Lunatics Radio Hour
The history of horror and the horror of history.
Lunatics Radio Hour
Episode 166 - The Dark Lore Behind The Wizard of Oz: Part 1
Abby sits down with Alex to talk through all things Wizard of Oz. From L Frank Baum's books which date back to 1900, to the 1939 classic MGM film and so much more.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the Lunatics Radio Hour Podcast. My name is Abby Brinker, and today I am sitting here with my friend Alex Goleman.
SPEAKER_02:Hey, hey, hey.
SPEAKER_00:Welcome back, Alex.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, it's so good to be back.
SPEAKER_00:And today we are talking about a topic that I knew you would be perfect to talk to about because, as friends, we have often talked about this. I think we both have a little bit of a different and unique perspective on some of the vast history that is associated with the Wizard of Oz. So I'm really excited to talk through this with you.
SPEAKER_02:I'm excited to be here. Let's do it.
SPEAKER_00:I want your perspective on this right away because I have always had this seed in the back of my head that the production of the movie from 1939, The Wizard of Oz, was riddled with all of these horrifying things. For example, there was a rumor that came to me in the 90s as a child that you could see a member of the cast or a crew or whatever, that you know, the different versions of the rumor said a different thing, committing suicide in the movie.
SPEAKER_02:Hanging themselves.
SPEAKER_00:Hanging themselves.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:You heard that too.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, absolutely. I went through and I paused the video. Just did I, yes. Just trying to make out what anyone was talking about.
SPEAKER_00:And I thought I saw it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, you know, I remember that lore. Yeah. And then I remember it could have been a bird who was in the background. And honestly, after pausing it for many, many times, I feel like I didn't see either thing.
SPEAKER_00:Well, we will reveal today what it was.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, how exciting.
SPEAKER_00:But how fascinating that this rumor about this movie from the 30s came to it's just, it's such a funny thing. And I'll say this there is a lot of dark. Dark in like an abusive production sense of the word that we're going to talk about with the movie. We're also going to talk about some hard topics in today's episode, including some abusive conditions, especially centered around food and dieting and the use of pills to control people. There's also, and I've anyone who follows us on Patreon knows this, I did a whole series last year when I read the original book, which is a delightful read. It's a children's novel. We're going to talk a lot about it today, but so much in it is so creepy and freaky and like horrifying in like, again, like a delightful way. I did a whole audio series on that on Patreon, but I just find there to be so much around early Oz in different forms that's worth talking about on this show and feels relevant to this show. Even if you might think, oh, the Wizard of Oz isn't horror. There's still some dark stuff to get into. But then also, of course, when you think about Alphabet, which I think I know way more people in 2025 are familiar with that character than previously because the movie has had such a vast, you know, response. And she's a witch. And it's really cool to talk about and think about how this character is 125 years old. I don't know, to think about how her origins versus where she is now and how popular she is.
SPEAKER_02:I I do feel like sort of the central question that even Glinda asks in the movie, and I think she asks it in the book too, are you a good witch or are you a bad witch? Yeah. That speaks volumes even. I I feel like uh the book opened a door to a good witches existing and and being part of the conversation. But to your point about the movie being sort of riddled with all of this, you know, abuse allegations or whatever whatever whatever we want to talk about there. It's so interesting when the central motif for the piece is good and evil, wickedness, and all of that. Yes. It it makes you want to look deeper into what's happening and see, you know, like, oh, finding finding examples of it, I guess, is what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_00:A hundred percent. And also, if you really want to get dark with it, which we will by the end of this, there's such similarity, I think, to what's happening in the United States right now. And listen, I'm not trying to minimize it by comparing it to a Broadway musical, but truly, there is so much similarity to what's happening in the the United States right now. And I think you leave wicked in a sense, and you feel empowered, I hope, to question authority. And to be aware that, like, to your point of like what's good and evil, like we have to be somewhat fluid as we learn more about things, and you know, and it's just like a dark time, and it feels really relevant when you think about what's what we're going through right now as a country.
SPEAKER_02:And things aren't binary, right? Like, and that's that's something that I think even wicked, which takes it takes the emotional stakes of Wizard of Oz and and raises them. I think we can agree on that for sure. Uh-huh. But it also sort of colors people differently. But but it does, right? It sort of fills in shades of between.
SPEAKER_00:Yes.
SPEAKER_02:That aren't just you're not only good, you're not only bad.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I do think that's something that feels missing right now from us as a country. It's like you're on this side or that side. And the truth is we're all people who have been consuming media and echo chambers. And, you know, I think the more we humanize people, the better. Yeah, 100%. So anyway, we're gonna get into all of it. We're gonna talk about everything from the original books, which came out in 1900, to Wicked in its film versions, which the second one is now very recently in theaters. So here we go. Let's get into it. Starting off with our sources a biography article by Colin Bertman, Judy Garland filmed The Wizard of Oz under grueling circumstances, a history.com article, Seven Surprising Facts About the Wizard of Oz movie by Elizabeth Yuko, The Dark Secrets Surrounding the Wizard of Oz by Colin Russell for Far Out magazine, a Time article was The Wizard of Oz Cursed, The Truth Behind the Dark Stories about the Judy Garland Classic, a Smithsonian National Museum of American History article by Ryan Lintelman, The Technicolor World of Oz, a Far Out magazine article by Jacob Simmons, The Story Behind the Shah, The Wizard of Oz, and Dorothy's Technicolor Dream. And of course, as always, we will link all of these sources in the description of this episode so you can check out the source material as well. In 1900, L. Frank Baum's novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was released. The original book was famously illustrated by W. W. Denslow, and the illustrations are quite striking, and I highly recommend you take a look.
SPEAKER_02:Very memorable.
SPEAKER_00:Very memorable, and actually, I believe you might know this because I am just gonna say a fact that might not be true. Some of the characters in Wicked the Musical are inspired by those illustrations, I believe.
SPEAKER_02:The costumes, at least. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. It's really cool when you read the book and you're like, oh, I saw that in the play.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, no, notably it's the one short day people. Those characters. The big, yeah, like the kooky characters that come out. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a children's novel, and it's a pretty fast and fun read, which I recommend. You read, you read the first few books.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I I did have the box set of them, um, but I can only confidently remember three. The first three.
SPEAKER_00:That's fair. I read one, and it was like I I said at the beginning, super fun. And it's fast. Like I you can read it as an adult in very enjoyable. A sitting or two, yeah. The novel tells the story pretty much as we know it, but there are some really fun and freaky deviations, and I think that's honestly why I had so much fun reading the novel, because we know the story so well. Like, regardless of what age you are, if you you know the movie so well, you know Wicked, a lot of people know Wicked. And so when you read the original, you're like, oh, I see, I see how we got where we are, but there's some really fun stuff that's a little bit different, and it's I don't know, it's like very charming to read through those little original, you know, it's not a deviation because it's the source material, but like these very quirky little beats that don't exist anywhere else.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and and if you're like me and you like when you find something you're really into, you have to know every little detail about it. When you go back to the books after, I mean, name a more iconic movie that has survived the test of time. Like every everyone knows the Wizard of Oz. Truly. But then all of a sudden there's these books where there's all these little details that aren't in the movie for whatever reason, and you feel like you're finding Easter eggs that you'd never even knew existed.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and one of the the an example of that, which I I don't know why this is the thing that stuck with me. Because there's some really weird moments, but this one, there's this chapter near the end of the novel where Dorothy and you know, crew stumble upon this, I think it's called like the dainty China Village.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_00:And it's it's literally like porcelain people that are made out of China, you know, plates, kind of that kind of material, like porcelain. And something happens and they like crack someone, and it's horrifying in a way, where you're like, wow, this was a a porcelain being that you like shattered and broke the leg off of because you were incompetent, not paying attention. I have so many questions about the logistics of a porcelain figure that's walking and moving around.
SPEAKER_02:There there is a lot of uh casual violence in the Wizard of Oz. It's something that I have thought. I mean, like we opened with a house landing on a lady, right? Like that that's just that's just the beginning. And then and then there are little bits, it seems like everywhere she goes, there's little things that just are off. Like when she goes to the China village and and someone gets cracked, which sounds horrible.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. The other one that I again is like burned into my brain is that when the wizard is giving the brain, and now I'm gonna mess it up, but like the brain and the heart, there's like these surgical scenes that happen where he like puts things into their bodies and it's quite intense. And I did this on Patreon, I like read from the chapter because it's all public domain now. But it's just like, yeah, to your point, it's like way more violent or way much more like, and then I opened up his body and put a fake brain in there because I was a fake with you know, and you're like, Oh, that wouldn't happen in a children's book today.
SPEAKER_02:And and you can you can see how it missed the cut of the movie. You were just like, uh, I guess we don't need to do that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, that might upset the audience. The first novel was so incredibly successful that Baum went on to write 13 sequels. So there's 14 books in total. There was a time when Baum wanted to branch out and write other things, but nothing sold as well as the Os series, so he kept going back to it as a way to kind of keep making money, of course. But what inspired him to write such fanciful and whimsical material? His son would later say that his father was largely inspired from his own life. We do know that growing up, Bomb had nightmares about a scarecrow chasing him across an open field.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, spooky. That is scary.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I would write a book about it too. And just before the scarecrow would grasp for his neck, he would dissolve. Like the scarecrow would just dissolve back into hay.
SPEAKER_02:That is I'm gonna have a nightmare about that now.
SPEAKER_00:In the early 1880s, there was also a fire during a production of Bomb's play Matches, which is ironic, I suppose. A spark from a kerosene lantern started the blaze. So some people also point to this as inspiration for the scarecrow's biggest fear, which of course is fire. The play The Wizard of Oz debuted on June 16th, 1902, at the Chicago Grand Opera House, marketed as a musical extravaganza. So this is a musical version of The Wizard of Oz, not of Wicked, just to clarify for everybody. Baum drafted the script and is credited as the book writer, but ghostwriter Glenn McDonough was brought on to shape and polish and, you know, really refine the story. A lot of the original music was written by Paul Tahines. The original cast boasted two popular comedy stars of the time, Fred Stone and David C. Montgomery. By the end of January 1903, it made its way to Broadway. So even from its original, right, the the first book came out in 1900. By three years later, there was a Broadway show.
SPEAKER_02:They needed more. They needed more.
SPEAKER_00:We can't get enough ever.
SPEAKER_02:No.
SPEAKER_00:So you're for are you familiar with the Wizard of Oz play?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, oh, Abby. I I did play the Scarecrow in well, see, my senior class video was The Wizard of Oz. Meaning we went around and did different scenes of the Wizard of Oz in my high school.
