Rainbow appears over Oconomowoc’s 85th anniversary of ‘Wizard of Oz’ premiere
The southeast Wisconsin city claims to have hosted the world premiere of ‘The Wizard of Oz’ in 1939.
In the classic Technicolor film “The Wizard of Oz,” the yellow brick road leads Dorothy to the Emerald City to meet the wizard. But in Wisconsin, the yellow brick road leads you to Oconomowoc.
The southeastern city hosted the movie’s world premiere back on Aug. 12, 1939, at the Strand Theatre. It has celebrated the film’s history every five years since 2009.
This year’s 85th anniversary celebration was postponed from August to Sept. 6 due to severe storms. While it briefly rained on the thousands of attendees on the rescheduled date, a rainbow appeared afterwards, a fitting banner for the celebration.
“I think it’s an iconic film that stood the test of time. We’re 85 years [in] and people are still following it, have interest in it,” said Bob Duffy, the economic development director for the city, which co-hosts the event with the nonprofit group Moonlit Movies.
Oconomowoc’s tie to “The Wizard of Oz” has always been a piece of the city’s history, Duffy said, but it wasn’t until 2009 that the community started embracing it. He said the city hoped celebrating the film’s 70th anniversary would boost tourism at a time when it was trying to revitalize its downtown.
Over the years, the city has added elements to its downtown for the celebration, including the construction in 2019 of a site called Oz Plaza, which has a permanent small-scale yellow brick road and statues of the four main characters — Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion — and Dorothy’s dog Toto, and a mural of Oz that was painted in 2021. This year the city unveiled two new character statues, one of Glinda the Good Witch of the North and one of the Munchkin coroner, the second to honor actor Meinhardt Raabe, who played the coroner in the movie and was from Farmington, about 11 miles west of Oconomowoc. Raabe died in 2010.
There has been some dispute over whether Oconomowoc was the first place to show the film. The film appears to have been shown in Kenosha and Appleton the day before, on Aug. 11.
When the city started holding the celebrations, Duffy said, they scanned the newspapers from August 1939 and saw an ad that promoted the world premiere in Oconomowoc. He said they believe Oconomowoc was the intended location for the film’s debut, even though other cities may have shown it earlier.
“We take ownership of this. We made tremendous investments in this to become a destination related to it. We can’t rewrite history; what we can do is say, Here’s the picture of the ad,” Duffy said.
Regardless, Wisconsin has deep ties to the film. Duffy said many believe the reason Oconomowoc was chosen as a premiere location is because of actor Raabe’s connection to the area, and because Herbert Stothart, who won an Academy award for writing the original musical score for the film, was from Milwaukee and owned a vacation home in Oconomowoc.
“Oconomowoc back in the 1930s, this was an area that was considered the Newport of the west. Very wealthy individuals [from] Chicago, St. Louis, would take the train up here and stay in the area all summer long,” Duffy said.
A celebration for generations
The Sept. 6 celebration transformed downtown Oconomowoc into Oz for an evening, with flying cow silhouettes decorating the windows of city hall and flying monkey wings set up as photo ops for visitors. The event included a petting zoo, pony rides and bounce houses for the kids, as well as food trucks, live music, and a costume contest.
The night ended as it always does, with a screening of the movie on a 50-foot screen at the end of Wisconsin Avenue, where people set up blankets and chairs beforehand to watch as a community.
While the event included a few hiccups this year — it occurred on the same evening as the NFL season’s first Green Bay Packers game, which was also broadcast outside during the event — officials said it was still an evening to remember.
“You saw generations. So you saw grandparents, little ones — I saw a little one who finally fell asleep in their chair — teenagers, twentysomethings, entire families together, every single demographic was represented well there, which is really part of the magic of it,” said Paige Brunclik, a marketing and communications specialist for the city.
She added, “I don’t know where you would find anything else like this where you shut down a very busy downtown corridor and set up something as unique as this.”
