Here's a goodie that Ron Kurer over at ToonTracker found and stuck up on YouTube. It's footage from Off to See the Wizard, a prime-time anthology program for kids that was on ABC from September 9, 1967 until September 20, 1968. It was supposed to do for the MGM film library what the Sunday night Disney show had done for Disney Studios…and it might have, had anyone ever watched it. Ratings were lower than low…and just on an anecdotal basis, I can't recall ever hearing one person I knew say they'd tuned in, nor have I heard even animation buffs or Chuck Jones scholars mention it since it went off.
Jones supervised the production of little cartoon segments that starred animated versions of the main Wizard of Oz characters. They acted as hosts for an awkward array of chopped-up MGM movies (usually cut in two parts and aired over two weeks), unsold pilots and nature films. The first two weeks, for instance, they ran the feature film, Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion. Later on, they ran the two Flipper movies and Lili and a lot of stuff that ABC or MGM had sitting on the shelf. It's not hard to see why it didn't attract an audience.
The clip offers three and a half minutes of animation that the MGM cartoon studio cooked up, including the show's opening and a truncated version of the closing. June Foray provided the voices of Dorothy and of the Wicked Witch, who doesn't appear in this excerpt. Daws Butler did the Wizard, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, with Mel Blanc as the Cowardly Lion. Daws told me once that the MGM lawyers didn't want him to voice the lion because of the lawsuit Bert Lahr had either filed or threatened (Daws wasn't sure which) over the Cocoa Krispies commercials in which Snagglepuss (another lion, voiced by Daws) had sounded a little like Bert Lahr. I told Daws that didn't sound logical. He could have done a voice utterly unlike Lahr…who had died the year before, anyway. Daws shook his head and replied, "Lawyers do a lot of weird things."
This clip ends abruptly in the middle of the end credits but it's the only footage I've seen from this show since '68. And most people didn't even see it then, so it'll probably be new to you…