SPEAKER_00:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Um and I played the Scarecrow in that.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. That's super fun. So so you're familiar.
SPEAKER_02:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And do you know? I mean, is that I don't know, you know how plays work more than I know. Would that be like the same material as this from 1903, or do you think it's been updated or different over the years?
SPEAKER_02:Well, uh the play that we did was definitely inspired by the movie and had songs from the movie, Somewhere Over the Rainbow and and things like that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_02:Um, so no, I don't think it's the same play.
SPEAKER_00:I wonder if anybody is still I you know, I don't know, just be curious like what is the latest version that was ever produced of this 1903 play?
SPEAKER_02:Like, did it endure and and how much of it, how much of it exists in the movie, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, very true.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I wonder if any of the songs are from the musical.
SPEAKER_00:So I just looked it up because I didn't know. The 1903 Broadway musical, The Wizard of Oz, and the 1939 MGM film share a few character names and story ideas, but they are almost completely different works.
SPEAKER_02:There you go.
SPEAKER_00:The music is not the same. The Wizard of Oz, in its film version, was released in 1939 by MGM. The cultural impact of this movie was immeasurable. I mean, it's still it's still impacting us today. But this iconic film wasn't the first cinematic version of this story. It was actually a remake. There were two silent film versions that predate the classic, one from 1910 and the other from 1925. But the 1939 movie made a splash for many reasons. One of them being the Technicolor transition from sepia to a fully saturated color.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's like one of the best moments of any movie ever created.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I'm gonna nerd out about Technicolor a little bit because I went in a little bit of a rabbit hole about this because I was interested in it.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, great.
SPEAKER_00:So let's talk about that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, lay it on me.
SPEAKER_00:So the camera used was the Technicolor DF24 beam splitter motion picture camera. And there was actually, I say the camera, but there was many of these cameras used at the same time. And I saw, I went to the Academy Award, is that what it's called? The Academy Award Museum in LA. And they have a whole Wizard of Oz kind of artifact section.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, it's very cool, yes.
SPEAKER_00:And they have some of those cameras there, and they're huge. Like you should look up the cameras because they're so different than cameras today, obviously. But it's cool. If you're ever in LA, I highly recommend that. But The Wizard of Oz was not the first movie made in color. That accolade belongs to a film called The World, The Flesh, and the Devil from 1914.
SPEAKER_02:1914?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_00:It used a different, it wasn't technicolor, it used something called Kinema with a K. Kinema color process. And I guess that footage is largely lost, which seems to be the case because of how uh I I don't know if this is the case, but a lot of early film footage that's lost is because of how flammable the chemicals were.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The first technicolor film was a short from 1917 called The Gulf Between. The first animated feature, which I know nobody asked, but it's a fun fact, with sound and color was Disney's Snow White from 1937. So Snow White with Color came out two years before The Wizard of Oz. So color wasn't like it wasn't every movie, but it wasn't, you know, it was it was around.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I'm sure it was expensive and yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It's kind of the same thing with sound. Like the first movie with sound was The Jazz Singer from 1927, but there was still it took a little bit of time before it kind of was broadly adapted because people were used to silent films and because, you know.
SPEAKER_02:They didn't want it yet.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and it was expensive to your point.
SPEAKER_02:I I think of the sort of rough CGI, um, fully CGI movies that we got to sort of lead us into what is now just animation.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And now looking back at those movies, they feel so dated at the time. And I remember being even a child and sitting through some of them and being like, Do I like this? Do I like what this looks like? I don't know if I do.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:But now it's everywhere. That's what it is.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's interesting. And I wonder, obviously, animation is such a core, I feel like, for our childhood because so much of what we consumed as kids was animated, and then you feel like you grow up and you watch live action and Disney and Pixar, and you know, all of these studios do so much animated. But I wonder, like, one of my big critiques, I think, with films that rely so heavily on CGI is that it doesn't age well.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_00:You know, even if you watch The Lord of the Rings, or some of these movies that were so groundbreaking 10 or 20 years ago, you're like, oh, it looks like a video game now. Like it doesn't look like we've come so far beyond it, and it'll be interesting with AI and other technologies in this day and age. I don't know. I just I wonder. I wonder how it will all work out.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I know. I know. Well, it goes to show how quickly technology advances too. Although you can't be even when you're watching an action movie from the 80s, they're not using any sort of computers. I mean, maybe they are. Fact check me. But but they're relying largely on these sets and these huge, um, huge scenery pieces that are are basically the the source of excitement that um that's happening that even when you watch those back, they feel a little bit more fun and authentic, yeah, genuine. I don't know.
SPEAKER_00:I like this comes up with horror all the time because so much of horror, right? There's so many, you have to have either a practical effect or a special effect, because you're trying to achieve something that's not possible in the normal world. You're trying to cut off somebody's head or whatever. And they could be very fun to watch silly, bad horror movies, of course. But like there's movies that use practical effects that age so much better, even if they're from the 60s or they're from the 40s, or than movies from the 90s that tried to use CGI. Like you watch it back and you're kind of like to your point about being authentic, I'm out. Like I know that that's a movie, and I would much rather watch a practical effect version of that.
