My mother saw this in late 1939 at 8 years old. She and grandmother had never seen a color movie. She told me when Dorothy opened the door, and Oz was in color the audience went "Oooooo!" and started to applaud. It was unexpected! Around the mid-60s it aired on TV and my mother was so excited to show us this movie that I and my brothers and sister had not seen. She didn't tell us about the colorized part. When that scene arrived we all went "Oooooo!" too! As the oldest at 10, I was very impressed. Apparently mom was like the viewers watching you and other reactors reacting to all the movies you've never seen. She was watching us react!! LOL! Of course there weren't any subscribe buttons back then, but she did get plenty of likes from us. I'm passing on the tradition and giving you a like for showing it! 😎👍
Grouchy Marx, this one touched my heart :) Thank you for sharing this story! I could only imagine what it must have been like to be in that movie theater when they all saw color in a film for the first time! So amazing! I truly cherish your comments :)
@@MoviesWithMia Thank you for the kind words Mia. Just to clarify a bit... There were cartoons in color I'm sure mom would have seen, and it's possible (though not certain) they saw some of James FitzPatrick's colorized "TravelTalks" featurettes. But she, my grandma and probably most in the US did not expect the dazzling color in this movie.
When I was growing up we didn’t even own a TV and when Dad finally bought one it was black and white. The first time I saw _The Wizard of Oz_ was in black-and-white. The second time I saw it was at my aunt and uncle’s house on their color TV. A lot of TV shows and movies shown on TV then were still black and white so I didn’t think anything about the beginning of the movie not being in color. When the door opened and Oz was revealed in all its colors is a moment I’ll never forget. It was like seeing the movie again for the first time. And that brick road was indeed yellow.
“When the wardrobe department was looking for a coat for Frank Morgan (Prof. Marvel / The Wizard), it decided it wanted one that looked like it had once been elegant but had since "gone to seed." They visited a second-hand store and purchased an entire rack of coats, from which Morgan, the head of the wardrobe department and director Victor Fleming chose one they felt gave off the perfect appearance of "shabby gentility." One day, while he was on set in the coat, Morgan idly turned out one of the pockets and discovered a label indicating that the coat had been made for L. Frank Baum. Mary Mayer, a unit publicist for the film, contacted the tailor and Baum's widow, who both verified that the coat had at one time been owned by the author of the original "Wizard of Oz" books. After the filming was completed, the coat was presented to Mrs. Baum.”
As a child I lived in a low income home. We did not have a color TV. I was aware that the film was in color but I had to use my imagination. It wasn't until 1980 that I finally got a color TV, 13". The following spring, when it's usual airing occurred, I was delighted when they got to the Emerald City, and I discovered that the Horse of a Different Color, changed to different colors!
“There was originally meant to be a reprise of "Over the Rainbow" when Dorothy is trapped in the Witch's castle. As Judy Garland would have had to incorporate a lot of acting into the song, it had to be recorded live during the take. Reportedly it reduced the entire crew to tears.”
A few notes: Buddy Ebsen, who originally played the Tin Man, spent two weeks in the hospital in an oxygen tent. He became ill away from the set after nine days of filming, at the same time that the first director was fired, so the rest of the cast didn’t know that he was sick, they just thought they recast the role with the new director. You can still hear him in the group sung part of “We’re Off to See the Wizard” because he had recorded all of his songs before filming began, as was standard. He became famous to later generations in starring tv roles in the shows The Beverly Hillbillies and Barnaby Jones. Margaret Hamilton was also not the first actor in her part of the Wicked Witch, but replaced Gale Sondergaard a few days before filming started. Sondergaard was supposed to be an elegantly beautiful witch, like in Snow White, but withdrew from the part when they decided to make her a hag instead. Those of us born in the ‘60s had our minds blown when we found out that the little old lady in the Maxwell House coffee commercials of the ‘70s was the Wicked Witch!
Wow! Thank you for that insight :) I feel so bad for Buddy Ebsen! Poor guy! And it would have been WILD if the Wicked Witch was beautiful! But at the same time, it would have been sick if her beauty outshown Glinda’s! And then when Dorothy threw the water on her, that’s when she turned into a hag exposing the ugliness living inside of her! Man, I should have been on the creative team for this film 😂 I would have had so much fun!!
@@MoviesWithMia The silver looking makeup applied to Buddy Epsen was powdered aluminum that he breathed in. When Buddy got sick they booked Jack Haley for the part. The solution to the silver makeup problem was so simple it was stupid! Just mix it in mineral oil or something similar which eliminated the dust problem. It was stupid they didn't think of that before, but if they had the movie would be very different.
@@MoviesWithMia Never mind Mia. I just got to the part now where you're covering the history of the infamous aluminum powder. I shoulda' waited to the end! Duh! 👉🥴👈 LOL! I crashed out about halfway thru your cool video last night, now back on it again today!
And Coincedence Or Not Gale Sondergaard Later On Starred On The Blue Bird With Shirley Temple Who Is For A Short While Was Considered To Played Dorothy But Since She Was Under Contract With 20th Century Fox , MGM Later On Casted Judy Garland And The Rest Is History .
As a kid we only had a black and white tv so I never appreciated the moment they first show the splendor of Oz until I was an adult and saw it in color.
The "That film's in COLOR!" reaction has happened while watching old movies like "Dive Bomber." Sometimes that continues because black-and-white prints of color movies are still shown from time to time.
Same here. It didn't stop me from watching - and loving - this film. In fact, even on a black and white TV, as a child, I "saw" the colors in my imagination, anyway.
“The movie's line "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." was voted as the #24 of "The 100 Greatest Movie Lines" by Premiere in 2007. "There's no place like home." was voted #11 in the same. "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." was 62. The latter is frequently misquoted as, "We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto."
Click your heels…. No , tap your heels together three times. And THINK to yourself…. I heard her saying it out loud!!! How did her hair get braided again? She lived through a tornado crashing her window into her head, miles of walking and dancing, flying monkeys and killing a witch. Shouldn’t she be a bit disheveled? No dirt or frizz that I can see, and the lions permanent? Water destroys perms until 24-48 hours afterwards? How did they rinse it out?….wait was that all a dream? Oohhhhh. I should go to bed. It’s over.
15:58: The transition from sepia to color in one shot was done by having the set painted sepia, and Judy Garland's stand-in dressed in a sepia dress. When the stand-in opens the door, she steps out of frame, and Judy steps in with her blue checked dress.
OMG! That is so amazing! The work that went into that scene! And the seemlessness of the final product makes me appreciate classic cinema SO MUCH MORE!!!
Yeah! Its all practical effects! Corridor Crew on youtube talked about it in one of their videos! I came to the comments to see if anyone had mentioned that its not CG
Once a year. That's how often we got to watch this movie when I was a kid. It would be played on TV exactly once, and EVERYONE watched it. It was such an event, and it's almost impossible for young people to imagine that now. But the anticipation was wonderful, and sitting down to finally step through that door into that magical transformation of the world... nothing like it. I started reading the books when I was 8, and got through all 14. I still have my copies on the shelf, and read through them every couple of years. (There were over 40 Oz books published, but only the first 14 were written by Baum.) He was trying to create a genre of purely American fairy tales, as the only ones kids in this country had back then were European. And he succeeded - they are a true fairy tale world, but so very American. Really lovely stuff. If you like fairy tales, you really should read at least a couple of them. :)
@@MoviesWithMia I think you'd love them. He also wrote a couple of fairy books that weren't about Oz, but his readers so inundated him with requests for "more about Dorothy", that he had to spent his years spinning those tales. "Queen Zixi of Ix" is my favorite of his non-Oz books. He really had a thing for powerful ladies! :)
15:24 If you'll look closely, you'll notice the Dorothy in sepia in that shot is not actually Judy Garland, but a body double in sepia makeup. And of course the door is sepia. And as soon as the camera pans away, Judy Garland steps in. So the whole scene was actually filmed in color. Anyway, that's how they did that transition without computer filters. Purely just body double, makeup, and scenery.
I think that is so intuitive! It's things like that that we don't really think about in 2021. Like that is amazing how they decided to make that shot work! so cool!
“Despite the fact she played an adversary to Judy Garland's Dorothy, Margaret Hamilton and Garland got along well on set. Garland showed off a dress to Hamilton that Garland was going to wear on stage for her graduation. However, Louis B. Mayer sent Garland on a tour with Mickey Rooney and Garland never got a chance to wear her dress on stage with her classmates. Hamilton was so angry she called Mayer and yelled at him.”
“Over 35 years after the release of this film, Margaret Hamilton revealed her approach to the character of the Wicked Witch in an interview with Fred Rogers for Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (1968). Hamilton saw the Witch as a person who relished everything she did, but who ultimately was a sad, lonely figure - a woman who lived in constant frustration, as she never got what she wanted (this is, in fact, the basis of the novel and musical "Wicked," in which the Wicked Witch of the West is portrayed as an unfortunate protagonist). In the same interview, Hamilton also famously donned the original Witch costume to explain that the witches were only make-believe, and that children shouldn't be afraid of them.”
“A recent study claimed that this is the most watched movie in film history, largely due to the number of television screenings each year as well as the various video/DVD/Blu-ray/4K releases, which have enabled children of every and all generations to see it.”
39:30 In the book, there was actually a Witch of the South, and SHE was actually named Glinda. There was a whole other act of the book after the wizard left where they journey to the South to find Glinda. But I guess for time constraints they combined both the Witch of the North and South into one (not to mention easier to just have one actress who shows up twice than two actresses who only get a few minutes screentime).
Ahh! I had no idea that Glinda was the witch of the South! And here I have spent a good chunk of my life thinking that she was the witch of the North :)
The history of what led up to the 39 WoOz is so fascinating, there’s a book on it that i got off amazon that talks about the 1905 Broadway musical and the several silent movie adaptions. For example, the idea of snow saving Dorothy comes from that musical, as the book had field mice rescuing her. Half the beautiful showgirls were dressed like colorful poppies, while the other half were all in pristine white, and whirled in as the snowstorm that saved her. Musicals then were more like what we would think of as a cross between current musicals, and vaudeville. They didn’t have scores but rather sang popular toons of the day. And Scarecrow and Tin Man were the stars, doing amazing acrobatic dances (which we see an example of in the Scarecrow’s cut scene in the movie in the pumpkin patch.). Then there were three short films in the teens. But the silent movie everyone still recalled in 39 was the one from just a decade of so before. Did you every wonder why in the 39 movie we spend so much time in Kansas, 15 or 20 minutes at least, even though in the book, she’s gone from Kansas after literally one page! it’s because that late 20s silent movie spent nearly half its run time in Kansas! So much interesting history that led up to the 39 movie!
@@MoviesWithMia The original Good Witch of the North (who I don't think is ever named in the Oz books) is a grandmotherly woman who wears all white with a white pointy hat, and she's the one who initially gives Dorothy the slippers and sends her to the Emerald City. Glinda doesn't actually appear in the book until the very end, where she reveals the slippers' power to take Dorothy home. Canonically, Glinda is supposed to be slightly wiser and more powerful than the Witch of the North, so it makes better sense in the book that Dorothy not be given the information about the slippers until the end because the Good Witch simply didn't know what they could do.
“The horses in Emerald City palace were colored with Jell-O crystals. The relevant scenes had to be shot quickly, before the horses started to lick it off.”
“Many of The Wicked Witch of the West's scenes were either trimmed or deleted entirely, as Margaret Hamilton's performance was thought to be too frightening for audiences.”
Fun fact, the twister was a 30 foot long muslin cloth, like the kind that is used as wind socks at airports, and they held it from a special rig in the ceiling and pumped down this dust like material to show it tearing up the ground, to the point that the stagehands working with it were coughing up black dust for awhile afterwards. Edit: you mentioned about that smooth transition from black and white to color, and this is some of that ingenious movie trickery. There was a stand in, wearing a black and white version of Dorthys dress, and then she opened the door and stepped back, and Dorothy walks into the frame with the color dress and boom, transition complete with no jump cuts. Funny how there were simple things done then that would just be done with computers these days. PS I hope you might take a look at 1933 King Kong, as that would have won the Oscar for special effects, if they’d had one like that back in the day lol
Oh lord! Coughing up black dust! Geez the lengths they went to to make this beautiful film! I commend every single person working on this film!! Also, yeah that transition from sepia to color looked so effortless! It is AMAZING (still blowing my mind, honestly!) how they did that!! And YES!!! I have a monster flick month planned out in the future! And Kong is on the top of that schedule!!!
