The critics call the 1939 film directed by Victor Fleming "less a movie than an American rite of passage."
The three actors who played Dorothy's friends, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr, were all skilled vaudeville men.
Decades later, star Judy Garland's daughter Liza and the son of Tin Man actor Haley, who was named after his father, got married for a brief time.