Movie goofs
- Thread starter mermaiden78
- Start date
cyberbeer65
Scratch Glass!
Halo said:
If I Only Had a Crane . . .
Claim: A lovelorn actor portraying one of the munchkins hanged himself on the set during the filming of The Wizard of Oz, and his death was captured on-camera and used in the final print.
Status: False.
Origins: The
so-called "munchkin suicide" scene occurs at the very end of the Tin Woodsman sequence, as Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodsman head down the road on their way to the Emerald City. This sequence begins with If they only had a brain! Dorothy and the Scarecrow trying to pick fruit from the talking apple trees, encompasses their discovery of the rusted tin man and their encounter with the Wicked Witch of the West (who tries to set the Scarecrow on fire), and ends with the trio heading off to Oz in search of the Wizard. To give the indoor set used in this sequence a more "outdoors" feel, several birds of various sizes were borrowed from the Los Angeles Zoo and allowed to roam the set. (A peacock, for example, can be seen wandering around just outside the Tin Woodsman's shack while Dorothy and the Scarecrow attempt to revive him with oil.) At the very end of this sequence, as the three main characters move down the road and away from the camera, one of the larger birds (often said to be an emu, but more probably a crane) standing at the back of the set moves around and spreads its wings. No munchkin, no hanging -- just a big bird.
The unusual movement in the background of the scene described above was noticed years ago, and it was often attributed to a stagehand's accidentally being caught on the set after the cameras started rolling (or, more spectacularly, a stagehand's falling out of a prop tree into the scene). With the advent of home video, viewing audiences were able to rewind and replay the scene in question, view it in slow-motion, and look at individual frames in the sequence (all on screens smaller and less distinct than those of theaters), and imaginations ran wild. The change in focus of the rumor from a hapless stagehand to a suicidal munchkin (driven to despair over his unrequited love for a female munchkin) seems to have coincided with the heavy promotion and special video re-release of The Wizard of Oz in celebration of its 50th anniversary in 1989: someone made up the story of a diminutive actor who, suffering the pangs of unrequited love for a female "little person," decided to end it all right there on the set, and soon everyone was eager to share this special little film "secret" with others. Since (grossly exaggerated) tales of munchkin lechery and drunken misbehavior on the "Oz" set had been circulating for years (primarily spread by Judy Garland herself in television talk show appearances), the wild suicide story had some seeming background plausibility to it. (Other versions of the rumor combined elements from both explanations, such as the claim that the strange figure was actually a stagehand hanging himself.)
The logistics of this alleged hanging defy all credulity. First of all, the forest scenes in The Wizard of Oz were filmed before the Munchkinland scenes, and thus none of the munchkin actors would have been present. And whether one believes that the figure on the film is a munchkin or a stagehand, it is simply impossible that a human being could have fallen onto a set actively being used for filming, and yet none of the dozens of people present -- actors, directors, cameramen, sound technicians, light operators -- failed to notice or react to the occurrence. (The tragic incident would also had to have been overlooked by all the directors, editors, film cutters, musicians, and others who worked on the film in post-production as well.) That anyone could believe a scene featuring a real suicide would have been left intact in a classic film for over fifty years is simply incredible.
Additional information: The sound clip below is commentary about the munchkin rumor by Oz expert John Fricke, taken from the soundtrack of The Ultimate Oz laserdisc set. The video clip show several seconds of the scene in question -- watch the middle of the screen as Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodsman head down the Yellow Brick Road.
Listen to John Fricke commentary John Fricke commentary
Video clip Video clip from The Wizard of Oz
Last updated: 13 December 1997
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/movies/films/ozsuicid.htm
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Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2003
by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson
This material may not be reproduced without permission
Sources Sources:
Doolittle, Leslie. "Really Most Sincerely, Still a Munchkin."
The Orlando Sentinel. 29 October 1996 (p. A2).
Fine, Marshall. "Defusing the Rumor of 'Oz'."
Gannett News Service. 26 April 1990.
Malcolm, Paul. "L. Frank Baum's Silent Film Collection."
LA Weekly. 20 December 1996 (p. 90).
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mermaiden78 said:yeah the little boy in the window was suppose to be a ghost!!!
It's a cardboard cut-out that Ted Danson left there. Dunno how that made it past editing though....oh yeah, thats right....That movie sucked too
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You can find that one on snopes.com also.sublime1184 said:It's a cardboard cut-out that Ted Danson left there. Dunno how that made it past editing though....oh yeah, thats right....That movie sucked too
cyberbeer65, that was the longest and most informative post I've read on here. And it didn't have anything to do with fish. 
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