Part of the appeal of “The Wizard of
Oz,” at least for those of us who are a certain age, is that it was
available to watch just once a year, sometime in the spring, I
believe, and like the Charlie Brown Christmas special and the annual
airing of “The Ten Commandments” at Easter, once the movie ended
that was it for another year. It was a situation one accepted with
some melancholy; there was nothing to be done about it, after all, at
that time. But it made you watch the movie. You wanted to fully absorb it, because it was going to be a long time before it came around again.
The annual viewings allowed more
attentive viewers the opportunity to anticipate when the first
commercial would come up (I remember it being just as the tornado was
about to arrive, and Prof. Marvel says of Dorothy, “Poor little
girl, I hope she gets home all right.”) and to wait with great anticipation for one's favorite lines and scenes.