SPEAKER_02:Wow, like and talk about the Wizard of Oz versus like Oz and the Great and Powerful. What was what was that movie from like with Mila Kunis and Oz the Great and Powerful from 2013?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And right, and you compare, you compare how even the witches look in both of them. And it it's almost not comparable. I mean, I would much rather watch the Wizard of Oz movie.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I'm yeah, it's such a good point. I would much rather watch the original from the 30s. So MGM's first color film was The Uninvited Guest from 1924. And in 1938, a year before Oz was released, MGM actually won an honorary Academy Award for its use of color in the movie Sweethearts. But Oz was really the first movie to use color like for marketing as a way to draw audiences, like a gimmick, right? And it was successful. Even though the film was released during the Great Depression, it's still, as we know, one of the greatest successes in all of cinema. Quoting from the Technicolor article by Ryan Lintelman, quote, Technicolor wasn't a type of color film. Instead, it was a process in which a specially modified motion picture camera recorded the same scene through colored filters on three different strips of film. These strips were then processed separately and used to print colors onto each finished print of the film sent to theaters. If a movie studio wanted to make a film in Technicolor, it had to lease the company's unique movie cameras, as well as a team of two experts to help operate the complicated machine. The technology of the transition from sepia to color was something innovated for Oz specifically. This is one of my favorite fun facts about this movie. I'd be curious if you if this is new information for you. So they actually did this practically. There's a scene which I've now watched a hundred times when Dorothy, still in black and white sepia, right? She goes to open the door, and then she opens the door in Oz. Everything's colored, and she as she exits, she is in color. And we we pick her up, right, in the world of color. This was done. This wasn't done in post-production by shooting half of this scene because there's there's a continuous shot, right? There's no contactic. They painted uh Judy Garland's stunt double in sepia. You only see her from behind, but she's wearing a paint, a fully painted sepia dress. They paint the set of the house, and it's just in the world, and they just shoot it normally.
SPEAKER_02:Wow. No, I did not know that.
SPEAKER_00:It's so cool.
SPEAKER_02:It's so impressive.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and when you go to watch it, you're like, oh, it's really quick. Like it's it's one kind of shot right behind her head. You know, it's not but it's so innovative and yeah, that's cool problem solving. Yeah, and they made such a cool, powerful effect. I'm gonna quote from the far out magazine article by Jacob Simmons, quote Originally, the plan was to use a form of stencil printing in this scene, which would require the inside of the house to be manually tinted in every frame. This proved to be far too expensive and time consuming, so the old switcheroo was used instead. It's ironic that in a film praised for its use of color, great effect was made to remove the color from one of its most famous scenes. Thankfully it paid off, as the sequence still looks incredible almost a century later. The rest of the technicolor portions, which make up the bulk of the middle chunk of the movie, were an absolute nightmare. The painstaking process took over six months to film and took an entire and took a serious toll on the cast. So now let's talk about the horrors of the Wizard of Oz.
SPEAKER_02:What a good segue.
SPEAKER_00:The technicality of filming in Technicolor isn't just interesting. It helps set the stage for the plight of this production. For instance, you need a lot of light to film in Technicolor. A lot of very, very, very bright light. According to Lintelman, MGM spent over a quarter of a million dollars on electricity alone. For many years after production wrapped, the actors complained about vision damage from the bright lights on set, and many developed keelig eyes on set or kind of like pink and swollen eyes. Oh no. People fainted often on set from heat. There were more than 150 36-inch overhead lights, which were always on at the same time. When it became too unbearable, production would shut down for a few hours at a time so that everybody could cool off. And this is in LA, right? So it's hot. Hot already. It's always hot.
SPEAKER_02:Man, and I don't like overhead lights in my apartment, let alone 150. Intense overhead lights. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So because it was new technology, they had to like blast it with light, and lights are hot. Like film lights are incredibly hot. You know, and we're about to get into the makeup and the costumes that these actors were wearing, but it was a grueling, horrible set. The film was directed by Victor Fleming, also known for Treasure Island from 1934, Gone with the Wind, also from 1939, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from 1941. Fleming was actually the fourth director hired for the movie, the last to survive, after the first three left the project for various reasons. And he ended up filming sort of the bulk of of the film, but actors had to change, and and so a lot of the first few produ I think the first two or three production weeks and everything they filmed had to be scrapped essentially. Oh my god. It was just like a everything about this was kind of a cursed production.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, already such turnover. That's not good.
SPEAKER_00:That's not good. It's interesting that Fleming's two largest, most successful films, both films that impacted cinema history forever, came out in the same year. Fleming was described as, quote, violently pro-Nazi by Anne Revere. Now Revere recanted her statements later, and the accuracy of her initial statement has been disputed by other people who knew Fleming. So there's some sort of chatter that maybe she said that because she was upset about casting or something that happened, and that he was he made some kind of like offhand comment about like, you know, the UK being unable to survive Germany and the World War or some, but it wasn't that he was, you know, a a supporter of the Nazi Party, but that was a rumor of the jump. Yeah. Yeah. That was circulating for a while about him. Fleming owned the Moraga estate in Los Angeles, which at the time was a horse ranch. He often hosted Clark Gable, John Barrymore, Ingrid Bergman, Judy Garland, Spencer Tracy, Lawrence Olivier, Vivian Lee, and more of the Hollywood elite. And as we know, the Wizard of Oz famously stars Judy Garland. Garland, who was only 16 during production, was given stimulants and sleeping pills to regulate her energy and keep her thin. But sadly, and contrary to popular belief, this actually was not the first time that Garland had been given pills. And these pills were known in the industry at the time as pep pills. According to Gerald Clark's biography, Get Happy, the Life of Judy Garland, Garland's mother, Ethel Gum, started giving her daughter pills at the age of nine.