Hey Mia! It is always a trip watching your reactions. Believe me, and in more ways than one. This film is an emotional time machine in that it’s one of the few that catapult me right back to the tender young age I was when I first watched it - my pint sized self stretched out on my belly in front of the tv, my fists pressed up against my cheeks, eyes glued to the screen. Many films can serve as time markers, recalling specific events from the past (pop songs from high school have the same effect), bringing to mind your first date, your first kiss (first sip of beer?), etc... But Oz has a different effect. It doesn’t just reference dates and places in time; it makes me “feel” exactly how I did at that moment - it’s an emotional x-ray of my younger uncomplicated self. How does this movie do that? Sure, it’s a “children’s film” per se. But still, others aren’t quite able to pull off that trick in the same way. So what is it about THIS film? Could it be that it has something to do with the fact that it is one of the purest, most straightforward films of its kind? These days, films geared toward children are laced with irony and sarcasm - which is fine. It’s a different era. Parents enjoy them as much as their kids. Pixar ingeniously marketed that to full effect. And don’t get me wrong: I adore Pixar (Wall-e, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Toy Story are always duking it out for the top spot as my personal fave). But Oz is that rare gem (emerald or ruby - take your pick) which is utterly childlike and innocent on every single level. This is reflected in its color schemes (sepia, primary colors), its story themes (good vs. evil), its good natured humor, its sweet hummable songs - it all gels together and weaves a powerful spell. And its concept and subject matter are very simple: “How do I get home?” Add to all of that the inspired costumes, set designs, and practical effects and we willingly and happily suspend disbelief. Also, Judy Garland was my first movie crush (and maybe for a whole bunch of other youngins too). To my 5 year old eyes and ears (her singing talent was not beyond me), she was the perfect blend of cuteness and sweetness. And that cast is TOO PERFECT... they all get a chance to shine throughout. And every time the following exchange takes place between the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man: “Look at the circles under my eyes. I haven’t slept in weeks!” “Why don’t you try counting sheep?” “That doesn’t do any good - I’m afraid of ‘em!” I still cannot never laugh; Bert Lahr’s delivery is too good. By the way, after all my blah-blah-blah about it being a more innocent era back then, the fact is World War II officially broke out just 3 weeks after “The Wizard of Oz” was released in theaters. So how about that for a parallel? The real life nightmare of WWII was blowing up in everyone’s consciousness and wouldn’t officially end until another 6 years later. But you know, that may be yet another thing that adds to the film’s specialness. It’s a time capsule within a time capsule. It lives in its own perfect bubble. 🌈
Wow! Thank you for your comment :) I am so glad that this movie has a special place in you memory! And wow! I never thought about it being so close to WWII! Thank you, Jose, truly, for watching and commenting :)
In 1898 Dorothy Louise Gage was born to the brother and sister-in-law of Maud Gage Baum, wife of author L. Frank Baum. When little Dorothy died exactly five months later Maud was heartbroken. Baum was just finishing "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and, to comfort his wife, named his heroine after Dorothy, changing her last name to Gale in his second book. Dorothy Gage was buried in Evergreen Memorial Cemetery in Bloomington, IL, where her grave was forgotten until 1996 when it was rediscovered. When Mickey Carroll, one of the last existing Munchkins from the movie, learned of the discovery, he was eager to replace her deteriorated grave marker with a new one created by his own monument company. The new stone was dedicated in 1997 and the children's section of the cemetery renamed the Dorothy L. Gage Memorial Garden, in the hope that bereaved families would be comforted in thinking of their lost children as being with Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz."
In the scene in Munchkinland where the three members of the 'Lollipop Guild' present a giant lollipop to Dorothy, the middle one was Jerry Maren. He lived until he was 98 years old,dying in 2018, the last member of the cast to pass. He had quite a career AFTER The Wizard of Oz. He became "Little Oscar", the spokesman for Oscar Mayer Hot Dogs all through the 1950s on TV. He continued working , mostly on TV into the 1990s, even having a role on Seinfeld.
Didn’t he get caught embellishing his stories? One guy did for sure. It wasn’t their voices after all. Maybe he thought it was his voice all this time? Maybe it was the coroner, something like that.
“Margaret Hamilton, a lifelong fan of the "Oz" books, was ecstatic when she learned the producers were considering her for a part in the film. When she phoned her agent to find out what role she was up for, her agent simply replied, "The witch, who else?.”
“When filming first started, Judy Garland wore a blonde wig and heavy, "baby-doll" makeup. When George Cukor assumed the role of intermediate director (after MGM fired original director Richard Thorpe and before it found a replacement), he got rid of the wig and most of the makeup and told her to just be herself.”
The part in the movie where they establish that the Bert Lahr character is a coward always bothered me. A coward would have froze but he jumped right into the pen and got Dorothy out. That was an act of courage and I always admired him for that.
I totally understand you! The way I interpreted it was that the lion always had courage within him! The only person who thought he was a coward was himself. These characters exhibited the very things they thought they lacked. All they needed was someone to show them their worth 😊
“Dorothy's iconic red slippers now live at the Smithsonian Institution, and are so popular that the carpet in front of the attraction has had to be replaced numerous times due to wear and tear.”
There were several pairs of ruby slippers used in the movie. Another pair used is on display at a museum in Judy Garland's home town of Grand Rapids Minnesota. Some years ago they were stolen and recently recoverd
“Margaret Hamilton, a single mother, got into an argument with the studio over guaranteed time to work, only agreeing to take the role of the Wicked Witch three days before filming. Ironically, although she finally got an agreement for five weeks of work, she ended up working on the film for three months.”
an absolute masterpiece whose groundbreaking visuals and deft storytelling are still every bit as resonant The Wizard Of Oz is a must see film for young and old alike to everyone, THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) 98/100% Certified Approved ☑️ Dorothy: THERE'S NO PlACE LIKE HOME.
Ahhh! Very interesting! Thank you for sharing that because I just couldn't, for the life of me, wrap my mind around how they achieved that sepia tone :)
"Mood tinting" was common in B&W films, especially silent, to be easier on audience's eyes. (One time when a silent film was restored, audiences overreacted and cried, "Ted Turner must have COLORIZED it!"...Umm, no.)
“According to lead Munchkin Jerry Maren, the "little people" on the set were paid $50 per week for a six-day work week, while Toto received $125 per week.”
As an old-fashioned male I rarely cry during movies. But I have to admit that I cannot listen to Judy Garland's rendition of Over the Rainbow without tears coming to my eyes. I love Izzy's version as well. What a sweet little dog Toto was ... the way his trainer got him to sit on the tractor seat and extend his tiny paw was SO cute.
Who is Izzy? I know Patti Labelle and Sylvester maybe sang it. But I’m old. Izzy must be young. And alive. I wish they left the slow sad teary version at the witch’s castle. You really felt that, and heard the snot in her throat.
Outside Wash.D.C. is an 8 lane highway that circles the city called the BELTWAY at one point north of D.C. a railroad overpass spans over the highway near the Mormon Temple Headquarters. That building looked like the Emerald City castle. Commuters that travel the Beltway approached the overpass with the Mormon building in the horizon. Well for years someone would sneak on the overpass and paint SURRENDER DOROTHY across the overpass. It became an amusing landmark to see for years for commuters.
Yes! I saw that when I was visiting my then boyfriend. We were driving to Wolftrap to see Sarah Caldwell (one of the first great female conductors) conduct the Prokofiev opera War and Peace. It was a great day and I will never forget the image of the words "Surrender Dorothy" seeming to float beside the white and gold tower.
“Lorna Luft has said interviews that her mother Judy Garland was deeply disappointed in the film, at least initially after it came out; since it was considered to be a box-office failure. It would take years for it to recoup its costs and did not really take off with audiences until CBS started showing it during the holidays every year starting in 1959.”
“Terry (Toto) was stepped on by one of the witch's guards, and had a double for two weeks. A second double was obtained, because it resembled Toto more closely. Judy Garland very much wanted to adopt Terry after the two spent so much time together shooting the film. Unfortunately, the owner of the dog wouldn't give her up, and Terry went on to a long career in films. She died in 1945 and was buried in her trainer's yard.”
Not quite right about Margaret s makeup. Miss Hamilton said they did a perfect take before lunch and the one after lunch, when people were full and sleepy, the elevator operator's timing was off. She held the broom to her face and that is what caught fire, burning her face and hand. The danger with the makeup was that the copper was toxic to her under layers of skin that were exposed by the burns. The makeup man had to clean the makeup off the burned skin. Miss Hamilton said it was the most painful experience of her life. She was hospitalized and thought about suing but figured she would never work again if she did. The Good Witch's bubble was done by shooting a big glass ball, like an oversized Christmas ornament, and moving the camera toward it or away from it. The large crystal ball was really a half ball, like a large bowl on its side and the images were projected into it. The sky writing was done in a shallow glass tank with the camera pointing up. The sky was blue liquid with white (milk?) Fed into it for a cloud effect. The writing was done by a tech with a hypodermic needle with a tiny witch on it. He would dip it in the tank and write the letters backward while squeezing out the black liquid. Talk about danger, they did one effect, I don't remember which, was done on a pool of mercury. Read The Making of the Wizard of Oz by Aljean Harmetz. Great fun!
This sure has been a fun month following your channel so far. I watched The Wizard of Oz a lot as a kid, along with Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Honestly, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang keeps getting worse and worse as I get older, but the other two keep getting better and better. Not only are they both technical wonders (it's miraculous they looked as good as they did, given the circumstances) but they also engender this feeling of warmth and charm that's near impossible to pull off without feeling artificial or saccharine, especially in this more cynical day and age.
Wow! Thank you so much for watching, Ray :) I agree with you! I enjoy watching these musicals so much! They feel so warm and fun, definitely not something that you’ll find in today’s day and age!
Loved your reactions and your research, Mia. As a Baby Boomer, I first saw "The Wizard of Oz" on television in 1959. It was a family event, with my parents and my younger brother gathered around the set. Because it was only aired once a year, it became a family tradition. Of course, when it was on DVD, my son and I watched it together. I still love this movie today. FYI: Judy Garland's signature song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was nearly cut from the movie. However, Arthur Freed believed in this song so strongly that he told the powers that be, "The song stays or I walk." The song stayed. June 10 of this year marks Judy Garland's 100th birthday. Happy Birthday Judy!
“Dorothy's hair changes lengths throughout the course of the film, most noticeably in the Scarecrow cornfield sequence, which was the first sequence to be shot. As production progressed, refinements were made to Judy Garland's hair and makeup. At the end of filming, reshoots were done of the cornfield sequence and, thus, the shots do not match. The reshoots are believed to have been done by King Vidor, who also directed the Kansas sequences, including "Over the Rainbow", after director Victor Fleming left the production to direct Gone with the Wind (1939).”
Her curls were not her real hair. The tight curls drop and appear long. That’s the first thing I noticed as a kid. The ending hairstyle is a fall or half wig. Very inconsistent styling but they tried.
When I was a kid we watched it annually and then would act it out for weeks afterward. We had a black and white tv, one year our parents sent us down the street to visit a neighbor with a color tv during the commercial break between the tornado and Oz. It was amazing to see in color, but when it went back to sepia, I didn't even notice. I was 3. It was several years before I saw the whole film in color that I realized it started and ended in sepia.
Haha wow! It is so cool to hear your story! Nowadays everything is so accessible that we forget what a treat it was to be able to catch a film when it was being aired! Thank you for your insight :)
Simpsons did this joke -"The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side." -"THAT'S A *RIGHT* TRIANGLE, YOU IDIOT!" -"D'OH!"
