll drop some pictures of the tape I need below (as well as the opening and closing), look around and see if you can find it. Thanks!

Opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR-ifeuNBfw
Closing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wCBApGHW5g
The Last One That Sold on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Wizard-Of-...229041?hash=item4425b27731:g:8eMAAOSw4M9be2pZ
 
Judging by your age, Kenna, unless you have older siblings or parents that were diehards, you probably don't have this copy. You most likely either had the 1989 VHS (the 50th Anniversary release in the blue box) or the 1996 VHS (the THX version in the plastic case).
 
I have one that has a booklet attached to it that has the history of the movie. XD It's the 50th anniversary, but I never thought it was a blue box, I thought it was silver. O_O

I know it has a bunch of stuff at the end of it, but I don't think it's the one you're looking for.

That link to eBay has a buy it now price of $10. It's not too expensive that you could just buy it and check it out.

(I honestly thought you were going to start going on about the 'munchkin suicide scene' and I was going to be all "IT'S A FRIGGIN BIRD, MAN." So glad this was something else.)
 
I've seen a lot of different things from way back then my mother was born in the 1950s, and my father was born in the late 1960s.

Watched a lot of black and white stuff with my mother when she was alive, and my grand father - and great grandmother. I even have the Wizard of Oz as a mp4 file now as well as I missed watching it as a child, so no it wasn't the 1996 version, actually didn't know a 1996 version existed.
 
judging by the obscurity of this one, you possibly have a better chance finding the sesame street lost episode with the wicked witch then this particular print unless there really was a released version with the extra scenes. I've seen that binder before, but not since probably the 80s
 
There are several movies that once made for TV, there were a number of scenes that got cut. There was a film made in the late '60s by Lindsey Anderson titled "If". There's a scene in the original movie where a young private school male gym teacher is in bed with his 13 year old male student.

But I bet few people know that there was an X rated version of "The Midnight Cowboy" which of course starred Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. When I was in college, my best friend and I went to the X rated version. In that version, there are these brief flashbacks involving Jon Voight's character when he was a senior in high school. About 5 other high school guys have him spread eagle over the fender of a pick up truck or car, I forget which, and are f**cking him in the ass, his pants down. You can be sure that scene never aired on TV.

Good luck on finding you VHS version of "The Wizard of Oz".
 
7. The link got screwed up, I think you have to keep hitting the SEE ORIGINAL POST link. The one in the white box with the red letters is very easy to get, and I plan on buying that soon, however, that's not the rare one. -_- As for the tape you have, that's the 1989 tape. Just don't drop it or the book will come out. I already made that mistake.
8. There isn't different versions of the movie, just different transfers. Nearly every release has a different transfer, and if you bought two different copies they'd look and sound completely different.
9. While I love and seek out lost episodes (with all of the Sesame Street/Henson episodes on my radar), lost movies and lost TV shows both had similar fates. When a TV episode was either deemed unprofitable for a rerun or too controversial to air a second time, the original tape it was recorded on was erased to use again, causing thousands of episodes of TV shows to be lost forever. The worst victim of that was arguably Doctor Who, and there are 97 episodes missing to this day, many of which contain major plot points. With movies, before there were special editions of movies (the first two were Citizen Kane and King Kong in 1984) or restored VHS/Beta tapes (the first one, while unofficial, was King Kong in 1978), there was no real reason to keep deleted scenes around, and the nitrate stock was usually melted down to recover the silver content. Greed (which had it's 8-hour runtime chopped to just over 2 hours), Metropolis (1927) (which had over half of the movie cut), The Phantom Of The Opera (1925) (where the studio destroyed the original negatives and the last surviving prints due to "lack of profitability"), Freaks (only 59 of the original 90 minutes of footage survives), King Kong (which lost 40 minutes overall), The Wizard Of Oz (which had 20 minutes cut), The Magnificent Ambersons (which had over an hour of footage cut), they were all notorious examples of footage being lost. In addition, Orson Welles had his films hijacked by the studios on most occasions, leaving mutilated messes in their place. And Stanley Kubrick cut somewhere in the range of three hours from his movies overall, including roughly 5 minutes from Dr. Strangelove, 22 minutes from 2001: A Space Odyssey, 42 minutes from A Clockwork Orange, 2 minutes from The Shining, and roughly 30 seconds from Full Metal Jacket, all of which has yet to see the light of day. However, it's not all bad, since some lost footage from these films has been recovered (including a scene from The Wizard Of Oz, a scene from Freaks, and complete cuts of The Phantom Of The Opera and Metropolis, all taken from the only known prints to exist), and there's a potential to find more in the next few years. It's rumored that an uncut print of The Wizard Of Oz is in the same Argentine museum where Metropolis was found, which would rock.
10. In the case of some movies that went to TV, scenes were actually added in. Cases I know of are Halloween, The Exorcist, Blazing Saddles, and The Wizard Of Oz. In the case of the more violent movies, they had to make up for the cuts in the film (which severely shortened the movie), so they had to add some deleted scenes in, or sometimes film new scenes to fill in the gaps in the story. For The Wizard Of Oz, they had this deleted scene on hand, and it was put in. However, when the movie started to become popular (as crazy as it sounds, The Wizard Of Oz wasn't that popular until the late 50s-early 60s), the annual airings (which eventually became more frequent) began to take on more esteem, and they eventually lined the film up with the theatrical version, which omitted this scene. The last possible stop for this TV print was this tape, but it's unclear exactly which TV print was used. As early as 1983, MGM/UA Home Video (created after MGM/CBS Home Video was reorganized) touted a VHS with better picture quality, and in 1985 a copy came out with improved sound. (CuddleWoozle, THAT'S the tape you saw when you clicked.) Since the picture and sound were upgraded, that means that the poor-quality TV print was officially out of commission. Now, onto the X-rated part. When the Hays code (which resulted in the butchering of tons of movies due to what was deemed offensive content) was retired, the MPAA instituted the first rating system, advertised as the GMRX system (pronounced "jim-rex" on the trailer). G was the same as G, M was the same as PG, R was R, and X was the same as NC-17, except the rule for X-rated movies was that no one under the age of 16 could get in. Back then, a rating of that caliber wasn't a deal breaker, and Midnight Cowboy went on to win the Best Picture Oscar, the only X-rated movie to do so. Other notable X-rated films are A Clockwork Orange, Fritz The Cat, and Cabaret. In 1976, the system was changed to G, GP (not a typo), and R. A later adjustment changed GP to PG, and the PG-13 rating was added in 1984. As for X-rated movies, their ratings were changed, usually to R or NC-17, but there's been at least one movie that got a PG rating. However, inspired by the high sex content in some X-rated movies, some porn studios began self-applying the X label on many of their movies, even when they were rated R or not rated at all. Officially, there hasn't been an X-rated movie in 42 years, but if you look around online, in a seedy book store, or in the back room of some more legit stores, you can find so-called X-rated movies very easily.

Here's the front of the box for the tape I want: The Wizard Of Oz 1980 VHS Front.jpg
Here's the tape: The Wizard Of Oz 1980 VHS Tape.jpg
 
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Ah! That would explain.

I think I have SEEN that one a few times, but not in a very very long time. (Like spotted at video rental places way back when and maybe at the library) But I never bothered with it because we already had a copy. :p

I know all about the crap they used to do. We had beta tapes that we worked with in high school. The tapes are expensive to keep buying and our assignment was to erase them with a high powered magnet. :p I just didn't know at the time that they used to do it constantly back in the sixties/seventies. (Apparently they didn't think there would be an interest. O_O)
 
The archiving of popular culture is a pretty recent thing. I would attribute it to the rise of the Internet and the drop in price of digital storage. Never before in history have we had the ability to conceivably save EVERYTHING. it used to be quite common for artists to paint over their own work to save on canvas. One of the reasons that old (like pre 19th century) books are so rare is that there was very little effort put in to preserving them.
 
Yep. They not only destroyed stuff for the sake of preserving storage space, but also because it wasn't deemed to be profitable. Take Erich von Stroheim's Greed, for example. The original version ran eight hours long, which was considered far too long to release. Eventually, the film was cut to just over two hours, and the cut footage was most likely destroyed. In the decades that followed, the uncut version of Greed (arguably the longest-running movie in history, seen by only about a dozen people besides Stroheim) was declared one of the greatest films of all time, if not THE greatest. And Metropolis was deemed unprofitable at it's 2-1/2 hour runtime, and the studios slaughtered the film. The movie became more profitable and even more esteemed as footage began being restored, and the profitability increased as the more notable restorations were released (arguably starting with the release of Giorgio Moroder's controversial restoration in 1984). Through a stroke of luck, two badly damaged copies of the uncut film were found (although they were complete cuts, and each print had to be used to supplement the other, two scenes were so badly damaged on both prints that they were deemed "damaged beyond repair"), and the so-called "complete" version of the film has been called one of the greatest films ever made. The melting/wiping did a lot more than save space and money, it destroyed art. There are tons of moments of history that could have very easily been destroyed by this process. To sit and weigh the effect a lost item caused would be wrong on many levels, since art doesn't run on a merit system. While hindsight is 20/20, you can't really blame them for their decisions, since they had no way of predicting the future. Studio heads can easily be blamed, but low men on the totem pole were only doing their job. For CuddleWoozle, considering that tapes were very expensive, it seemed at the time to be a good idea, and I'm sure it saved your school tons of money. However, there may be a day when your school looks back on their history and wonders where tons of classic moments are, and there's a chance they're gone forever. I'm trying to see if there's a way to un-wipe a tape, but that's probably impossible. All I can say is save what we have now.

