On November 6th, twenty-six years after “The Wizard of Oz” was last released and on the eve of its sixtieth anniversary, a spiffy, digitally remastered print of the film arrived in eighteen hundred movie theatres throughout the land. With a rub rub here and a rub rub there, “The Wizard of Oz,” which never looked bad, has been made to look even better. Dorothy’s ruby slippers are rubier. Emerald City is greener. Kansas, a rumpled and grainy black-and-white world, has been restored to a buff, sepia Midwestern blandness. And, since everything that rises nowadays in America ends up in a licensing agreement, new Oz merchandise will shower the planet like manna from hog heaven.

The last time I watched “The Wizard of Oz” from start to finish was in 1962, at home, with my family. My father, Bert Lahr, who played the Cowardly Lion, was sixty-seven. I was twenty-one; my sister, Jane, was nineteen. My mother, Mildred, who never disclosed her age, was permanently thirty-nine. By then, as a way of getting to know the friendly absence who answered to the name of Dad, I was writing a biography—it was published, in 1969, as “Notes on a Cowardly Lion”—and I used any occasion with him as field work. This was the first time we’d sat down together as a family to watch the film, but not the first time a Lahr had been secretly under surveillance while viewing it. The family album had infra-red photographs of Jane and me in the mid-forties—Jane in a pinafore, me in short pants—slumped in a darkened movie house as part of a row of well-dressed, bug-eyed kids. Jane, who was five, is scrunched in the back of her seat in a state of high anxiety about the witch’s monkey henchmen. I’m trying to be a laid-back big brother: my face shows nothing, but my hands are firmly clutching the armrests.

Recently, Jane told me that for weeks afterward she’d had nightmares about lions, but what had amazed her most then was the movie’s shift from black-and-white to Technicolor, not the fact that Dad was up onscreen in a lion’s suit. Once, around that time, while waiting up till dawn for my parents to return from a costume party, I heard laughter and then a thud in the hall; I tiptoed out to discover Dad dressed in a skirt and bonnet as Whistler’s Mother, passed out on the floor. That was shocking. Dad dressed as a lion in a show was what he did for a living, and was no big deal. Our small, sunless Fifth Avenue apartment was full of Dad’s disguises, which he’d first used on stage and in which he now occasionally appeared on TV. The closet contained a woodsman’s props (axe, jodhpurs, and boots); a policeman’s suit and baton; a New York Giants baseball outfit, with cap and cleats. The drawers of an apothecary’s cabinet, which served as a wall-length bedroom bureau, held his toupées, starting pistol, monocle, putty noses, and makeup. In the living room, Dad was Louis XV, complete with sceptre and periwig, in a huge oil painting made from a poster for Cole Porter’s “Du Barry Was a Lady” (1939); in the bedroom, he was a grimacing tramp in Richard Avedon’s heartbreaking photograph of him praying, as Estragon, in “Waiting for Godot” (1956).

Over the decades, the popular memory of these wonderful stage performances has faded; the Cowardly Lion remains the enduring posthumous monument to Dad’s comic genius. While we were growing up, there was not one Oz image or memento of any kind in the apartment. (Later, at Sotheby’s, Dad acquired a first edition of L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.”) The film had not yet become a cult. Occasionally, a taxi-driver or a passerby would spot Dad in the street and call out, “Put ’em up, put ’em uuuhp!” Dad would smile and tip his tweed cap, but the film’s popularity didn’t seem to mean as much to him as it did to other people.