Director Victor Fleming and the wardrobe department picked out a coat for actor Frank Morgan to wear as the Wizard. One day Morgan turned one of the pockets inside-out and discovered a label that said the coat had been made for L. Frank Baum. They originally wanted to cast Shirley Temple as Dorothy. It would have been an entirely different movie. Temple was typecast as a cute little kid. Also, Garland was a much better singer than Temple. It was Buddy Ebsen who was originally cast as The Tin Man. Ebsen is best known today as Jed Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies. Margaret Hamilton was a kind woman who loved children. It bothered her that children were afraid of her after this movie came out. The actors who played the Munchkins were from Europe. Many were Jewish, and they stayed in the U.S. rather than return to face Nazi Germany. The horses in Emerald City were colored with Jell-O mix. They had to shoot the scenes quickly before the horses licked it off. Toto got $125 a week. The Munchkins each only got $50 a week. Yip Harburg wrote the lyrics to all the songs, and Harold Arlen wrote the music. Both wrote a large number of other songs, and wrote some together apart from Wizard of Oz, including It's Only a Paper Moon. They'd have worked more together, except that Harburg drove Arlen crazy with his political opinions. Harburg was a socialist. It's not that Arlen disagreed with Harburg, but that Harburg wouldn't shut up about it. Harburg also wrote: April in Paris Brother Can You Spare a Dime? Arlen is considered one of the all-time great American songwriters - some of his best are Accentuate the Positive Come Rain or Come Shine Get Happy I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues One for My Baby (and One More for the Road) Stormy Weather That Old Black Magic. The song Over the Rainbow was almost cut from the movie. It's a slow number, and they thought the movie was too long. Fortunately, they left it in. Otherwise it would have been lost to history. In 2004 the American Film Institute ranked it #1 in their list of 100 Greatest Songs in American Films. It was also named The Song of the Century by the National Endowment for the Arts. The movie was shot with the Technicolor three-strip process. This system produced three black-and-white negatives for each frame, one representing red, one blue, and one green. The final print was made with a complicated dye transfer process. Because black-and-white negatives don't fade, it's always possible to get an accurate color print from the negatives. This is a big reason the colors are so rich for a film made in 1939. Many old movies were shot with a 4:3 aspect ratio, so when TV was new they made the screens to the same ratio so that movies could be shown on them. But the movie studios were worried about competition from TV, so they started using wide screen formats. Cinemascope was capable of an 8:3 aspect ratio (twice as wide as TV). Digital TVs have an aspect ratio of 16:9. "But Oz never did give nothing to The Tin Man, "That he didn't, didn't already have." - The Tin Man by the band America
the change from sepia to technicolor was accomplished very easily. the inside of the house was painted sepia, and judy's stand-in was wearing a brown dress - she's the one who opens the door, then backs out of camera range. judy was wearing a blue dress, and she' then walked forward through the door into technicolor muchkinland - it was all done in one camera shot.
The Wizard of Oz was always a favorite of mine in my childhood and it is hands down one of the most beautifully made movies ever made. It was so many specials effects that were very unique for its time. Also a fun fact about Margaret Hamilton; her character, The Wicked Witch of the West, only got 12 minutes of screen time because some of her acting scenes would have been considered "too frightening for audiences". But she still managed to pull it off as the world's most iconic villain. Not to mention, she was also the only actor who is best friends with Judy Garland.
12:26 Buddy (Jed Clampett/Barnaby Jones) Ebsen was cast as Tin Man. He breathed in aluminum powder when they applied it to his facial make-up, and really messed-up his lungs for months. The part got recast with Jack Haley, and they mixed the powder into the liquid make-up for him, so no problems emerged again.
"I saw you tinkering with that contraption, Hickory" - What contraption? In one deleted scene, the Jack Haley farmhand was supposed to be inventing his own homemade anti-tornado device, "a machine with a heart!"...Which promptly blows up. (But some day, they'll erect a statue to him in this town!)
@@MoviesWithMia I do, too. That was what set him up as the "heartless" Tin Man! The machine was made out of scrap metal. And, he told Dorothy to have more of a heart and have pity on Miss Gulch.
“Dorothy, The Scarecrow and The Tin Man meet The Cowardly Lion and Dorothy hits him on the nose for chasing Toto, making him cry. Judy Garland breaks character and laughs at Bert Lahr, covering her laughter into Toto's nose. (This is at the exact midpoint of the movie, 0:50:53.) She recovers quickly and goes on with the scene.”
The reason why the image quality is so good is because the movie was shot on physical film (celluloid). Many of today's movies are shot digitally and are made up of pixels. I'm admittedly not an expert on the matter myself, but I think that's more or less the reason!
Well my original vhs is not so rich or bright. I think the remastering is the reason. They restored it to modern standards. The technicolor is tricky since it’s three colors I think. Dorothy’s hair looks more auburn and dull , her dress looked solid blue, and her top was pinkish,and everything kind of blended color wise. And lots of flares, popping, hairs, swirls,faded spots. That’s on the film. They erased the flaws.
The Wizard of Oz was put in The National Film Registry and is one of the most seen films in film history. This is my favorite movie from my childhood days. They picked the right person when they picked Judy Garland to be Dorothy.
“If you look closely, the door the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion rescue Dorothy through isn't the same as the one Dorothy enters the Hourglass Room through. This is due to the deletion of an entire scene in which the room the heroes enter (following the sound of someone humming "Somewhere Over The Rainbow") holds not Dorothy but the Wicked Witch of the West! She paralyzes the heroes, then creates a false Rainbow Bridge from that room to Dorothy's. She sends a Winkie out to test it . . . he falls through the center of the bridge. She then magically compels our three heroes to call out to Dorothy, who runs onto the bridge . . . and is carried across by the magic slippers! Our friends are reunited, and (released from the witch's spell by love/the slippers, whichever) run out of the room, with the witch screaming, "Stop them!" behind them. The scene was cut both for technical reasons--they couldn't pull off a good Rainbow Bridge--and because seeing a Winkie falling to his presumed death was considered too likely to incur the wrath of the Hays Office, the industry's official censors.”
“The film received a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records as the film to which a live-action sequel was produced after the longest period of time--Return to Oz (1985) was released 46 years later.”
There is a tv movie called The Dreamer Of Oz, about L. Frank Baum's life and how the Wizard of Oz came to be. It started John Ritter and Annette O'Toole as his wife Maud Gage, with Rue McClanahan as his mother-in-law, Matilda Gage who was a famous suffragist. Frank Baum was not a success at a multitude of jobs, but he made up stories for his kids, which led to writing books.
That was fun Mia, and an excellent review I might add. I learned a few things about it from you. Couple of things to mention; @ 38:28 if you haven't seen "Jumanji" with Robin Williams do yourself a BIG favor and watch it! The scene of the flying monkeys bouncing up and down reminded me of it. You'd just have to see it, and it's a movie right up your alley! Like Casablanca, this movie has so iconic phrases like "We're not in Kansas anymore" and "There's no place like home", etc. The one that stands out for me is, "Pay NO attention to that man behind the curtain!" LOL! Anyway, nice review and looking forward to watching more of your videos. I did link your Casablanca video in another reactor's comment room where somebody was looking for "...a reactor who does old B&W movies like Casablanca." Hope you landed another subscriber there. ✌️😎
Hey Grouchy Marx! I glad you like the video :) I have seen Jumanji, but I need to watch it again 😅 such a great film! It used to scare me as a kid, but as an adult, I absolutely adored it!!! And YES!! HAHAHA “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” 😂 hilarious!! Thanks as always for your comment :)
@ 43:22 What's amusing about that scene is the scarecrow is wrong about an isosceles triangle! It was after studying trigonometry in high school and college, I realized later he was off a bit!! LOL!
I'm in my 40s and very vividly remember those special nights in the early to mid 80s when I was a kid and the whole family would watch The Wizard of Oz once a year. I fell in love with it right away. And the excitement of it being on just once a year was palpable. I loved those days. I know pretty much everything about the movie today and I LOVE how much YOU love it, too!!! I really enjoyed watching your video (and decided to subscribe!)
I memorized all the great lines from this and am a member of the Wizard of Oz Fan Club, even at age 70. Also have all the characters as christmas Tree Ornaments
“To compensate for the extreme make-up demands on this film, MGM recruited extra help from the studio mail room and courier service. As most of the Oz extras required prosthetic devices (false ears, noses, etc.), and since application of prosthetics requires extensive training, the recruited make-up artists were each instructed in one area of prosthetic application and then formed an assembly line. Each extra would then move from one station to another to complete make-up application each morning.”
I grew up watching this on CBS television. They broadcast it once a year and it was a very special event for us. Because we didn't have a color TV I never knew it was a color movie till years later!
Grainy scratchy popping with many flaws right? Skips and flares? That’s what I remember. The film was worn heavily by the 80’s for sure. Never saw it on the big screen.
“The Munchkins are portrayed by The Singer Midgets, named not for their musical abilities but for Leo Singer, their manager. The troupe came from Europe, many of them were Jewish and a number of them took advantage of the trip to stay in the US in order to escape the Nazis. Professional singers dubbed most of their voices, as many of the Midgets couldn't speak English and/or sing well. Only two are heard speaking with their real-life voices--the ones who give Dorothy flowers after she has climbed into the carriage.”
“While filming the scene in which Dorothy slaps the Cowardly Lion, Judy Garland got the giggles so badly that they had to take a break in shooting. The director, Victor Fleming, took her aside, gave her a quick lecture, and then slapped her. She returned to the set and filmed the scene in one take. Fleming was afraid that this would damage his relationship with Garland and even told a co-worker he wished that someone would hit him because of how bad he felt, but Garland overheard the conversation and gave him a kiss on the nose to show that she bore no hard feelings. In the film she can still be seen to be stifling a smile between the lines "well, of course not" and "my, what a fuss you're making." (This is at the very mid-point of the movie, 0:50:53.)
New subscriber here! I'm loving your reactions. It's so rare to see old classics get this much attention. Wizard Of Oz is one of my favorite films. I was in love with it and watched it over and over as a kid. Personal fun facts: Dorothy and Scarecrow are my OTP, and I honestly believe the theory that Glenda was the villain all along 😁 Also, you mentioned not knowing what it was like to be in a tornado, but I've been through tornados before. (From the Midwest USA here.) The most notable tornado was when I was 8 years old in May 2008. My city was hit by an EF5 tornado (the highest rating on the tornado meter.) I and my family just made it inside as the twister was coming and we huddled in the basement as the tornado went over us. There's really no way to explain it other than comparing it to like being under a freight train. You hear the deafening roar, debris flying, things being ripped to shreds, and all the oxygen feels like it's being sucked from the air. We stayed clustered together praying over the sound of the storm until it was over and everything became quiet. Thank God my whole family was okay, but our house was demolished. We lived in hotels, in trailers, and with other family members for months until we rebuilt and got to move into our unfinished home. I still have ptsd and terrible anxiety over tornados and storms in general, but God's helping me get through it 🙌
Oh wow! Thank you for sharing your story! That must have been a terrifying experience! And at age 8, wow! I am thankful you and your family made it out unscathed :) thank you for sharing 😊 and thank you for watching!!
I remember as a kid looking forward to the annual airing of this movie on TV before the VCR era. Mia, someone once gave me the tip to watch this movie but focus on the dog Toto. His trainer Carl Spitz is just off camera giving him hand signals. Watching the movie this way gives you a totally different perspective. As you mentioned Toto's real name was Terry and was a film star in his own right, appearing in numerous films. One of the witch's guards accidentally stepped on his paw and broke it, and Judy Garland took him home and tended him for 2 weeks. As you mentioned she wanted to adopt him but the trainer turned her down. Check out his other film appearances if you get a chance!!