SPEAKER_02:Oh good.
SPEAKER_00:And spoiler alert, she was addicted to pills until they took her life when she was 47 years old. So her entire life, for 40 years practically, she was addicted to these pills because she was given them when she was nine. Oz wasn't Garland's only film for MGM. During her contract there, she actually appeared in two dozen MGM movies, starting in 1936 when she was only 14. The film, which was called Pig Skin Parade, was a musical and a comedy about football coaches. The studio was hypercritical of Garland's weight, and executive Louis B. Mayer reportedly referred to as, quote, fat little pig with pigtails, end quote.
SPEAKER_02:This was her at 14.
SPEAKER_00:At 14.
SPEAKER_02:Wow. And a little sidebar, a musical about football.
SPEAKER_00:Who was that for?
SPEAKER_02:Oh yeah, not uh not interested.
SPEAKER_00:Garland was put on a very limited diet that was closely monitored by studio executives. The first of several times that this happened during her career. Her diet was chicken soup, cottage cheese, black coffee, cigarettes, and diet pills. Yum.
SPEAKER_02:Wow, yeah, that's all the food groups, I think.
SPEAKER_00:During the production of Oz, memos were sent between studio executives monitoring Judy's food intake. By the time production ended on The Wizard of Oz, Judy was fully addicted to barbituates and amphetamines. Garland co-starred in many films with Mickey Rooney, who was also forced to take pet pills. Quoting from Judy herself as she told biographer Paul Donnelly, quote, They had us working days and nights on end. They'd give us pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they'd take us to the studio hospital and knock us out with sleeping pills. Mickey sprawled out on one bed and me on another. Then, after four hours, they'd wake us up and give us the pet pills again, so we could work 72 hours in a row. Half of the time we were hanging from the ceiling, but it was also a way of life for us. End quote. On top of the pills and diet monitoring, the studio controlled Garland's body in another way during the production of Oz. Judy was forced to wear corsets and they strapped down her breast in order to make her appear younger than she was. Because the character is meant to be nine.
SPEAKER_02:Nine.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Which is how that character is portrayed in every other version of Oz.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and they were considering uh Shirley Temple then, too, right? It was kind of between them.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and Shirley Temple would have been eleven in 1939. So that would have been a more age-appropriate, you know, for the way that the role was written. Of course, I wouldn't want Shirley Temple to go through as an 11-year-old, but Judy Garland did, but yeah. I'm not wishing that on her. She was also famously slapped by director Victor Fleming for giggling on set. Now there are different versions of this story, but it was well known that Judy adored Bertlar, who played the Cowardly Lion. Bert had been a vaudeville performer, and Judy thought he was warm and hilarious. Like she had kind of a special friendship with him. And there was this scene they were filming, right, where the group meets the cowardly lion for the first time, and right he becomes he's scared. And then he cries and all that. And she couldn't get over it. Like she thought it was the funniest thing, and she would burst out laughing every time he would go to cry because you know he was a very famous vaudeville performer and he was very good at what he was doing. Well, director Victor Fleming was frustrated by this. The production was behind schedule and over budget. There was a lot of eyes on this project.
SPEAKER_02:And a lot of very bright lights on the city.
SPEAKER_00:A lot of lights, yeah. Tempers were running high. So eventually he took Judy behind one of the set trees and slapped her on the face. She did not laugh in the next take. Now, there's some versions of this that, you know, I think paint him as more of an angry person, and then some that this was sort of a gentle tactic that he very thoughtfully, you know, whatever. But I'll say this. Afterwards, Victor said out loud that his number two, you know, some other guy on set should punch him in the face for what he did to her. Like he felt he immediately was like, You should punch me for that. And Judy overheard this and said that she would rather kiss him on the nose instead.
SPEAKER_02:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:So, you know.
SPEAKER_02:If if it's either or she chose the the nose.
SPEAKER_00:She rose above in the way that Victor didn't.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. It goes to show, yeah, g just give pills to nine-year-olds and they'll grow up just fine.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's right. It's hard to imagine that despite being constantly fed uppers and downers, only eating soup, cottage cheese, and coffee, and being forced into body modifying shapewear, Judy Garland, at the age of sixteen, was still able to give one of the most iconic performances in classic film history. A testament to her talents, despite the horrible and abusive working conditions that she endured. There's also this is a little bit of a side quest, but there's also a very strange coincidence that I think we need to talk about. According to the History.com article, so Balm's coat, so the writer, the original writer of 1900 novel, his coat was accidentally used in the movie.
SPEAKER_02:Accidentally?
SPEAKER_00:Accidentally. The wardrobe department was looking for the perfect costume for the Professor Marvel character, right? They were looking for a very specific coat and kind of racking through all of the options at thrift stores. According to the movie's publicist, Mary Mayer, they wanted Grandeur Gone to Seed, a tattered version of a once beautiful coat, right? So they finally found the perfect jacket, a black Prince Albert velvet coat with a purple collar. And on set, the actor Frank Morgan, who played Professor Marvel, you know, kind of between sets on a hot day, took it off and turned the collar inside out and saw that L. Frank Baum's name was written within. After an investigation, the production confirmed with the tailor who made the coat and Baum's widow that it was actually his.
