Release Year: 1939

Genre: Family, Fantasy, Musical

Director: Victor Fleming

Writers: Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, Edgar Allan Woolf; L. Frank Baum (novel)

Stars: Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr

If for some reason you haven't seen this film yet, we're glad you managed to escape the rock you've been trapped under.

The Wizard of Oz—the story of a young girl from Kansas who finds herself in a magical land of Technicolor saturation—has arguably become the most popular movie of all time, as well as an integral part of cinema history and the basis for pop culture references too numerous to count. The songs have become legend ("Over the Rainbow" won an Oscar), the story has served as the inspiration for countless fantasy and adventure films, and elementary school plays the world over would have a lot more empty space on their schedules without this puppy.

And yet at the time of its release, few people considered it a classic. It took a trip almost as long and unbelievable as Dorothy Gale's to arrive at its current status.

Its production chewed everyone's faces off: grinding through writers, directors, and on-set accidents like a blender set to "gooify." One actor had to leave because the make-up was literally killing him. Another suffered an effects-based mishap that left burns on her body. It ran over schedule, over budget, and over the nerves of MGM's executives, who probably had kittens watching the production spiral out of control.

That trend didn't look to end once it hit theaters. 

Though the critics dug it, the movie itself had a fair-to-middling run when first released in 1939: making its money back but not exactly setting the box office on fire. And it came out in a year that many consider the greatest in all of cinema: competing with the likes of Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Dark Victory, Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Rules of the Game, Wuthering Heights, Of Mice and Men, The Roaring Twenties, and a little number called Gone with the Wind.

It's easy to lose track of a little girl from Kansas in the middle of all of that.

Instead, the movie really earned its place in our hearts through the magic of another medium: television. On November 3, 1956, CBS ran it as a part of its Ford Star Jubilee anthology show. They were so excited about the prospect that they added another half-hour to the show's normal ninety-minute running time. It ran again in 1959, and almost every year after that until the late 1990s.

"So why was that a big deal?" you ask. "Couldn't people just rent it?" 

Nope.

VCRs (those primitive videotape machines your grandparents had to use) didn't come along until the 1980s, and the movie itself wasn't released on any kind of home video before then. That's twenty-plus years where you couldn't see it in any form unless your butt was in front of the TV on the slated dates. A lot of families—and we mean a lot—made an annual tradition of keeping said butts in close proximity to said TVs.

These days, of course, you can pick up any one of a dozen Blu-ray copies, as well as watch countless cable airings, videos on demand, and even the occasional return to theaters like it had in 2013 to celebrate its 75th anniversary. (We know, we know: it was only 74 years if you count. But there's no sense arguing facts with Hollywood.) But regardless of how you saw it first, we're guessing you've seen it enough times to commit most of it to memory by now.

And there's a reason for that. 

MGM produced a lot of musicals in the 1930s—it was kind of their thing—and this was just one of many. It was made as part of an established production process and it didn't have any innovative filmmaking techniques. While the songs were catchy, they were just part of a glut of show tunes crowding the theaters at the time. So there was something else within it all: some weird little X factor that wouldn't have existed without the right cast and the right material coming together in just the right way. Judy Garland became forever identified with Dorothy, the girl in the gingham dress, clutching her beloved Toto and following the Yellow Brick Road.

We're hoping that this little guide will show you how that magic works.

We could fill this whole treatise on reasons to study this movie. Besides being one of the most popular, most enduring, most beloved films in history, it serves as a great example of how movies got made in the 1930s, a reflection of people's hopes and dreams during the turbulence of the Great Depression. Not to mention a one-stop-shopping location for lounge singers in search of something catchy to cover.

But the biggest reason probably has something to do with the way it's held up so well. The Wizard of Oz is a textbook example of The Hero's Journey: the one-myth-fits-all storyline first developed by author Joseph Campbell. We'd seen its tropes in movies before this one, but none of them rendered quite as well. It's the perfect embodiment of the Journey. A little girl dreams of other places, only to travel to a magical land in order to discover her true potential and engage in a little freelance de-witching on the side. Who could ask for more? Every girl wanted a pair of those ruby slippers.

Its TV airings in the 50s and 60s inspired filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to deliver their own takes on the Hero's Journey… and in turn for other filmmakers to take their cues from them. (You can catch a few references to Oz in their stories, like Obi-Wan's cloak steaming like the Wicked Witch's in Star Wars, or E.T. who has his own catch phrase about going home.)

Today, The Hero's Journey appears in everything from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games to those superhero films all the kids are into these days. The Wizard of Oz laid out the blueprint for everyone to see, and without it, our pop culture landscape wouldn't be the Campbellian wonderland that it became. Let's face it: we're nuts about the guy, and if we're talking movies, The Wizard of Oz was the one that kicked it all off. That makes for a heck of a legacy, and as long as movies exist, we'll always see a little bit of Dorothy creeping into their DNA.