My Dad, who saw this in a (segregated) theater a couple years after it came out, delighted in arguing with me that the flying monkeys were the scariest things in the movie, as opposed to my terror: The bullying trees.
p.s. First Tin Man: Buddy Ebsen. After his poisoning episode, he played Holly Golightly's ditched husband in Breakfast At Tiffany's as well as his most famous role, patriarch Jed Clampett in TV's The Beverly Hillbillies.
Haha! I have heard from many people that the flying monkeys are the scariest part of the movie, but I tend to agree with you! There is a reason why trees can’t talk 😂 thank you so much for watching!
Well , I think it’s scary that someone dropped her house on a witch, stole her shoes, proceeds to see a wizard that Glinda says could help, picking up three dudes on the way, promising he must help them too. But he orders them to steal the witches broom instead. And when the witch sister tries to get those shoes, Dorothy kills her too. And everyone ignores the privilege of a little white girl , was the witch evil because she’s green? Or pissed she lost her sister and her magic shoes too? Maybe if she asked nicely, the wicked witch would of sent her back from Munchkinland. Never trust a baby talking adult in pink sparkly gowns., that sends you off to meet a strange old man all alone, especially without knowing how to use the stolen shoes she gave you. Glinda the good? Ehh. Helping innocents? Not really. She didn’t send her home in the end. The shoes did. Anyways……
“L. Frank Baum's novel is considerably more gruesome than MGM's rendition. For example, "Kalidahs" (tiger-bear hybrids) are dashed to pieces in a crevasse, the Tin Man uses his axe to chop off the heads of a wildcat and forty wolves, bumblebees sting themselves to death against the Scarecrow, and the Wizard orders the four to actually kill the Wicked Witch of the West, not simply to retrieve her broomstick.”
In the book, Glinda was the Good Witch of the South. The Good Witch of the North was never named. She appears in the first book, but from the second one on, Glinda is the primary Good Witch, with the Witch of the North rarely seen or mentioned. Because of this, the movie combined the two characters into one.
Also the end when Dorothy tells Scarecrow she’ll miss him most of all that gets me every time, sorry for all these late comments I’m getting caught up!
Ugh they were supposed to have a love story , so glad it got rewritten. So sick of love stories in everything. My fantasy life doesn’t include love stories. Oh well
Thank goodness you saw though the film and it's great messages :) Alot of people fail to see the incredible messages from this film. They are always asking: "why didn't glinda told dorothy about the slippers sooner" well. Dorothy was constantly asking for help in the beginning of the film. And if she would had gone home sooner, she would had remained the same. But as she traveled down the yellow brick road, she helped people other than herself, she freed the winkies from the tyranny of the wicked witch, and she made the wizard coming out of the curtains as his true self. Then dorothy gave that speech to glinda before finding out the slippers was the way home to show how she now changed. All by herself, without the help of her aunt, uncle or the three of her friends. Great message huh? Well. Many people watch the wizard of oz without understanding the messages.
So, from what I heard (I think from my mom), colored filters didn't come out to the world until they were filming the scenes on Oz. The whole movie was supposed to be in that sepia filter, however the film crew got their hands on colored filter when it came out and filmed with it for the rest of the movie. So that's why it's all sepia in Kansas and all colorful in Oz. Don't quote me on this, though.
Hmmm. Who knows. But color films were big in the silent era too. Just blue screen or red or yellow. Not truly colorful, but colored anyways. I thought they planned it in color all along. It was all the rage by the 30’s, but not exactly new.
“The digitally restored and converted 3D version of this film, which was first released in September 2013, according to publicity for the picture, the oldest film ever to be converted to 3D.”
“The movie garnered two more achievements when it was reissued in 1949 (first in a limited release in April, then expanded to a wide release in June). The picture made more money on this release than on its original one, and reassessments by film critics were near-universally adoring. Enthused TIME magazine in its May 9, 1949 edition: "The whimsical gaiety, the lighthearted song and dance, the lavish Hollywood sets and costumes are as fresh and beguiling today as they were ten years ago when the picture was first released. Oldsters over ten who have seen it once will want to see it again. Youngsters not old enough to be frightened out of their wits by the Wicked Witch (Margaret Hamilton) will have the thrill of some first-rate make-believe ('We're off to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz...')."
More Wizard of Oz trivia: During ‘If I Only Had a Heart’ when an offscreen voice asks ‘Where fore art thou, Romeo?’ I read that the actress who supplied the voice was Adriana Caselotti. She did the voice for Snow White in the Disney film. If you watch carefully after Dorothy hits the Cowardly Lion and he starts sobbing you will see Judy Garland hide her face in Toto in an attempt to stifle her giggling. In the book, the Emerald City was a complete fake. Everything was white, not green. Everybody who entered the city had to wear green-tinted glasses to make it appear green.
Oh wow! Yeah I also read about the voice of Snow White! I love that they did that! Also, when I was editing, I totally noticed when she stifled a laugh 😂😂 I was laughing right along with her 😂😂 I didn’t know about Emerald City! That is so cool! I love to see all of the differences between the book and the movie 😊😊 thank you for sharing your insight 😊😊
@@MoviesWithMia one last trivia: upon receiving his diploma the scarecrow attempts to quote the Pythagorean Theorem but gets it wrong. The correct math is: the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.
Margaret Hamilton was out of commission for six months after her burn injuries. First day back on set, they ask her to get on the broom with the black smoke coming out of it. She said absolutely not. So they got her double to do it, and the broom exploded. 😳 In all honesty, MGM does not deserve this film for all the hell they put their actors through.
Oh wow! Yeah there were a lot of things like that that happened on set! Wild, right? Yeah, I wish there were precautions put in place to protect the actors, but it was the 1930’s after all 😂
“In the earlier drafts of the script, the writers often created new incidents to liven up the story. The original idea was to turn the story into a slapstick musical comedy, so there were a few deviations from what was written in the book. Some of the earlier scripts included a son for the Wicked Witch of the West whom she wanted to put on the throne of Oz, a stuck-up niece for Miss Gulch, a rescue from the Wizard's balloon by the Munchkin fire department, a singing princess and her cowardly suitor who gets transformed into a lion, a rainbow bridge that the witch constructs as a trap for Dorothy, and a romance between Dorothy and one of the farmhands. When the script got too bogged down, however, writers Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf would turn to L. Frank Baum's book for inspiration, and the result was closer to the whimsical fantasy Baum had written.”
I think Toto/Terri is the best animal actor I've ever seen. She's so involved in every scene she's in, from the singing and dancing scenes to just walking down the road, she's always looking at the actors and actually feels like she's participating in everything. I only remember one scene where she's looking off camera at a trainer and that's the wizard reveal scene where they have to tie the curtain to her collar to make it look like ToTo is pulling the curtain back. Otherwise, she's paying attention to her costars, especially Judy, not to anything off camera. Pretty sure Judy spent a lot of time training Terri so she would always keep her attention on Judy, which is brilliant. I love it 💗💗💗
"Over the Rainbow" was nearly cut from the film; MGM felt that it made the Kansas sequence too long, as well as being too far over the heads of the children for whom it was intended. The studio also thought that it was degrading for Judy Garland to sing in a barnyard. A reprise of the song was cut: Dorothy sang it to remember Kansas while imprisoned in the Witch's castle. Garland began to cry, along with the crew, because the song was so sad”.
In 1939, most people were well versed in basic trigonometry to pick up on the joke that when the scarecrow gets his brains, he spouts "The sum of the square of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square of the other side." An isosceles triangle has all three sides equal. It is the sum of the squares of the two sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse (the diagonal side), known from the time of the ancient Greeks as the Pythagorean theorem.
I remember when this used to air every Easter, and they would always go to commercial break right after the lion jumped out of the window. Also in the book, Dorothy meet the good witch of the North in Munchkin Land. She was a grandmother type character. But at the end of the book Glinda the witch of the South shows up to help Dorothy go home. She was young and beautiful.
OMG! That is amazing! I also had no idea Glinda was the witch of the South until someone said it in the comments! I figured the witch of the North would be a grandmother figure! It just seems fitting :)
The original actor who played the Tin Woodman, and who suffered a severe allergic reaction to the aluminum makeup, was Buddy Ebsen. Although he ,mostly remembered today for having played Jed Clampett in the 1960s television series "The Beverly Hillbillies", during the 1930s Buddy Ebsen was a well-known dancer and singer both on Broadway and in motion pictures. He also was an actor in numerous dramatic roles, such as in "Breakfast at Tiffanys".
I would highly recommend Meet Me in St Louis with Judy Garland. Set in the early 1900s before the St Louis World’s Fair. It’s a fun look at life at the time. And introduced the Christmas classic Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
When the witch sends the monkeys to capture Dorothy in the forest, she says not to worry, she sent a bug ahead to take the fight out of them. The next scene was originally a dance number called The Jitterbug, which was a popular dance in the 30s. They cut the number to save time, but left that line in. Dvd releases included the existing video and the separate audio
My mother saw this in late 1939 at 8 years old. She and grandmother had never seen a color movie. She told me when Dorothy opened the door, and Oz was in color the audience went "Oooooo!" and started to applaud. It was unexpected! Around the mid-60s it aired on TV and my mother was so excited to show us this movie that I and my brothers and sister had not seen. She didn't tell us about the colorized part. When that scene arrived we all went "Oooooo!" too! As the oldest at 10, I was very impressed. Apparently mom was like the viewers watching you and other reactors reacting to all the movies you've never seen. She was watching us react!! LOL! Of course there weren't any subscribe buttons back then, but she did get plenty of likes from us. I'm passing on the tradition and giving you a like for showing it! 😎👍
Grouchy Marx, this one touched my heart :) Thank you for sharing this story! I could only imagine what it must have been like to be in that movie theater when they all saw color in a film for the first time! So amazing! I truly cherish your comments :)
@@MoviesWithMia Thank you for the kind words Mia. Just to clarify a bit... There were cartoons in color I'm sure mom would have seen, and it's possible (though not certain) they saw some of James FitzPatrick's colorized "TravelTalks" featurettes. But she, my grandma and probably most in the US did not expect the dazzling color in this movie.
@@GrouchyMarx understood! Yeah I wasn’t even expecting all the colors in this film! When Dorothy walked into color, I got goosebumps!!
When I was growing up we didn’t even own a TV and when Dad finally bought one it was black and white. The first time I saw _The Wizard of Oz_ was in black-and-white. The second time I saw it was at my aunt and uncle’s house on their color TV. A lot of TV shows and movies shown on TV then were still black and white so I didn’t think anything about the beginning of the movie not being in color. When the door opened and Oz was revealed in all its colors is a moment I’ll never forget. It was like seeing the movie again for the first time. And that brick road was indeed yellow.
What a sweet story! Thanks for sharing. ❤️
“When the wardrobe department was looking for a coat for Frank Morgan (Prof. Marvel / The Wizard), it decided it wanted one that looked like it had once been elegant but had since "gone to seed." They visited a second-hand store and purchased an entire rack of coats, from which Morgan, the head of the wardrobe department and director Victor Fleming chose one they felt gave off the perfect appearance of "shabby gentility." One day, while he was on set in the coat, Morgan idly turned out one of the pockets and discovered a label indicating that the coat had been made for L. Frank Baum. Mary Mayer, a unit publicist for the film, contacted the tailor and Baum's widow, who both verified that the coat had at one time been owned by the author of the original "Wizard of Oz" books. After the filming was completed, the coat was presented to Mrs. Baum.”
Actually, apparently this was NOT true but made up by the publicity dept. (Bummed me out to hear that.)
As a child I lived in a low income home. We did not have a color TV. I was aware that the film was in color but I had to use my imagination. It wasn't until 1980 that I finally got a color TV, 13". The following spring, when it's usual airing occurred, I was delighted when they got to the Emerald City, and I discovered that the Horse of a Different Color, changed to different colors!
“There was originally meant to be a reprise of "Over the Rainbow" when Dorothy is trapped in the Witch's castle. As Judy Garland would have had to incorporate a lot of acting into the song, it had to be recorded live during the take. Reportedly it reduced the entire crew to tears.”
I've listened to the audio and it's heartbreaking
A few notes: Buddy Ebsen, who originally played the Tin Man, spent two weeks in the hospital in an oxygen tent. He became ill away from the set after nine days of filming, at the same time that the first director was fired, so the rest of the cast didn’t know that he was sick, they just thought they recast the role with the new director. You can still hear him in the group sung part of “We’re Off to See the Wizard” because he had recorded all of his songs before filming began, as was standard. He became famous to later generations in starring tv roles in the shows The Beverly Hillbillies and Barnaby Jones.
Margaret Hamilton was also not the first actor in her part of the Wicked Witch, but replaced Gale Sondergaard a few days before filming started. Sondergaard was supposed to be an elegantly beautiful witch, like in Snow White, but withdrew from the part when they decided to make her a hag instead. Those of us born in the ‘60s had our minds blown when we found out that the little old lady in the Maxwell House coffee commercials of the ‘70s was the Wicked Witch!
Wow! Thank you for that insight :) I feel so bad for Buddy Ebsen! Poor guy! And it would have been WILD if the Wicked Witch was beautiful! But at the same time, it would have been sick if her beauty outshown Glinda’s! And then when Dorothy threw the water on her, that’s when she turned into a hag exposing the ugliness living inside of her! Man, I should have been on the creative team for this film 😂 I would have had so much fun!!
@@MoviesWithMia The silver looking makeup applied to Buddy Epsen was powdered aluminum that he breathed in. When Buddy got sick they booked Jack Haley for the part. The solution to the silver makeup problem was so simple it was stupid! Just mix it in mineral oil or something similar which eliminated the dust problem. It was stupid they didn't think of that before, but if they had the movie would be very different.
@@MoviesWithMia Never mind Mia. I just got to the part now where you're covering the history of the infamous aluminum powder. I shoulda' waited to the end! Duh! 👉🥴👈 LOL! I crashed out about halfway thru your cool video last night, now back on it again today!
Oh no worries 😊 I love your insight 😊
And
Coincedence Or Not
Gale Sondergaard Later On Starred On The Blue Bird With Shirley Temple Who Is For A Short While Was Considered To Played Dorothy But Since She Was Under Contract With 20th Century Fox , MGM Later On Casted Judy Garland And The Rest Is History .
As a kid we only had a black and white tv so I never appreciated the moment they first show the splendor of Oz until I was an adult and saw it in color.
The "That film's in COLOR!" reaction has happened while watching old movies like "Dive Bomber." Sometimes that continues because black-and-white prints of color movies are still shown from time to time.
10:55 11:52 12:08 12:29
Same here. It didn't stop me from watching - and loving - this film. In fact, even on a black and white TV, as a child, I "saw" the colors in my imagination, anyway.
And Secret Garden… outside the garden walls was black and white. Inside was colorful and happy
“The movie's line "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." was voted as the #24 of "The 100 Greatest Movie Lines" by Premiere in 2007. "There's no place like home." was voted #11 in the same. "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore." was 62. The latter is frequently misquoted as, "We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto."
Click your heels…. No , tap your heels together three times. And THINK to yourself…. I heard her saying it out loud!!! How did her hair get braided again? She lived through a tornado crashing her window into her head, miles of walking and dancing, flying monkeys and killing a witch. Shouldn’t she be a bit disheveled? No dirt or frizz that I can see, and the lions permanent? Water destroys perms until 24-48 hours afterwards? How did they rinse it out?….wait was that all a dream? Oohhhhh. I should go to bed. It’s over.
Obviously I wasn’t fooled by illusion at a young age. This must be magic.
15:58: The transition from sepia to color in one shot was done by having the set painted sepia, and Judy Garland's stand-in dressed in a sepia dress. When the stand-in opens the door, she steps out of frame, and Judy steps in with her blue checked dress.
OMG! That is so amazing! The work that went into that scene! And the seemlessness of the final product makes me appreciate classic cinema SO MUCH MORE!!!
Yeah! Its all practical effects! Corridor Crew on youtube talked about it in one of their videos! I came to the comments to see if anyone had mentioned that its not CG
It ain’t what you do. It’s the way that you do it.
Simple tricks are often the best
Once a year. That's how often we got to watch this movie when I was a kid. It would be played on TV exactly once, and EVERYONE watched it. It was such an event, and it's almost impossible for young people to imagine that now. But the anticipation was wonderful, and sitting down to finally step through that door into that magical transformation of the world... nothing like it. I started reading the books when I was 8, and got through all 14. I still have my copies on the shelf, and read through them every couple of years. (There were over 40 Oz books published, but only the first 14 were written by Baum.) He was trying to create a genre of purely American fairy tales, as the only ones kids in this country had back then were European. And he succeeded - they are a true fairy tale world, but so very American. Really lovely stuff. If you like fairy tales, you really should read at least a couple of them. :)
Oh definitely! I LOVE reading and I would love to read some of these books! The story sounds so interesting!
@@MoviesWithMia I think you'd love them. He also wrote a couple of fairy books that weren't about Oz, but his readers so inundated him with requests for "more about Dorothy", that he had to spent his years spinning those tales. "Queen Zixi of Ix" is my favorite of his non-Oz books. He really had a thing for powerful ladies! :)
@@MoviesWithMia The Oz books are very interesting. Oz is not a dream in the books, but a real place, and Dorothy eventually moves there.
Well don’t forget the racism and classism and violence packed into those books. But I still loved them. Never noticed things as a kid.
He did think Whites should inherit the civilized world after all. And lots of what we call bad these days.
They could have used Bert Lahr instead of the MGM lion at the beginning of the film. That would have been hilarious.
Oh I wish they would have done that! It would have been hilarious 😂
8 out of 10? You're nuts. This is a SOLID 10 hands down. It's unsurpassable.
15:24 If you'll look closely, you'll notice the Dorothy in sepia in that shot is not actually Judy Garland, but a body double in sepia makeup. And of course the door is sepia. And as soon as the camera pans away, Judy Garland steps in. So the whole scene was actually filmed in color. Anyway, that's how they did that transition without computer filters. Purely just body double, makeup, and scenery.
I think that is so intuitive! It's things like that that we don't really think about in 2021. Like that is amazing how they decided to make that shot work! so cool!
@Robert Smith yes she did, and her double’s name was Bobbie Koshay. #lookitup
@RobertSmith-rg1hxwait. We’re you there? Or it’s a joke ? There are pictures of her double….
@RobertSmith-rg1hx The camera motion, with Dorothy momentarily off-screen, indicates Garland and her double switching.
“Despite the fact she played an adversary to Judy Garland's Dorothy, Margaret Hamilton and Garland got along well on set. Garland showed off a dress to Hamilton that Garland was going to wear on stage for her graduation. However, Louis B. Mayer sent Garland on a tour with Mickey Rooney and Garland never got a chance to wear her dress on stage with her classmates. Hamilton was so angry she called Mayer and yelled at him.”
I saw in a documentary Judy said Margaret Hamilton was the only decent person to her on set.
They dyed the horse with JELL-O. It was a challenge to keep them from eating the "dye" off!😁
I've never been able to find another movie that gives me the same sense of childlike wonder this movie gives me🥺💕
I love that! This movie is so special :)
“Over 35 years after the release of this film, Margaret Hamilton revealed her approach to the character of the Wicked Witch in an interview with Fred Rogers for Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (1968). Hamilton saw the Witch as a person who relished everything she did, but who ultimately was a sad, lonely figure - a woman who lived in constant frustration, as she never got what she wanted (this is, in fact, the basis of the novel and musical "Wicked," in which the Wicked Witch of the West is portrayed as an unfortunate protagonist). In the same interview, Hamilton also famously donned the original Witch costume to explain that the witches were only make-believe, and that children shouldn't be afraid of them.”
“A recent study claimed that this is the most watched movie in film history, largely due to the number of television screenings each year as well as the various video/DVD/Blu-ray/4K releases, which have enabled children of every and all generations to see it.”
39:30 In the book, there was actually a Witch of the South, and SHE was actually named Glinda. There was a whole other act of the book after the wizard left where they journey to the South to find Glinda. But I guess for time constraints they combined both the Witch of the North and South into one (not to mention easier to just have one actress who shows up twice than two actresses who only get a few minutes screentime).
Ahh! I had no idea that Glinda was the witch of the South! And here I have spent a good chunk of my life thinking that she was the witch of the North :)
Mia Tiffany ...And it is made explicitly clear in the books that the events in Oz really happened and most certainly was not a dream.
The history of what led up to the 39 WoOz is so fascinating, there’s a book on it that i got off amazon that talks about the 1905 Broadway musical and the several silent movie adaptions.
For example, the idea of snow saving Dorothy comes from that musical, as the book had field mice rescuing her. Half the beautiful showgirls were dressed like colorful poppies, while the other half were all in pristine white, and whirled in as the snowstorm that saved her. Musicals then were more like what we would think of as a cross between current musicals, and vaudeville. They didn’t have scores but rather sang popular toons of the day. And Scarecrow and Tin Man were the stars, doing amazing acrobatic dances (which we see an example of in the Scarecrow’s cut scene in the movie in the pumpkin patch.).
Then there were three short films in the teens. But the silent movie everyone still recalled in 39 was the one from just a decade of so before. Did you every wonder why in the 39 movie we spend so much time in Kansas, 15 or 20 minutes at least, even though in the book, she’s gone from Kansas after literally one page! it’s because that late 20s silent movie spent nearly half its run time in Kansas! So much interesting history that led up to the 39 movie!
@@MoviesWithMia The original Good Witch of the North (who I don't think is ever named in the Oz books) is a grandmotherly woman who wears all white with a white pointy hat, and she's the one who initially gives Dorothy the slippers and sends her to the Emerald City. Glinda doesn't actually appear in the book until the very end, where she reveals the slippers' power to take Dorothy home. Canonically, Glinda is supposed to be slightly wiser and more powerful than the Witch of the North, so it makes better sense in the book that Dorothy not be given the information about the slippers until the end because the Good Witch simply didn't know what they could do.
who according to the stage play adaptation is named Locasta (according to Quora)
“The horses in Emerald City palace were colored with Jell-O crystals. The relevant scenes had to be shot quickly, before the horses started to lick it off.”
“Many of The Wicked Witch of the West's scenes were either trimmed or deleted entirely, as Margaret Hamilton's performance was thought to be too frightening for audiences.”
“Forty-four million people tuned into its first television broadcast on November 3, 1956.”
Fun fact, the twister was a 30 foot long muslin cloth, like the kind that is used as wind socks at airports, and they held it from a special rig in the ceiling and pumped down this dust like material to show it tearing up the ground, to the point that the stagehands working with it were coughing up black dust for awhile afterwards.
Edit: you mentioned about that smooth transition from black and white to color, and this is some of that ingenious movie trickery. There was a stand in, wearing a black and white version of Dorthys dress, and then she opened the door and stepped back, and Dorothy walks into the frame with the color dress and boom, transition complete with no jump cuts. Funny how there were simple things done then that would just be done with computers these days.
PS I hope you might take a look at 1933 King Kong, as that would have won the Oscar for special effects, if they’d had one like that back in the day lol
Oh lord! Coughing up black dust! Geez the lengths they went to to make this beautiful film! I commend every single person working on this film!! Also, yeah that transition from sepia to color looked so effortless! It is AMAZING (still blowing my mind, honestly!) how they did that!! And YES!!! I have a monster flick month planned out in the future! And Kong is on the top of that schedule!!!
In order to maximize the magic, production wanted it all in one shot. And wow, what an effective solution (and really simple, as it turns out).
Hey Mia! It is always a trip watching your reactions. Believe me, and in more ways than one.
This film is an emotional time machine in that it’s one of the few that catapult me right back to the tender young age I was when I first watched it - my pint sized self stretched out on my belly in front of the tv, my fists pressed up against my cheeks, eyes glued to the screen.
Many films can serve as time markers, recalling specific events from the past (pop songs from high school have the same effect), bringing to mind your first date, your first kiss (first sip of beer?), etc...
But Oz has a different effect. It doesn’t just reference dates and places in time; it makes me “feel” exactly how I did at that moment - it’s an emotional x-ray of my younger uncomplicated self.