SPEAKER_02:That's spooky.
SPEAKER_00:Isn't that crazy?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's pretty that's pretty strange.
SPEAKER_00:But there's a lot of other um wardrobe-related issues that were not quite so charming. Actor Bert Lar, who played the lion, had to wear a costume that was made from a real lion's hide.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, uh.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Not great. The costume also weighed close to 90 pounds. The actor struggled with the weight and the lack of ventilation. Lar would sweat so badly that the costume would need to be dried at the end of each filming day. Because remember, in these bright lights that people are passing out actively in all the time, he's in a 90-pound costume that's made of real lion's high.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he's wearing a lion. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It's horrifying. For a period of time, the actor wasn't allowed to eat solid food on set because his makeup took too long to reapply. Finally, after eating only milkshakes and soup, he requested that his makeup just be redone after lunch, and they agreed to that.
SPEAKER_02:That that seems fair.
SPEAKER_00:Like, oh my god. Why is the default that we'll just have to endure? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Although soup and milkshakes sounds pretty nice.
SPEAKER_00:What a life.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But the Tin Man costume was equally problematic. It was almost impossible to sit down while wearing the costume. The actor had to lean against a board if he wanted to rest because he couldn't bend his knees, so he was just kind of stuck vertically.
SPEAKER_02:Method acting.
SPEAKER_00:But even worse, the silver paint caused such a bad allergic reaction in actor Buddy Epson that he was rushed to the hospital and the character was recast to Jack Haley. So that was one of the big resets of the production. I mean, he had like a near-death reaction to the silver paint.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. And I mean, you're in that silver paint.
SPEAKER_00:A lot. A lot. For months, yeah. I mean, nowadays, right, you film a movie, it takes about like I mean it depends on the movie, but just from when Alan goes away on movie shoots, five weeks? This took six months.
SPEAKER_02:So long.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, they're doing a lot of things manually, too. Of course.
SPEAKER_00:The technology is much different. But it's it's quite the in in this director head, he came out with uh The Wizard of Oz and uh Gone with the Wind the same year, like two epic movies.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's kind of great. Those those are two movies that have really stood the test of time that people still love. And they came out the same I didn't realize it's the same year. Yeah. That's pretty much.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, I wonder which one was it Gone with the Wind that won the Academy Award?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Must have been, right?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I mean, right?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I would have voted for Oz. Let's see. It was the 11th Academy Awards in 1938.
SPEAKER_02:11.
SPEAKER_00:They used to be uh hosted at the Biltmore Hotel. Oh wait, hang on. Do I need to look at 1940? It was the 12th Academy Award.
SPEAKER_02:It was the 12th.
SPEAKER_00:Let's see, who won? Gone with the Wind.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Better luck next time.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The green copper paint worn by Margaret Hamilton portraying the wicked witch of the West was also an issue. The actor actually suffered from second and third degree burns after filming the fire scene. So there's a scene where Margaret disappears into a cloud of smoke through a trapdoor, which we all know and love. But the effect in, you know, one of the takes went off too soon. According to an MGM interoffice memo, she suffered from first degree burns on her face and second degree on her hands. Usually, like what they would typically do is apply a salve, which would be applied, but because her makeup contained copper and was toxic, it had to be removed first. She later described it as the worst pain of her life, and there's this quote about you know about this that she describes how she just had to like sit and endure it. Like she just had to wait for this makeup to be removed, and it was just like sitting in the biggest pain and discomfort of her life, and she was still pretty scarred by it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that that is a worst nightmare scenario.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, first uh a scarecrow chasing you across a field, that's that's a nightmare A. Yeah. But getting burned and then having to wait to take off makeup to then get relief sounds horrible. At work.
SPEAKER_00:Horrible. Like I literally was lighting a candle yesterday with a lighter and it burned my thumb. And I was like, well, I guess I'm done for the day. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Ow. Oh, you know, time for bed. That's it. Nothing nothing good can happen after this.
SPEAKER_00:But don't think, Alex, that the scarecrow got off without any costume incidents.
SPEAKER_02:Oh no.
SPEAKER_00:Not quite as bad though. Ray Bolger also suffered from deep marks and furrows on his skin from the makeup. Like the the hay and you know, indented so deeply in his body that he was left kind of with scarring for a while.
SPEAKER_02:Wow. Such issues with all this makeup.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, who was uh who was in charge of the her makeup team?
SPEAKER_02:Well, hopefully they didn't win an Academy Award.
SPEAKER_00:There have been rumors that the snow used on set was actually asbestos, but in reality, crushed gypsum was used for the snow. Quoting from the History.com article, quote, asbestos was, however, used in another part of the movie. In the scene where the wicked witch of the West lights the scarecrow, Ray Bulger, on fire, the actor wore a version of his costume made from asbestos, quoting within the quote, men with wet blankets and fire extinguishers stood out of camera range in case of a mishap, Stillman says, continuing his quote, Every time the scarecrow moved, Bulger recalled, the straw sprouting from holes in his costume had to be rearranged to exactly match the previous shot. And all quotes. There was also prejudice on set against the little people who played the Munchkins. For reference, Todo was paid more,$125 a week, than any of the cast of the Munchkins. Garland made about$500 a week on set. Ray Bolger and Jack Haley were paid$3,000 a week.
SPEAKER_02:Oh.
SPEAKER_00:So there was some pay inequality happening across the board.
