There you sat, cross-legged on the living room floor in your flannel jammies, covering your eyes in horror as evil flying monkeys careened across the television screen.

Remember the Munchkins, and Dorothy’s little dog Toto, and Glinda the Good Witch, and the Yellow Brick Road?

Chances are you do. The annual network telecast of “The Wizard of Oz,” a cultural phenomenon for generations of Americans, first happened 50 years ago this week, on Nov. 3, 1956.

For decades, “the three most important days to kids were their birthday, the December holiday (either Christmas or Hanukkah) and “The Wizard of Oz’ on TV,” said John Fricke of New York City, perhaps the nation’s foremost Oz scholar.

“Everybody talked about it at school, everybody watched it,” said Fricke, author of four books on Oz and a longtime international lecturer on the film. “You only got to see it once, and then not for another year.”

A Gallup Poll in 1998 (the latest figures available) reported that 94 percent of 1,016 American adults surveyed had seen the film.

“It’s the first American fairy tale,” said Carlos W. Colon, an Oz fan and head reference librarian at Shreve Memorial Library in Shreveport, La. “The other fairy tales were Grimm’s, Aesop’s fables, things like that. This story was the first that was truly American.”

Fricke thinks the 1939 movie is especially enthralling because children are immediately drawn into the drama. “Here is a little girl worried about her dog. Every child can relate. Dorothy is every child.”

And, he added, Dorothy is 16-year-old Judy Garland, “arguably the greatest entertainer America ever had.”

“The Wizard of Oz” is showing this week on TBS, at 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, and 8 and 10:15 p.m. Sunday.

Colon has traced its television ratings. Back in 1985 he dug through old newspapers and interviewed researchers at CBS, the first network to show the movie.

He found that the annual telecast did very well, averaging No. 8 in shows for the week. Only once in its first 27 years, in 1975, did it fail to make the top 20, against tough competition: a special on “The Waltons” and an interview with Watergate figure H.R. Haldeman.

That first TV broadcast featured a live introduction by actor Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion. Perched on his lap were Garland’s 10-year-old daughter, Liza Minnelli, and 13-year-old Justin G. Schiller – who later founded the massive International Wizard of Oz Club.

CBS producers had wanted a first-edition copy of the book for Lahr to read during the presentation. Rare-book dealers in New York City referred the network to Justin, who’d been collecting books since age 8. And he did indeed have an “Oz” first edition.

“I remember meeting Mr. Lahr,” said Schiller, of New York City, now a worldwide expert and dealer in rare literature for children. “They had hoped to get Judy Garland also, but she was performing and sent her daughter instead.”

Fricke said Garland was on stage at the Palace Theatre on Broadway that evening, and watched parts of the broadcast on a TV in the wings.

Various stars introduced the film through the years: Comic Red Skelton and his daughter. “Have Gun Will Travel” star Richard Boone. Comedians Dick Van Dyke and Danny Kaye.

More families were buying color TVs, so the introductions included an explanation that there was nothing wrong with those sets; the movie shifted from muted black-and-white in Kansas to brilliant Technicolor in Oz, then back.

Which fit author Frank Baum’s vision perfectly. He uses the word “gray” to describe Kansas at least nine times, Fricke said. “The grass, Toto, Auntie Em, the sky – all gray. That’s Kansas during a drought.”

As years went by, more children anticipated the film’s annual arrival.

But not Misa Chappell. She never saw “The Wizard of Oz.”

No Lullaby League or Lollipop Guild. No melting Wicked Witch. No sleepy fields of poppies.

“I grew up in a household without a television,” said Chappell, 37, a freelance writer in Minneapolis. “And I don’t remember it ever being in theaters.”

Yet she’s familiar with the movie’s catch phrases – and uses them herself.

“I love to say, “We’re not in Kansas anymore’ and “Ding-dong, the witch is dead,”‘ Chappell said. “I know about clicking your heels three times, and I’ve even visited the ruby slippers at the Smithsonian.”

It’s strange, she mused, those things “all just kind of seeped in.”

Once, while her husband was away on business, she noticed the movie coming on TV. “I called his hotel and mentioned I was going to watch it. He said, “No! I want to watch it with you!”‘

Maybe this will be the year Chappell – with her husband – finally sees it. “I think we should make an event out of it,” she said.

Fricke will be doing just that. “I’ll try to get together with some other fans, have dinner or something nice,” he said.

Fricke continues Oz projects. He’s provided commentary on DVD sets and lectures on the movie around the world. One Oz festival in Indiana drew around 85,000 participants.

“I’ve been doing festivals for years, and I’ve seen thousands of little girls in blue dresses with red shoes,” Fricke said. “And there are still thousands of little girls in blue dresses with red shoes, who are now their daughters.”

He said he’s seen the movie “somewhere between 125 and 150 times.” But things are different now.

Because it’s on DVD, “there are 4-year-olds who have seen it more than I have. Some watch it twice a day, every day.”