How does this movie do that? Sure, it’s a “children’s film” per se. But still, others aren’t quite able to pull off that trick in the same way. So what is it about THIS film?
Could it be that it has something to do with the fact that it is one of the purest, most straightforward films of its kind? These days, films geared toward children are laced with irony and sarcasm - which is fine. It’s a different era. Parents enjoy them as much as their kids. Pixar ingeniously marketed that to full effect. And don’t get me wrong: I adore Pixar (Wall-e, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Toy Story are always duking it out for the top spot as my personal fave).
But Oz is that rare gem (emerald or ruby - take your pick) which is utterly childlike and innocent on every single level. This is reflected in its color schemes (sepia, primary colors), its story themes (good vs. evil), its good natured humor, its sweet hummable songs - it all gels together and weaves a powerful spell. And its concept and subject matter are very simple: “How do I get home?” Add to all of that the inspired costumes, set designs, and practical effects and we willingly and happily suspend disbelief.
Also, Judy Garland was my first movie crush (and maybe for a whole bunch of other youngins too). To my 5 year old eyes and ears (her singing talent was not beyond me), she was the perfect blend of cuteness and sweetness. And that cast is TOO PERFECT... they all get a chance to shine throughout.
And every time the following exchange takes place between the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man:
“Look at the circles under my eyes. I haven’t slept in weeks!”
“Why don’t you try counting sheep?”
“That doesn’t do any good - I’m afraid of ‘em!”
I still cannot never laugh; Bert Lahr’s delivery is too good.
By the way, after all my blah-blah-blah about it being a more innocent era back then, the fact is World War II officially broke out just 3 weeks after “The Wizard of Oz” was released in theaters. So how about that for a parallel? The real life nightmare of WWII was blowing up in everyone’s consciousness and wouldn’t officially end until another 6 years later.
But you know, that may be yet another thing that adds to the film’s specialness. It’s a time capsule within a time capsule. It lives in its own perfect bubble. 🌈
Wow! Thank you for your comment :) I am so glad that this movie has a special place in you memory! And wow! I never thought about it being so close to WWII! Thank you, Jose, truly, for watching and commenting :)
In 1898 Dorothy Louise Gage was born to the brother and sister-in-law of Maud Gage Baum, wife of author L. Frank Baum. When little Dorothy died exactly five months later Maud was heartbroken. Baum was just finishing "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and, to comfort his wife, named his heroine after Dorothy, changing her last name to Gale in his second book. Dorothy Gage was buried in Evergreen Memorial Cemetery in Bloomington, IL, where her grave was forgotten until 1996 when it was rediscovered. When Mickey Carroll, one of the last existing Munchkins from the movie, learned of the discovery, he was eager to replace her deteriorated grave marker with a new one created by his own monument company. The new stone was dedicated in 1997 and the children's section of the cemetery renamed the Dorothy L. Gage Memorial Garden, in the hope that bereaved families would be comforted in thinking of their lost children as being with Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz."
In the scene in Munchkinland where the three members of the 'Lollipop Guild' present a giant lollipop to Dorothy, the middle one was Jerry Maren. He lived until he was 98 years old,dying in 2018, the last member of the cast to pass. He had quite a career AFTER The Wizard of Oz. He became "Little Oscar", the spokesman for Oscar Mayer Hot Dogs all through the 1950s on TV. He continued working , mostly on TV into the 1990s, even having a role on Seinfeld.
Oh wow! That is so cool! Man what a life! Thank you for sharing :)
Didn’t he get caught embellishing his stories? One guy did for sure. It wasn’t their voices after all. Maybe he thought it was his voice all this time? Maybe it was the coroner, something like that.
“The only location footage in the entire film is the clouds over the opening titles”.
“Margaret Hamilton, a lifelong fan of the "Oz" books, was ecstatic when she learned the producers were considering her for a part in the film. When she phoned her agent to find out what role she was up for, her agent simply replied, "The witch, who else?.”
“Judy Garland would later refer to the pint-sized Oscar Juvenile Award she won at 1939's Academy Awards as the Munchkin Award.”
“When filming first started, Judy Garland wore a blonde wig and heavy, "baby-doll" makeup. When George Cukor assumed the role of intermediate director (after MGM fired original director Richard Thorpe and before it found a replacement), he got rid of the wig and most of the makeup and told her to just be herself.”
Thank you... What an amazing story ✌😎
@Robert Smith relax. You keep jumping in and contradicting facts that are established.
“Ultimately it took 14 writers and five directors to bring L. Frank Baum's story to the screen.”
@Robert Smith Mia mentioned 4 in the beginning
The part in the movie where they establish that the Bert Lahr character is a coward always bothered me. A coward would have froze but he jumped right into the pen and got Dorothy out. That was an act of courage and I always admired him for that.
I totally understand you! The way I interpreted it was that the lion always had courage within him! The only person who thought he was a coward was himself. These characters exhibited the very things they thought they lacked. All they needed was someone to show them their worth 😊
@@MoviesWithMia Exactly - that was the entire point of the story.
“No mention is ever made about what happened to Miss Gulch after Dorothy wakes up.”
My theory is that she was killed in the tornado.
@@Progger11,That explains the Witch on her broom in the tornado sequence.
Or Toto, for whom Dorothy ran away in the first place.
“Dorothy's iconic red slippers now live at the Smithsonian Institution, and are so popular that the carpet in front of the attraction has had to be replaced numerous times due to wear and tear.”
There were several pairs of ruby slippers used in the movie. Another pair used is on display at a museum in Judy Garland's home town of Grand Rapids Minnesota. Some years ago they were stolen and recently recoverd
I want Debbie Reynolds’s pair. The Arabian ones. So sassy
“Margaret Hamilton, a single mother, got into an argument with the studio over guaranteed time to work, only agreeing to take the role of the Wicked Witch three days before filming. Ironically, although she finally got an agreement for five weeks of work, she ended up working on the film for three months.”
she also spent time in a hospital for burns.
an absolute masterpiece whose groundbreaking visuals and deft storytelling are still every bit as resonant The Wizard Of Oz is a must see film for young and old alike to everyone, THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) 98/100% Certified Approved ☑️ Dorothy: THERE'S NO PlACE LIKE HOME.
Sepia scenes were filmed in black and white, and a development process replaced blacks with brown tones, chemically.
Ahhh! Very interesting! Thank you for sharing that because I just couldn't, for the life of me, wrap my mind around how they achieved that sepia tone :)
"Mood tinting" was common in B&W films, especially silent, to be easier on audience's eyes.
(One time when a silent film was restored, audiences overreacted and cried, "Ted Turner must have COLORIZED it!"...Umm, no.)
“According to lead Munchkin Jerry Maren, the "little people" on the set were paid $50 per week for a six-day work week, while Toto received $125 per week.”
As an old-fashioned male I rarely cry during movies. But I have to admit that I cannot listen to Judy Garland's rendition of Over the Rainbow without tears coming to my eyes. I love Izzy's version as well. What a sweet little dog Toto was ... the way his trainer got him to sit on the tractor seat and extend his tiny paw was SO cute.
Who is Izzy? I know Patti Labelle and Sylvester maybe sang it. But I’m old. Izzy must be young. And alive. I wish they left the slow sad teary version at the witch’s castle. You really felt that, and heard the snot in her throat.
Outside Wash.D.C. is an 8 lane highway that circles the city called the BELTWAY at one point north of D.C. a railroad overpass spans over the highway near the Mormon Temple Headquarters. That building looked like the Emerald City castle. Commuters that travel the Beltway approached the overpass with the Mormon building in the horizon. Well for years someone would sneak on the overpass and paint SURRENDER DOROTHY across the overpass. It became an amusing landmark to see for years for commuters.
Oh wow! I need to search for pictures! That sounds amazing!!!
Yes! I saw that when I was visiting my then boyfriend. We were driving to Wolftrap to see Sarah Caldwell (one of the first great female conductors) conduct the Prokofiev opera War and Peace. It was a great day and I will never forget the image of the words "Surrender Dorothy" seeming to float beside the white and gold tower.
“Lorna Luft has said interviews that her mother Judy Garland was deeply disappointed in the film, at least initially after it came out; since it was considered to be a box-office failure. It would take years for it to recoup its costs and did not really take off with audiences until CBS started showing it during the holidays every year starting in 1959.”
Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo was also a commercial failure after it was released. Took a lot of years for people to appreciate both pictures.
“Terry (Toto) was stepped on by one of the witch's guards, and had a double for two weeks. A second double was obtained, because it resembled Toto more closely. Judy Garland very much wanted to adopt Terry after the two spent so much time together shooting the film. Unfortunately, the owner of the dog wouldn't give her up, and Terry went on to a long career in films. She died in 1945 and was buried in her trainer's yard.”
Not quite right about Margaret s makeup. Miss Hamilton said they did a perfect take before lunch and the one after lunch, when people were full and sleepy, the elevator operator's timing was off. She held the broom to her face and that is what caught fire, burning her face and hand. The danger with the makeup was that the copper was toxic to her under layers of skin that were exposed by the burns. The makeup man had to clean the makeup off the burned skin. Miss Hamilton said it was the most painful experience of her life. She was hospitalized and thought about suing but figured she would never work again if she did.
The Good Witch's bubble was done by shooting a big glass ball, like an oversized Christmas ornament, and moving the camera toward it or away from it.
The large crystal ball was really a half ball, like a large bowl on its side and the images were projected into it.
The sky writing was done in a shallow glass tank with the camera pointing up. The sky was blue liquid with white (milk?) Fed into it for a cloud effect. The writing was done by a tech with a hypodermic needle with a tiny witch on it. He would dip it in the tank and write the letters backward while squeezing out the black liquid.
Talk about danger, they did one effect, I don't remember which, was done on a pool of mercury.
Read The Making of the Wizard of Oz by Aljean Harmetz.
Great fun!
Very interesting! Thank you for your insight!
There’s a picture book too. Lots of behind the scenes
“The "tornado" was a 35-foot-long muslin stocking, spun around among miniatures of a Kansas farm and fields in a dusty atmosphere.”
Here’s an interesting trivia fact: The day that Judy Garland died (June 22, 1969), there was a tornado in Kansas.
How ironic is that? 🙃
Wow! Yeah totally ironic 😂
This sure has been a fun month following your channel so far.
I watched The Wizard of Oz a lot as a kid, along with Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Honestly, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang keeps getting worse and worse as I get older, but the other two keep getting better and better. Not only are they both technical wonders (it's miraculous they looked as good as they did, given the circumstances) but they also engender this feeling of warmth and charm that's near impossible to pull off without feeling artificial or saccharine, especially in this more cynical day and age.
Wow! Thank you so much for watching, Ray :) I agree with you! I enjoy watching these musicals so much! They feel so warm and fun, definitely not something that you’ll find in today’s day and age!
Loved your reactions and your research, Mia. As a Baby Boomer, I first saw "The Wizard of Oz" on television in 1959. It was a family event, with my parents and my younger brother gathered around the set. Because it was only aired once a year, it became a family tradition. Of course, when it was on DVD, my son and I watched it together. I still love this movie today.
FYI: Judy Garland's signature song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was nearly cut from the movie. However, Arthur Freed believed in this song so strongly that he told the powers that be, "The song stays or I walk." The song stayed.
June 10 of this year marks Judy Garland's 100th birthday. Happy Birthday Judy!
“Dorothy's hair changes lengths throughout the course of the film, most noticeably in the Scarecrow cornfield sequence, which was the first sequence to be shot. As production progressed, refinements were made to Judy Garland's hair and makeup. At the end of filming, reshoots were done of the cornfield sequence and, thus, the shots do not match. The reshoots are believed to have been done by King Vidor, who also directed the Kansas sequences, including "Over the Rainbow", after director Victor Fleming left the production to direct Gone with the Wind (1939).”
Her curls were not her real hair. The tight curls drop and appear long. That’s the first thing I noticed as a kid. The ending hairstyle is a fall or half wig. Very inconsistent styling but they tried.