SPEAKER_02:Yikes!
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Why was Toto even being paid like crazy?
SPEAKER_02:That is that is crazy to me.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. But let's talk about the rumor that most of us have heard that one of the actors playing a munchkin on set hanged themselves, which you can see in the background of a shot. The truth is, for a very long time, you could only see the Wizard of Oz when it played on TV, right? Now that there are remastered on-demand versions, you can slow down the footage and see what's actually a very large bird taking flight. It is a bird. It is a bird. And to your point about it not being either, it's because and I I did this too. I would slow it, I would try to watch it when it was playing. The quality at the time when we were young watching this was so bad, you couldn't make it out. But when it was remastered, and now that we could like pause our TV, you could see that it's a bird more clearly. But at the time, it was just a smudge, like a you could see something moving, but you couldn't really identify what it was.
SPEAKER_02:Did you ever think it was a munchkin?
SPEAKER_00:Yes.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, you did. You saw it.
SPEAKER_00:I saw it and I was like, yeah, that there's a lot of it. Totally. Yeah. But I'm also someone who like very easily believes things. I'm very gullible and don't question things enough. Working on it. I'm working on it.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I'm sure you I'm sure there's half of you that's like, oh, some sort of like uh uh exciting scandal. Some sort of exciting scandal of a beloved children's movie. I mean, right?
SPEAKER_00:There's even then I was looking for the horror in it all.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But Alex, you might ask, why is there a large bird on set?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, I guess yeah, I guess that is the next question.
SPEAKER_00:There were actually over 300 birds on set that Fleming rented from the Los Angeles Zoo. Quoting from the History.com article, quote, according to MGM publicity, the studio quote unquote rented 300 birds from the Los Angeles Zoo so that Fleming, the director du jour, could select a few to be in the background of the apple orchard scene. These birds included golden pheasants, a South American toucan, a Saurus crane, and an African crane, one of which can be seen in the film. When Dorothy, the scarecrow, and the tin man skip down the yellow brick road, a Saurus crane makes its presence known by spreading its wings, Stillman says. However, over the years people mistook the movement of the crane for something much darker. Since the 1970s, there's been a rumor of a stage hand wandering into the background of one movie scene, he explains. In recent times, that myth has become a munchkin hanging from a tree. But Stillman says that a bird is behind the confusion. Besides, it's simply not possible that none of the over fifty staff behind the camera would have ignored anything ill-fated, he adds. And it would be headlong city if it had happened.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like that does seem particularly uh salacious.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And we could we could debunk it. So production obviously was difficult to say the least. It was abusive in some ways. Everybody was incredibly stressed and under a ton of pressure. It was hot. It was plagued with disaster and different costume malfunctions. Right? It was difficult, but I also am, you know, wonder but beyond the bright light, how much of that is unique to this movie versus filmmaking it's a little bit more. Yeah, and maybe part of it is like the costumes and the makeup were, you know, creating a fantasy movie, I think, was new-ish, you know, but still, there was a lot of stuff that was happening all of the time on movies like this that were horrifying. But the contents of Oz itself is something I want to talk about briefly because again, I think pretty much everybody knows The Wizard of Oz. One of my, you know, family connections to it is that my dad was so afraid from his own childhood of the flying monkeys that he refused to watch it with us growing up. Like he did not had had no interest in watching it. But I will say he has he's has seen Wicked Part 1 and he survived those monkeys, which I think are much scarier.
SPEAKER_02:They certainly are more scary.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. But this film also does so much, and I'm not saying this to be glib, but like think about the symbol of Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West in this movie. Her hat, like, you know, everything about the way she's portrayed becomes iconic after this, especially when we're thinking about witches. And, you know, the hat and all that is in the broom and everything is not like this is not the origination of these witches elements. But like I think it takes the lore around something like witchcraft, right? And brings it into one of the most famous films of all time, and that's really interesting to me.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and and I think what you're talking about is like the caricature of the witch is is sort of permanently imprinted and in this childhood movie, in this children's movie, that then I mean, it's everything. It's the stockings, it's her shoes, up to her dress, her hat. It's like all of the pieces are pretty much there that you're just like, yes, that's what a witch looks like.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And and then it's easy to replicate that afterwards.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and so much of this movie, like it also dabbles in the occult with Professor Marvelous and his crystal ball. And of course, he's whitewashing like a Romani fortune teller, but that's you know, he's not unique to that. That's something that happened a lot at that time period.
SPEAKER_02:Um and he's a con artist anyway, so that's exactly what he's doing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. Um but yeah, there's a lot of spooky stuff in this movie. Like, it's not just it's a children's movie, but you know, it's interesting because my dad, right, was really uh scared of it. Like we, I think, grew up probably watching this and had seen enough other content around the time that it didn't, at least for me, like embed within me, right? It it felt aged even if it felt classic. But for my dad, you know, when he grew up many years before me, it was horrifying. It was a scary movie.
SPEAKER_02:Right, right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, I mean, I think that's still true. I mean, it is true, true. It is, there are parts of it that are scary and on purpose, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. When she her guards, even, right? Like, there's something very uh for yeah, they I think they do a really good job at creating real fear in those moments.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and I don't think it's a mistake that they all like march in unison and all are like saying the same, you know, like they're s humming the strange s song and they're kind of they're kind of reminiscent of another, like uh, you know, like Nazism and all of that that's brewing if not like fully happening.
