Three Myths (And Three Odd Truths) About ‘The Wizard of Oz’
The Wizard of Oz was a pop culture phenomenon practically from the minute the original Frank Baum book arrived in 1900. A musical adaptation hit stages all across America a mere two years later, and a 15-minute silent film followed in 1910 when Hollywood was in its infancy. A much better one came at the heyday of the silent film era in 1925 with Laurel and Hardy’s Oliver Hardy as the Tin Woodman. The past 100 years has seen too many Wizard of Oz-related projects to mention, leading up to the release of Wicked this past week.
But one Wizard of Oz adaptation towers above them all, even Wicked. We’re talking, of course, about the 1939 MGM movie starring Judy Garland. It was a sensation when it hit theaters just as black and white films were giving way to Technicolor, and its legend has only grown in the decades that followed thanks to endless replays on television. It’s very difficult to entertain children of today nearly with any movie made prior to 1980, but the magic of The Wizard of Oz rarely fails to captivate.
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It has also inspired more myths and urban legends than any movie in Hollywood history. Many of us heard them as children, and they were very hard to debunk in the years prior to the Internet — and even now, they still regularly make the rounds on TikTok and X (formerly Twitter). There’s just something about the surreal nature of the film that made anything feel possible about its production, no matter how outlandish the claim. And there were indeed some very strange and unfortunate things that took place during filming. Here’s a look at six of them.
False: A Munchkin did not hang himself on set.
The most persistent myth about the movie involves a Munchkin actor who supposedly died by suicide on set. The story varies, but it often centers around a member of the Singer Midgets troupe who hangs himself after a Munchkin actress rejects his romantic overtures. You can supposedly see him swinging from the rafters in the background when Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman first enter the Enchanted Forest. (This moment was paused on VHS tapes more often than the supposed ghost scene in Three Men and a Baby.)
This claim is ludicrous for a multitude of reasons: First off, The Wizard of Oz was filmed out of sequence, and they shot the scene before any of the Munchkin actors were on set. Secondly, even though this was hard to tell in the days of VHS tapes, the movement briefly visible on screen is a large bird. The movie was shot 100 percent on indoor soundstages, so they borrowed animals from the Los Angeles Zoo to make it seem like they were outside. You can see a large peacock near the Tin Woodman’s shack.
Finally, just think about this claim for many than three seconds. If an actor died on set, they’d really include the footage in the final cut of the movie? This myth simply will not go away, but trust us on this one. There’s no hanging munchkin. It’s a friggin’ bird. (And yes, there are several videos on YouTube where clever pranksters edited the footage to make it look like a figure was indeed hanging in the background. They have all been debunked.)
True: There were a number of serious injuries on set.
Hollywood studios of the 1930s didn’t have anything close to the safety precautions of today. It was very easy to get injured, and lawsuits were very uncommon since nobody wanted to be blackballed from the industry. Original Tin Woodman actor Buddy Ebsen was the first to go down, since the aluminum dust in his silver body makeup got into his lungs, nearly killing him. He was replaced by Jack Haley, but found fame later in life when he was cast as Jed Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies. (He did have breathing problems for the rest of his life, however, which he blamed on the movie.)
Wicked Witch of the West actress Margaret Hamilton went down next when she suffered serious second and third degree burns on her face and hands while shooting her departure scene from Munchkinland. It removed her from the set for six weeks. (Check out the fireball at the 1:49 mark in the above video and imagine that hitting your face.) “I won’t sue, because I know how this business works, and I would never work again,” she said. “I will return to work on one condition — no more fireworks!”
Poor little Toto was even injured when an actor playing a Winkie guard stepped on its paw and sprained it. The Careen Terrier spent two weeks healing at Judy Garland’s house, and made a full recovery. She continued to appear in movies until shortly before her death at age 11 in 1945.
False: The Munchkins did not have wild, drunken parties during the shoot.
Leopold Singer brought 124 little people to The Wizard of Oz set who were part of his Singer Midgets vaudeville troupe. (While that term is obviously no longer acceptable, it was the parlance of the day.) Despite little experience in Hollywood, they executed their roles with great professionalism. But wild tales about them spread decades after the movie wrapped.
“They were drunks,” Garland told Jack Paar in 1967. “One of them, who was about 40, a gentleman, asked me for dinner and I couldn’t say ‘I can’t, because you’re a midget’. I just said, ‘No, my mother wouldn’t like it’, [the man replied] ‘Ah come on, bring your ma too.’ They put them all in one hotel in Culver City. They got smashed every night. They’d pick them up in butterfly nets.”
Garland was correct that the Singer Midgets all stayed in a hotel in Culver City, which inspired the 1981 Carrie Fisher/Chevy Chase movie Under the Rainbow. It takes place largely at the hotel as the Munchkin actors run wild and drink heavily. But it’s a complete fiction. By nearly every credible account, tales of their antics were either exaggerated to absurd degrees or made up entirely.
True: Judy Garland was hooked on barbiturates and amphetamines during filming.
Garland was just 16 years old when landed the role of Dorothy, but she was already an industry veteran going back to her early childhood as part of the Guam Sisters vaudeville trio. MGM fixated on her weight and stamina during production of The Wizard of Oz, and they gave her pills to suppress her appetite and keep her working long hours. It created a lifelong dependency on barbiturates and amphetamines that led to her death in 1969 when she was only 47.
False: Pink Floyd didn’t sync the movie to Dark Side of the Moon.
Back in the Nineties, a story ricocheted all across the Internet that Pink Floyd secretly synced up their 1973 LP Dark Side of the Moon to The Wizard of Oz. And to be fair, there are some odd coincidences that take place when you start the album just as the MGM lion roars for the third time during the intro. Clare Torry’s howls during “The Great Gig in the Sky” as the tornado hits, the cash register rings in “Money” just as the movie turns to color, and the final heartbeat at the end of the album plays at the exact month that Dorothy listens to the Tin Woodman’s heart.
None of this was intentional. As members of the band have explained over and over, they didn’t have VCRs back in 1973, and they sure didn’t project the movie onto a screen as they made the album. The vast majority of the album doesn’t line up to the action on the screen in any way, and the parts that do are just coincidences. It’s just proof that when you work backwards to justify a pre-existing conclusion, you can convince yourself of most anything.
True: You can pause the movie and see some fun inconsistencies.
When a movie has been watched as many times as The Wizard of Oz, all sorts of tiny inconsistencies will be discovered. For example, pause the above video of the apple picking scene at the 1:05 mark. Garland is wearing black shoes instead of the Ruby Slippers. A more glaring inconsistency takes place when Dorothy first meets the Scarecrow and the length of her pigtails changes from shot to shot. This happened because they re-shot the scene several months after they initially filmed it and merged the footage together. Pause the below clip at 2:09, and again just four seconds later at 2:13 to see the most glaring example. Did a rogue Munchkin mess with her hair between takes? Did Roger Waters write “Brain Damage” about it? No. It’s just a movie. Everyone needs to relax.
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