“Ranked #1 on the American Film Institute's list of the 10 greatest films in the genre "Fantasy" in June 2008.”
“When the Witch tries to get off the ruby slippers, fire strikes her hands. This "fire" was apple juice.”
When I was a kid we watched it annually and then would act it out for weeks afterward. We had a black and white tv, one year our parents sent us down the street to visit a neighbor with a color tv during the commercial break between the tornado and Oz. It was amazing to see in color, but when it went back to sepia, I didn't even notice. I was 3. It was several years before I saw the whole film in color that I realized it started and ended in sepia.
Haha wow! It is so cool to hear your story! Nowadays everything is so accessible that we forget what a treat it was to be able to catch a film when it was being aired! Thank you for your insight :)
Simpsons did this joke
-"The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side."
-"THAT'S A *RIGHT* TRIANGLE, YOU IDIOT!"
-"D'OH!"
OMG! I remember this episode! I used to watch it with my grandpa!! Hahaha wow how hilarious 😂
Director Victor Fleming and the wardrobe department picked out a coat for actor Frank Morgan to wear as the Wizard. One day Morgan turned one of the pockets inside-out and discovered a label that said the coat had been made for L. Frank Baum.
They originally wanted to cast Shirley Temple as Dorothy. It would have been an entirely different movie. Temple was typecast as a cute little kid. Also, Garland was a much better singer than Temple.
It was Buddy Ebsen who was originally cast as The Tin Man. Ebsen is best known today as Jed Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies.
Margaret Hamilton was a kind woman who loved children. It bothered her that children were afraid of her after this movie came out.
The actors who played the Munchkins were from Europe. Many were Jewish, and they stayed in the U.S. rather than return to face Nazi Germany.
The horses in Emerald City were colored with Jell-O mix. They had to shoot the scenes quickly before the horses licked it off.
Toto got $125 a week. The Munchkins each only got $50 a week.
Yip Harburg wrote the lyrics to all the songs, and Harold Arlen wrote the music. Both wrote a large number of other songs, and wrote some together apart from Wizard of Oz, including It's Only a Paper Moon. They'd have worked more together, except that Harburg drove Arlen crazy with his political opinions. Harburg was a socialist. It's not that Arlen disagreed with Harburg, but that Harburg wouldn't shut up about it.
Harburg also wrote:
April in Paris
Brother Can You Spare a Dime?
Arlen is considered one of the all-time great American songwriters - some of his best are
Accentuate the Positive
Come Rain or Come Shine
Get Happy
I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues
One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)
Stormy Weather
That Old Black Magic.
The song Over the Rainbow was almost cut from the movie. It's a slow number, and they thought the movie was too long. Fortunately, they left it in. Otherwise it would have been lost to history. In 2004 the American Film Institute ranked it #1 in their list of 100 Greatest Songs in American Films. It was also named The Song of the Century by the National Endowment for the Arts.
The movie was shot with the Technicolor three-strip process. This system produced three black-and-white negatives for each frame, one representing red, one blue, and one green. The final print was made with a complicated dye transfer process. Because black-and-white negatives don't fade, it's always possible to get an accurate color print from the negatives. This is a big reason the colors are so rich for a film made in 1939.
Many old movies were shot with a 4:3 aspect ratio, so when TV was new they made the screens to the same ratio so that movies could be shown on them. But the movie studios were worried about competition from TV, so they started using wide screen formats. Cinemascope was capable of an 8:3 aspect ratio (twice as wide as TV). Digital TVs have an aspect ratio of 16:9.
"But Oz never did give nothing to The Tin Man,
"That he didn't, didn't already have."
- The Tin Man by the band America
Wow! So many cool facts! Thank you for the insight :)
the change from sepia to technicolor was accomplished very easily. the inside of the house was painted sepia, and judy's stand-in was wearing a brown dress - she's the one who opens the door, then backs out of camera range. judy was wearing a blue dress, and she' then walked forward through the door into technicolor muchkinland - it was all done in one camera shot.
@ 29:00 LOL! Especially a lion with a Brooklyn accent! 😆
Hahaha “the nooive” hahaha 😂
The Wizard of Oz was always a favorite of mine in my childhood and it is hands down one of the most beautifully made movies ever made. It was so many specials effects that were very unique for its time. Also a fun fact about Margaret Hamilton; her character, The Wicked Witch of the West, only got 12 minutes of screen time because some of her acting scenes would have been considered "too frightening for audiences". But she still managed to pull it off as the world's most iconic villain. Not to mention, she was also the only actor who is best friends with Judy Garland.
12:26 Buddy (Jed Clampett/Barnaby Jones) Ebsen was cast as Tin Man. He breathed in aluminum powder when they applied it to his facial make-up, and really messed-up his lungs for months. The part got recast with Jack Haley, and they mixed the powder into the liquid make-up for him, so no problems emerged again.
Oh wow! Poor Buddy! That must have been awful!
"I saw you tinkering with that contraption, Hickory" - What contraption? In one deleted scene, the Jack Haley farmhand was supposed to be inventing his own homemade anti-tornado device, "a machine with a heart!"...Which promptly blows up.
(But some day, they'll erect a statue to him in this town!)
Oh that would have been such a cute scene! I wish they would have left it in!
@@MoviesWithMia I do, too. That was what set him up as the "heartless" Tin Man!
The machine was made out of scrap metal. And, he told Dorothy to have more of a heart and have pity on Miss Gulch.
“Judy Garland could only do 4 hours on set as she was at school at the time and did 3 hours being educated when she was not playing Dorothy.”
“Dorothy, The Scarecrow and The Tin Man meet The Cowardly Lion and Dorothy hits him on the nose for chasing Toto, making him cry. Judy Garland breaks character and laughs at Bert Lahr, covering her laughter into Toto's nose. (This is at the exact midpoint of the movie, 0:50:53.) She recovers quickly and goes on with the scene.”
The reason why the image quality is so good is because the movie was shot on physical film (celluloid). Many of today's movies are shot digitally and are made up of pixels. I'm admittedly not an expert on the matter myself, but I think that's more or less the reason!
Wow! That is so cool just to know that the way wasn’t always digital! Thank you for sharing that insight :)
Well my original vhs is not so rich or bright. I think the remastering is the reason.
They restored it to modern standards. The technicolor is tricky since it’s three colors I think. Dorothy’s hair looks more auburn and dull , her dress looked solid blue, and her top was pinkish,and everything kind of blended color wise. And lots of flares, popping, hairs, swirls,faded spots. That’s on the film. They erased the flaws.
The Wizard of Oz was put in The National Film Registry and is one of the most seen films in film history. This is my favorite movie from my childhood days. They picked the right person when they picked Judy Garland to be Dorothy.
“If you look closely, the door the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion rescue Dorothy through isn't the same as the one Dorothy enters the Hourglass Room through. This is due to the deletion of an entire scene in which the room the heroes enter (following the sound of someone humming "Somewhere Over The Rainbow") holds not Dorothy but the Wicked Witch of the West! She paralyzes the heroes, then creates a false Rainbow Bridge from that room to Dorothy's. She sends a Winkie out to test it . . . he falls through the center of the bridge. She then magically compels our three heroes to call out to Dorothy, who runs onto the bridge . . . and is carried across by the magic slippers! Our friends are reunited, and (released from the witch's spell by love/the slippers, whichever) run out of the room, with the witch screaming, "Stop them!" behind them. The scene was cut both for technical reasons--they couldn't pull off a good Rainbow Bridge--and because seeing a Winkie falling to his presumed death was considered too likely to incur the wrath of the Hays Office, the industry's official censors.”
“The film received a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records as the film to which a live-action sequel was produced after the longest period of time--Return to Oz (1985) was released 46 years later.”
There is a tv movie called The Dreamer Of Oz, about L. Frank Baum's life and how the Wizard of Oz came to be. It started John Ritter and Annette O'Toole as his wife Maud Gage, with Rue McClanahan as his mother-in-law, Matilda Gage who was a famous suffragist. Frank Baum was not a success at a multitude of jobs, but he made up stories for his kids, which led to writing books.
Wow I definitely gotta check that out! Thank you for recommending!
The whole backstory for this movie is pretty much a PSA for actors' unions
Your movie knowledge for someone so young is very impressive. I really enjoy watching your reaction videos. Keep up the great work.
I appreciate that! Thank you for watching :)
That was fun Mia, and an excellent review I might add. I learned a few things about it from you. Couple of things to mention; @ 38:28 if you haven't seen "Jumanji" with Robin Williams do yourself a BIG favor and watch it! The scene of the flying monkeys bouncing up and down reminded me of it. You'd just have to see it, and it's a movie right up your alley! Like Casablanca, this movie has so iconic phrases like "We're not in Kansas anymore" and "There's no place like home", etc. The one that stands out for me is, "Pay NO attention to that man behind the curtain!" LOL! Anyway, nice review and looking forward to watching more of your videos. I did link your Casablanca video in another reactor's comment room where somebody was looking for "...a reactor who does old B&W movies like Casablanca." Hope you landed another subscriber there. ✌️😎
Hey Grouchy Marx! I glad you like the video :) I have seen Jumanji, but I need to watch it again 😅 such a great film! It used to scare me as a kid, but as an adult, I absolutely adored it!!! And YES!! HAHAHA “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” 😂 hilarious!! Thanks as always for your comment :)
the effects in ten commandments and ben hur are timeless
Ooh! I really want to watch Ben Hur! Thank you for recommending :)
@@MoviesWithMia a lot of hoopla over the recent remake but I like the original effects and story so so so much better
@@MoviesWithMia so both and I definitely recommend the 10 Commandments more!! Much much more epic scenes
@ 43:22 What's amusing about that scene is the scarecrow is wrong about an isosceles triangle! It was after studying trigonometry in high school and college, I realized later he was off a bit!! LOL!
Hahaha! I would have never have picked up on that! I was terrible at math in High School!!
I'm in my 40s and very vividly remember those special nights in the early to mid 80s when I was a kid and the whole family would watch The Wizard of Oz once a year. I fell in love with it right away. And the excitement of it being on just once a year was palpable. I loved those days. I know pretty much everything about the movie today and I LOVE how much YOU love it, too!!! I really enjoyed watching your video (and decided to subscribe!)
I memorized all the great lines from this and am a member of the Wizard of Oz Fan Club, even at age 70. Also have all the characters as christmas Tree Ornaments
“To compensate for the extreme make-up demands on this film, MGM recruited extra help from the studio mail room and courier service. As most of the Oz extras required prosthetic devices (false ears, noses, etc.), and since application of prosthetics requires extensive training, the recruited make-up artists were each instructed in one area of prosthetic application and then formed an assembly line. Each extra would then move from one station to another to complete make-up application each morning.”
I grew up watching this on CBS television. They broadcast it once a year and it was a very special event for us. Because we didn't have a color TV I never knew it was a color movie till years later!
Grainy scratchy popping with many flaws right? Skips and flares? That’s what I remember. The film was worn heavily by the 80’s for sure. Never saw it on the big screen.
“The Munchkins are portrayed by The Singer Midgets, named not for their musical abilities but for Leo Singer, their manager. The troupe came from Europe, many of them were Jewish and a number of them took advantage of the trip to stay in the US in order to escape the Nazis. Professional singers dubbed most of their voices, as many of the Midgets couldn't speak English and/or sing well. Only two are heard speaking with their real-life voices--the ones who give Dorothy flowers after she has climbed into the carriage.”
“While filming the scene in which Dorothy slaps the Cowardly Lion, Judy Garland got the giggles so badly that they had to take a break in shooting. The director, Victor Fleming, took her aside, gave her a quick lecture, and then slapped her. She returned to the set and filmed the scene in one take. Fleming was afraid that this would damage his relationship with Garland and even told a co-worker he wished that someone would hit him because of how bad he felt, but Garland overheard the conversation and gave him a kiss on the nose to show that she bore no hard feelings. In the film she can still be seen to be stifling a smile between the lines "well, of course not" and "my, what a fuss you're making." (This is at the very mid-point of the movie, 0:50:53.)
