The Lizard of Oz

This year marks the 71st anniversary of the movie The Wizard of Oz’s theatrical release. I stumbled across a blog pointing this out and I know there are tons of folks who grew up watching the movie over and over like I did. I found some really neat trivia on IMDB.com. The “Lizard of Oz” (as my nephews used to call it) is a timeless classic and I can’t wait to have kids of my own to share it with!

Judy Garland's dress and blouse were in reality not white but pale pink. True white did not photograph properly in Technicolor and made the blue of her checked dress seem too bright.

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.

Judy Garland had to wear a painful corset-style device around her torso so that she would appear younger and flat-chested.
 

Although Judy Garland was always the favorite to play Dorothy, there were many other actresses in Hollywood who were also considered to play her. Among them were Shirley Temple, who was closer to the actual age of Dorothy and extremely popular at the time.

According to lead Munchkin Jerry Maren, the "little people" on the set were paid $50 per week for a 6-day work week, while Toto received $125 per week.

"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.

At the end of the sequence in which Dorothy and the Scarecrow first meet the Tin Man, as the three march off singing "We're Off to See the Wizard", there is a disturbance in the trees off to the right. This was long rumored to be one of the crew (or, by some accounts, one of the dwarf actors) committing suicide by hanging himself, but it is in fact a large bird stretching its wings.

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.

The film started shooting on 13 October 1938 and was completed on 16 March 1939 at a then-unheard-of cost of $2,777,000. It earned only $3,000,000 on its initial release.

The ruby slippers were silver (like in the book) until MGM chief Louis B. Mayer realized that the Technicolor production would benefit from the slippers being colored.

The song "Over the Rainbow" was ranked #1 by the American Film Institute in 2004 on the 100 Greatest Songs in American Films list.

 

In the song "If I Only Had A Heart", the girl who says, "Wherefore art thou, Romeo?" is Adriana Caselotti, the voice of Snow White in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

The name for Oz was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N, and O-Z, hence "Oz."

The "tornado" was a 35-foot-long muslin stocking, spun around among miniatures of a Kansas farm and fields in a dusty atmosphere.

 

P.S. The folks over at Google changed the doodle today to this: