Editing Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (section)

===MGM enters television===
MGM's first television program, ''[[MGM Parade|The MGM Parade]]'', was produced by MGM's trailer department as one of the compilation and promotional shows that imitated Disney's series ''[[Walt Disney anthology television series|Disneyland]]''<ref>{{cite book|last=Segrave|first=Kerry|title=Movies at Home: How Hollywood Came to Television|date=1999|publisher=McFarland|location=Jefferson, North Carolina|isbn=0786406542|pages=33, 34|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=IZTehB3M1_kC&q=In+1955,+MGM+launched+Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer+Television+-wiki&pg=PA31|access-date=January 8, 2016|archive-date=May 10, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210510142532/https://books.google.com/books?id=IZTehB3M1_kC&q=In+1955,+MGM+launched+Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer+Television+-wiki&pg=PA31|url-status=live}}</ref> which was also on [[American Broadcasting Company|ABC]]. ''Parade'' was canceled by ABC in the second quarter of 1956.<ref name=bb>{{cite news|title=M-G-M Makes Triple Move into TV Field|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=20QEAAAAMBAJ&q=MGM-TV&pg=PA8|access-date=January 7, 2016|magazine=Billboard|date=June 30, 1956|archive-date=January 26, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210126135818/https://books.google.com/books?id=20QEAAAAMBAJ&q=MGM-TV&pg=PA8|url-status=live}}</ref> MGM took bids for its movie library in 1956 from Lou Chesler and others, but decided on entering the television market itself. Chesler had offered $50 million for the film library.<ref name=bb/> [[MGM Television]] was started with the hiring of Bud Barry to head up the operation in June 1956. [[MGM Television]] was to distribute its films to television (starting with the networks), television production and purchasing television stations. Television production was expected to start with the 1957–58 season and was to include half-hour remakes of, or series based on, its pictures. Initial feature film sales focused on selling to the networks.<ref name=bb/>

The year 1957 also marked the end of MGM's animation department, as the studio determined it could generate the same amount of revenue by reissuing older cartoons as it could by producing and releasing new ones.<ref>Barbera, J: ''How Bill & Joe met Tom & Jerry'', interviews with William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Warner Home Video, 2005</ref> William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, by then the heads of the MGM cartoon studio, took most of their unit and made their own company, [[Hanna-Barbera|Hanna-Barbera Productions]], a successful producer of television animation.

In 1956, MGM sold the television rights for ''The Wizard of Oz'' to [[CBS]], which scheduled it to be shown in November of that year. In a landmark event, the film became the first American theatrical fiction film to be shown complete in one evening on prime time television over a major American commercial network. ([[Laurence Olivier]]'s version of ''[[Hamlet (1948 film)|Hamlet]]'' was shown on prime time network television a month later, but split in half over two weeks, and the 1950 film, ''[[The Titan: Story of Michelangelo]]'' was telecast by ABC in 1952, but that was a documentary.) Beginning in 1959, and lasting until 1991, telecasts of ''The Wizard of Oz'' became an annual tradition, drawing huge audiences in homes all over the United States and earning additional profits for MGM. The studio was all too happy to see ''Oz'' become, through television, one of the two or three most famous films MGM has ever made, and one of the few films that nearly everybody in the United States has seen at least once. Today ''The Wizard of Oz'' is regularly shown on the [[Ted Turner|Turner]]-owned channels, no longer just once a year.