I don't care if he felt bad. He deserved to get bad. He was a phlegmwad. Victor Phlegmwad.
New subscriber here! I'm loving your reactions. It's so rare to see old classics get this much attention.
Wizard Of Oz is one of my favorite films. I was in love with it and watched it over and over as a kid.
Personal fun facts: Dorothy and Scarecrow are my OTP, and I honestly believe the theory that Glenda was the villain all along 😁
Also, you mentioned not knowing what it was like to be in a tornado, but I've been through tornados before. (From the Midwest USA here.) The most notable tornado was when I was 8 years old in May 2008.
My city was hit by an EF5 tornado (the highest rating on the tornado meter.)
I and my family just made it inside as the twister was coming and we huddled in the basement as the tornado went over us.
There's really no way to explain it other than comparing it to like being under a freight train. You hear the deafening roar, debris flying, things being ripped to shreds, and all the oxygen feels like it's being sucked from the air.
We stayed clustered together praying over the sound of the storm until it was over and everything became quiet.
Thank God my whole family was okay, but our house was demolished. We lived in hotels, in trailers, and with other family members for months until we rebuilt and got to move into our unfinished home.
I still have ptsd and terrible anxiety over tornados and storms in general, but God's helping me get through it 🙌
Oh wow! Thank you for sharing your story! That must have been a terrifying experience! And at age 8, wow! I am thankful you and your family made it out unscathed :) thank you for sharing 😊 and thank you for watching!!
I remember as a kid looking forward to the annual airing of this movie on TV before the VCR era. Mia, someone once gave me the tip to watch this movie but focus on the dog Toto. His trainer Carl Spitz is just off camera giving him hand signals. Watching the movie this way gives you a totally different perspective. As you mentioned Toto's real name was Terry and was a film star in his own right, appearing in numerous films. One of the witch's guards accidentally stepped on his paw and broke it, and Judy Garland took him home and tended him for 2 weeks. As you mentioned she wanted to adopt him but the trainer turned her down. Check out his other film appearances if you get a chance!!
My Dad, who saw this in a (segregated) theater a couple years after it came out, delighted in arguing with me that the flying monkeys were the scariest things in the movie, as opposed to my terror: The bullying trees.
p.s. First Tin Man: Buddy Ebsen. After his poisoning episode, he played Holly Golightly's ditched husband in Breakfast At Tiffany's as well as his most famous role, patriarch Jed Clampett in TV's The Beverly Hillbillies.
p.p.s Poppies provide the essential ingredient in heroin. And yeah, it only works on folks made of flesh, leaving out Scarecrow & Tin Man.
Haha! I have heard from many people that the flying monkeys are the scariest part of the movie, but I tend to agree with you! There is a reason why trees can’t talk 😂 thank you so much for watching!
Well , I think it’s scary that someone dropped her house on a witch, stole her shoes, proceeds to see a wizard that Glinda says could help, picking up three dudes on the way, promising he must help them too. But he orders them to steal the witches broom instead. And when the witch sister tries to get those shoes, Dorothy kills her too. And everyone ignores the privilege of a little white girl , was the witch evil because she’s green? Or pissed she lost her sister and her magic shoes too? Maybe if she asked nicely, the wicked witch would of sent her back from Munchkinland. Never trust a baby talking adult in pink sparkly gowns., that sends you off to meet a strange old man all alone, especially without knowing how to use the stolen shoes she gave you. Glinda the good? Ehh. Helping innocents? Not really. She didn’t send her home in the end. The shoes did. Anyways……
And remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart ❤ will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.
But...but I still want one
Thank you. Most reactors to this wonderful film leave that part out.
“L. Frank Baum's novel is considerably more gruesome than MGM's rendition. For example, "Kalidahs" (tiger-bear hybrids) are dashed to pieces in a crevasse, the Tin Man uses his axe to chop off the heads of a wildcat and forty wolves, bumblebees sting themselves to death against the Scarecrow, and the Wizard orders the four to actually kill the Wicked Witch of the West, not simply to retrieve her broomstick.”
In the book, Glinda was the Good Witch of the South. The Good Witch of the North was never named. She appears in the first book, but from the second one on, Glinda is the primary Good Witch, with the Witch of the North rarely seen or mentioned. Because of this, the movie combined the two characters into one.
Oh I just said that up above. I’m late to the chat
“One early script had Aunt Em as the abusive witch who wanted to kill Toto to punish Dorothy.”
Man! That would have been very intriguing to see 🤔
Also the end when Dorothy tells Scarecrow she’ll miss him most of all that gets me every time, sorry for all these late comments I’m getting caught up!
Ugh they were supposed to have a love story , so glad it got rewritten. So sick of love stories in everything. My fantasy life doesn’t include love stories. Oh well
Thank goodness you saw though the film and it's great messages :) Alot of people fail to see the incredible messages from this film. They are always asking: "why didn't glinda told dorothy about the slippers sooner" well. Dorothy was constantly asking for help in the beginning of the film. And if she would had gone home sooner, she would had remained the same. But as she traveled down the yellow brick road, she helped people other than herself, she freed the winkies from the tyranny of the wicked witch, and she made the wizard coming out of the curtains as his true self. Then dorothy gave that speech to glinda before finding out the slippers was the way home to show how she now changed. All by herself, without the help of her aunt, uncle or the three of her friends. Great message huh? Well. Many people watch the wizard of oz without understanding the messages.
Victor Fleming ended up directing 2 of the most important films of 1939. It's surprising to me that he isn't more famous.
I know!! I can’t believe he isn’t talked about these days!
So, from what I heard (I think from my mom), colored filters didn't come out to the world until they were filming the scenes on Oz. The whole movie was supposed to be in that sepia filter, however the film crew got their hands on colored filter when it came out and filmed with it for the rest of the movie. So that's why it's all sepia in Kansas and all colorful in Oz. Don't quote me on this, though.
Hmmm. Who knows. But color films were big in the silent era too. Just blue screen or red or yellow. Not truly colorful, but colored anyways. I thought they planned it in color all along. It was all the rage by the 30’s, but not exactly new.
And filters.? I think the film itself is colored, not the filter.
“The digitally restored and converted 3D version of this film, which was first released in September 2013, according to publicity for the picture, the oldest film ever to be converted to 3D.”
“The movie garnered two more achievements when it was reissued in 1949 (first in a limited release in April, then expanded to a wide release in June). The picture made more money on this release than on its original one, and reassessments by film critics were near-universally adoring. Enthused TIME magazine in its May 9, 1949 edition: "The whimsical gaiety, the lighthearted song and dance, the lavish Hollywood sets and costumes are as fresh and beguiling today as they were ten years ago when the picture was first released. Oldsters over ten who have seen it once will want to see it again. Youngsters not old enough to be frightened out of their wits by the Wicked Witch (Margaret Hamilton) will have the thrill of some first-rate make-believe ('We're off to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz...')."
More Wizard of Oz trivia: During ‘If I Only Had a Heart’ when an offscreen voice asks ‘Where fore art thou, Romeo?’ I read that the actress who supplied the voice was Adriana Caselotti. She did the voice for Snow White in the Disney film.
If you watch carefully after Dorothy hits the Cowardly Lion and he starts sobbing you will see Judy Garland hide her face in Toto in an attempt to stifle her giggling.
In the book, the Emerald City was a complete fake. Everything was white, not green. Everybody who entered the city had to wear green-tinted glasses to make it appear green.
Oh wow! Yeah I also read about the voice of Snow White! I love that they did that! Also, when I was editing, I totally noticed when she stifled a laugh 😂😂 I was laughing right along with her 😂😂 I didn’t know about Emerald City! That is so cool! I love to see all of the differences between the book and the movie 😊😊 thank you for sharing your insight 😊😊
@@MoviesWithMia one last trivia: upon receiving his diploma the scarecrow attempts to quote the Pythagorean Theorem but gets it wrong. The correct math is: the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.
I noticed she wasn’t on the recorded original version. Less sound effects too. Never noticed the giggle!
Margaret Hamilton was out of commission for six months after her burn injuries. First day back on set, they ask her to get on the broom with the black smoke coming out of it. She said absolutely not. So they got her double to do it, and the broom exploded. 😳
In all honesty, MGM does not deserve this film for all the hell they put their actors through.
Oh wow! Yeah there were a lot of things like that that happened on set! Wild, right? Yeah, I wish there were precautions put in place to protect the actors, but it was the 1930’s after all 😂
The year 1939 produced a lot of classic movies. There was something very special about that year in Hollywood!!💖💖
“In the earlier drafts of the script, the writers often created new incidents to liven up the story. The original idea was to turn the story into a slapstick musical comedy, so there were a few deviations from what was written in the book. Some of the earlier scripts included a son for the Wicked Witch of the West whom she wanted to put on the throne of Oz, a stuck-up niece for Miss Gulch, a rescue from the Wizard's balloon by the Munchkin fire department, a singing princess and her cowardly suitor who gets transformed into a lion, a rainbow bridge that the witch constructs as a trap for Dorothy, and a romance between Dorothy and one of the farmhands. When the script got too bogged down, however, writers Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf would turn to L. Frank Baum's book for inspiration, and the result was closer to the whimsical fantasy Baum had written.”
I think Toto/Terri is the best animal actor I've ever seen. She's so involved in every scene she's in, from the singing and dancing scenes to just walking down the road, she's always looking at the actors and actually feels like she's participating in everything. I only remember one scene where she's looking off camera at a trainer and that's the wizard reveal scene where they have to tie the curtain to her collar to make it look like ToTo is pulling the curtain back. Otherwise, she's paying attention to her costars, especially Judy, not to anything off camera. Pretty sure Judy spent a lot of time training Terri so she would always keep her attention on Judy, which is brilliant. I love it 💗💗💗
"Over the Rainbow" was nearly cut from the film; MGM felt that it made the Kansas sequence too long, as well as being too far over the heads of the children for whom it was intended. The studio also thought that it was degrading for Judy Garland to sing in a barnyard. A reprise of the song was cut: Dorothy sang it to remember Kansas while imprisoned in the Witch's castle. Garland began to cry, along with the crew, because the song was so sad”.
In 1939, most people were well versed in basic trigonometry to pick up on the joke that when the scarecrow gets his brains, he spouts "The sum of the square of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square of the other side." An isosceles triangle has all three sides equal. It is the sum of the squares of the two sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse (the diagonal side), known from the time of the ancient Greeks as the Pythagorean theorem.
Really loved the facts !! , Great reaction ! x
Thank you, Richard 😊 I am glad you like the videos! Thank you for watching!
I remember when this used to air every Easter, and they would always go to commercial break right after the lion jumped out of the window. Also in the book, Dorothy meet the good witch of the North in Munchkin Land. She was a grandmother type character. But at the end of the book Glinda the witch of the South shows up to help Dorothy go home. She was young and beautiful.
OMG! That is amazing! I also had no idea Glinda was the witch of the South until someone said it in the comments! I figured the witch of the North would be a grandmother figure! It just seems fitting :)
The original actor who played the Tin Woodman, and who suffered a severe allergic reaction to the aluminum makeup, was Buddy Ebsen. Although he ,mostly remembered today for having played Jed Clampett in the 1960s television series "The Beverly Hillbillies", during the 1930s Buddy Ebsen was a well-known dancer and singer both on Broadway and in motion pictures. He also was an actor in numerous dramatic roles, such as in "Breakfast at Tiffanys".
I would highly recommend Meet Me in St Louis with Judy Garland. Set in the early 1900s before the St Louis World’s Fair. It’s a fun look at life at the time. And introduced the Christmas classic Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
The wicked witch couldn't be more perfect. She creeped me out so much as a kid
When the witch sends the monkeys to capture Dorothy in the forest, she says not to worry, she sent a bug ahead to take the fight out of them. The next scene was originally a dance number called The Jitterbug, which was a popular dance in the 30s. They cut the number to save time, but left that line in. Dvd releases included the existing video and the separate audio