And as for that tape that CuddleWoozle saw, there's two that look almost identical, with the one I want being one of them. The 1980 tape and the 1983 tape have almost the same package, with the exceptions being the words "AN MGM/CBS HOME VIDEO PRESENTATION"/"AN MGM/UA HOME VIDEO PRESENTATION", the logo in the top right corner (the 1968 "Leo Goes to Las Vegas" variant of the MGM logo on the 1980 box, and the MGM/UA Home Video logo on the 1983 box), the same logo and label name on the inside of the box, the logo on the top and side of the box, a different label (a horizontal label on the 1980 tape and a vertical label on the 1983 tape) and the logo on the back (the 1968 MGM logo on the 1980 tape and the MGM/UA Home Video logo on the 1983 box).

You weren't the only one who didn't bother with it. The first round of tapes cost $80, with the subsequent videodisc release costing somewhere between $30 and $40. The videodisc sold more than the tapes (which says a lot), and while it took until the third VHS/Beta release in 1985 for sales to truly take off, people either picked up a copy or taped it off or TV by then, effectively limiting this tape to only a few thousand copies sold. (By comparison, the initial VHS release of Pinocchio in 1985 sold a record-breaking 250,000 copies before being taken off the market in 1987 due to Disney's moratorium procedure.) With that initial tape of The Wizard Of Oz, it's estimated that somewhere between 100 and 500 copies exist, mostly on Beta, which really limits my ability to view them. Also, depending on the TV print used (despite the lack of color TVs, the movie was always shown in color), the scene I'm looking for may not be on there at all, which would plunge the scene into the "possibly lost forever" category. Even though completely lost movies have been found in the past, The Wizard Of Oz is highly unlikely, which is really sad to think of.
 
Starlight99 said:
For CuddleWoozle, considering that tapes were very expensive, it seemed at the time to be a good idea, and I'm sure it saved your school tons of money. However, there may be a day when your school looks back on their history and wonders where tons of classic moments are, and there's a chance they're gone forever.

They were 'practice' tapes. It was an actual video productions class, where we learned to operate cameras and such. We'd go out filming some pretty stupid things for practice on operating the cameras and equipment, and those were the tapes that got erased every year. Because it was 'garbage' footage even by our own standards. Who wants to save fifteen minutes of having the camera go in and out of focus on a tree with no purpose to it other than the person was TRYING to get footage of a bird and didn't know how to zoom in? XD

Important bits got stored, like our big interview with WWI/WWII/Korean War veterans. The Historical society made copies to put in their collection for posterity. Any important sports stuff got saved. But our practicing got dumped yearly because it made no sense to keep it (to anyone. I would still have erased my practice footage myself.). We made PSA's, too, for the waterways people, raising awareness of people dumping garbage into lakes and streams. And ended up actually having to CLEAN UP the site we were filming because it was full of garbage. So it was a double whammy! The trash got removed and they got a PSA film encouraging people to not dump in waterways. The weirdest things we pulled out were a smallish refrigerator and a microwave that had a nest of mice in it. :|
 
Damn. I don't think I've ever been that unlucky. I've gotten boxes of moldy/waterlogged tapes before, even tapes with stinkbugs in them, but mice have never come my way (yet). Well, at least not in terms of my movies they haven't. It's good to know your school's history survives, and I wish others could be that lucky. Every time I come across a home movie or a school movie in my collection (I have hundreds of recording tapes), it breaks my heart to know that there's someone missing these memories. Even though I found one family (only because their child acted as an emcee on the tape), that's just luck, and there's a good chance most of these videos won't make their way home.

On a lighter note, where can I watch your PSA? :)
 
Starlight99 said:
Damn. I don't think I've ever been that unlucky. I've gotten boxes of moldy/waterlogged tapes before, even tapes with stinkbugs in them, but mice have never come my way (yet). Well, at least not in terms of my movies they haven't. It's good to know your school's history survives, and I wish others could be that lucky. Every time I come across a home movie or a school movie in my collection (I have hundreds of recording tapes), it breaks my heart to know that there's someone missing these memories. Even though I found one family (only because their child acted as an emcee on the tape), that's just luck, and there's a good chance most of these videos won't make their way home.

On a lighter note, where can I watch your PSA? :)

I don't think you can. :p I checked and they didn't have a website until 2012 and we made it in 1999/2000. :p The school probably still has a copy somewhere, but I don't think anyone has bothered to go through and digitize them.

When my mom made home-videos of our school programs, she would announce at the beginning of it what it was. LOL Like "Lagonda School Christmas Pagent 1991", then she'd pan around and show all of the kids and say who they were. LOL She knew years later I would have forgotten half of them. But we still have all of her tapes. (Even though I have a lack of VCR to show them.)
 
Hmmmm....the school would have that one weird employee who kept the funny moments, I know because I am that weird person in many regards. (I turned a home movie of some family, a newspaper in the trash, and an ancient Disney tape into three very insane stories, so I know weird when I sense it.) As for your tapes at your mothers house, are we talking VHS, Beta, or another format?
 
the thrift stores some times have this .
every one check them out this member.
 
Wait...THIS COPY?
 
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