All Deserts Have Cacti: The Deadly Desert has cacti, at least to begin with.
Agitated Item Stomping: At one point, when the Nome King's chancellor loses his temper, he throws his own hat on the ground and stomps on it.Woggle-Bug and the Hungry Tiger, do not appear in this version. Adapted Out: Some characters, like H.M.Not having the magic to actually do the job himself lead him to entrust Ozma to Mombi. This vision shows a dying Pastoria entrusting the newly arrived Wizard with the task of protecting Ozma from the wicked witches. Adaptational Heroism: The circumstances of the Wizard taking over the throne are shown in flashback when Ozma and Dorothy discover a hidden chamber within the palace.In this adaptation, Glinda explains that when she approved of the Scarecrow becoming King she thought the royal family had died out, and only since then had learned that the rightful heir had been hidden away but was still alive. The sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz, introduces the idea that there was a royal family who ruled the Emerald City before the Wizard took over, and when the Scarecrow is deposed by General Jinjur's army, Glinda refuses to help restore him to the throne because he has no more right to it than Jinjur has - even though she approved of him taking the throne at the end of the previous book. Adaptational Explanation: In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Scarecrow becomes King of the Emerald City after the Wizard departs.Here, it takes a few episodes and includes several things that weren't in the book, like an Antlion Monster, a Saharan Shipwreck, a collapsing deserted city, giant Rock Monsters, and a river of lava. The trip to the Nome Kingdom is brief in the book, with only the mechanical giant with the hammer to deal with.One episode of the first story arc involves Tip and Mombi from The Marvelous Land of Oz, setting up their importance in the second arc.Several incidents that are only briefly described in the book are depicted in more detail, such as the Winkie army's attempt to capture Dorothy and her friends, which is about ten minutes of the anime and three sentences in the book.There's nearly an episode of extra Kansas material at the beginning, so that Dorothy's meeting with the Good Witch of the North comes at the end of the first episode.Her entire design is also completely different. Ozma is a strawberry blonde in the books but has light brown hair in the anime.The redheaded Glinda from the book inexplicably has light blue hair.Adaptation Distillation: The quest to rescue the Prince of Ev from the Nome King - in the book, it's nearly the entire royal family that needs rescuing (and the rescue party has more people in it, too).Including several blatantly anachronistic objects floating around in the tornado, presumably because they had the models on hand. 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: CGI is used liberally in the Cinar title sequence.(Note: Unless otherwise specified, examples involving dialogue and background music are taken from the Cinar version.) Akira Miyazaki, a writer for this show, also wrote for the film. Not to be confused with the 1982 Japanese animated film adaptation The Wizard of Oz.
They committed to releasing the English dubbed version of the series on DVD to go along with existing movie-length releases, and they also uploaded the first three episodes in subtitled Japanese on their Youtube channel to gauge interest. In 2017, the series was licensed by Discotek Media. Canadian pop band Parachute Club also performed new theme songs for the English language release. Cinar also re-edited each of the four story arcs into movie-length versions for home video release. In addition to rewriting and re-dubbing all the dialogue, (with narration performed by Margot Kidder) The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has new titles and credits, which contrive to disguise the fact that it's not a native English-language product (none of the Japanese cast or crew are credited in the Cinar version essentially the only thing the English version has in common with the Japanese is the animation itself). The English-language adaptation was produced in Montreal by Cinar and aired on HBO in the United States.