SPEAKER_00:Totally.
SPEAKER_02:Um, as far as like w the war or anything, but yeah, yeah, very true. It's it it's scary.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's scary. So the the novel, right? The source material, The Wizard of Oz, has been depicted in other film versions of the story. Perhaps the most notable for a long time was Return to Oz from 1985. And you read the books, right? So this I believe Return to Oz is based on the third book.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, Ozma.
SPEAKER_00:Ozmus.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, Ozma of Oz, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Do you remember much about have you seen Return to Oz? Do you remember much about the books?
SPEAKER_02:I've seen Return to Oz. Oh yeah. Um that is a horror movie. Yeah. Straight up, straight up is not for children. I feel I I what I remember from that the most is the heads, the hall, the hall of heads. Yeah. That that was particularly upsetting.
SPEAKER_00:Which is based on the source material. Which is again why I'm like, you guys read these books. They are they are wild.
SPEAKER_02:Totally. Yeah, I remember them and I remember the chicken.
SPEAKER_00:What is the chicken?
SPEAKER_02:The chicken's her like companion.
SPEAKER_00:Oh uh.
SPEAKER_02:It's like her fr her todo. Her toto. Yeah. Yeah, they're I know like that. All the books do uh become a little bit like, oh, here's all the pieces, all like let's jumble them up and get like some new characters into it. But um, yeah, like the chickens the chicken's the new Toto, particularly. You know, she's a little like sassy. Yeah. Chicken.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, that's kind of fun. Return to Oz was released by Disney, and it's a dark fantasy, which is set six months after the events of the first movie. The film was written and directed by Walter Merch. Merch is primarily known for being a film editor and sound designer. He's worked on some major Hollywood films. American Graffiti, Apocalypse Now, all three of the Godfather movies, Ghost, The English Patient, and The Restoration of Touch of Evil, just to name a few. He's been nominated for six editing academy awards and three for sound design. Return to Oz was the only time that Merch ever directed a movie. I find it this could be like a a deep dive for another day, but I find it interesting. There's a few cases, and some that have come up recently when we were doing the Friday the 13th series and some in like Pumpkinhead, for instance, where there's a few times where you get like a movie that becomes a cult classic, maybe, but it was made by somebody in film. In those other cases, like special effects guys that then directed something, and you can kind of see that. And I think that's true with Return to Oz. Like it's weird and it relies on a lot of like sound design and visual stuff that I think merch, as somebody who does sound design and editing, was able to sort of uniquely bring to that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's cool. I mean, I the fact that he didn't direct anything else makes you wonder was this a passion project? Was this something that he was really excited about? I mean, uh how could you not be? Um another Wizard of Oz movie, like that seems pretty exciting to you know, sink your teeth into, especially as a special effects person.
SPEAKER_00:And I don't say this to this is gonna sound derogatory, and I don't mean it like that. But it's sort of like watching a movie, I feel like that's made by somebody who specializes in a different part of film. It sort of sometimes feels like when Ringo wrote wrote the song, where it's like, oh, this movie is a little bit different from other movies, and it's not bad, but it's like a little bit different. It's through the a different lens.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, a different voice, a di well, a different perspective. Yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Like they're they're usually like headier, I don't know, just like a little bit, a little bit more visually like focused.
SPEAKER_02:It it certainly didn't feel as um digestible as the Wizard of Oz, perhaps. Well, I don't even know if you could say that. I don't know if like at the end of The Wizard of Oz they look back on it and they're like, What did we do? I mean, there's a lot of stuff happening here.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, but this it feels like maybe it was for fans of The Wizard of Oz.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Right. Yeah, totally. And maybe for those who read the books.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Return to Oz is based on the novels by L. Frank Baum, primarily again on Ozma of Oz, which is the third book in the series. Except Oz is now a wasteland. The citizens are stone, the scarecrow is in captivity, and there are dark forces afoot. Dorothy ends up teaming up with a new cast of characters to attempt to defeat the wicked Gnome King and restore the magic and beauty of Oz. Ozma of Oz, along with most of the Oz books, are freaky. The book and movie feature an evil princess who swaps heads and keeps a room full of heads. Notably, Dorothy is much younger in this movie than the original. The actress playing Dorothy was about 10, which again is age appropriate for the character. So let's talk about the Ruby slippers really quickly. The Ruby slippers are from the movie The Wizard of Oz. They are not from the source material. And as such, Disney, as you know, the production company behind Return to Oz had to get uh permission from MGM to re to use them sparingly in Return to Oz because they're canon to the movie and not the original books.
SPEAKER_02:That that's why in Wicked the Stage Show, they're silver shoes. Yeah. Also.
SPEAKER_00:Fascinating. I love these little kind of like Hollywood tidbits that you, you know, you're like, oh, that's why that's silver. Okay, so speaking of Wicked, we're going to put a pin in this conversation because there's been so much to say, and come back next week and continue talking about the dark lore and history of the Wizard of Oz, but this time through the lens of Wicked. Obviously, there's many other film versions. There's so many different versions and adaptations of Oz out there. We're just talking about the hits, you know.
SPEAKER_02:Nothing but the hits.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. Alex, thank you so much for being here.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00:Of course. It's so fun to talk to you. And we will be back next week. Thank you guys so much for listening. Talk to you soon.
SPEAKER_02:Ta ta.
SPEAKER_00:Bye.
