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Message from: Martin Roberts (mroberts@MIT.EDU)
About: Fandom: The Wizard of Oz on the Dark Side of the Moon

Sat, 31 May 97 09:59:44 EDT


>Date: Sat, 31 May 1997 02:26:13 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Stuart Semmel <semmel@husc.harvard.edu>
>To: martin roberts <mroberts@MIT.EDU>
>Subject: RE: Forwarded mail.... (fwd)
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>
>
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 09:11:47 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Jason Morris <jmorris@husc.harvard.edu>
>To: semmel@husc.harvard.edu
>Subject: RE: Forwarded mail.... (fwd)
>
>
>By HELEN KENNEDY 5/13/97
>The New York Daily News Staff Writer
>Call it Dark Side of the Rainbow. Classic rockers are buzzing about the
>amazingly weird connections that leap off the screen when you play Pink
>Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" as the soundtrack to "The Wizard of Oz."
>It sounds wacky, but there really is a bizarre synchronization there. The
>lyrics and music join in cosmic synch with the action, forming dozens upon
>dozens of startling coincidences the kind that make you go "Oh wow, man"
>even if you haven't been near a bong in 20 years.
>Consider these examples:
>Floyd sings "the lunatic is on the grass" just as the Scarecrow begins his
>floppy jig near a green lawn. The line "got to keep the loonies on the
>path" comes just before Dorothy and the Scarecrow start traipsing down the
>Yellow Brick Road.
>When deejay George Taylor Morris at WZLX-FM in Boston first mentioned the
>phenom on the air six weeks ago, he touched off a frenzy.
>"The phones just blew off the wall. It started on a Friday, and that first
>weekend you couldn't get a copy of 'The Wizard of Oz' anywhere in Boston,"
>he said. "People were staying home to check it out." It's fun, he said,
>because everyone knows the movie,and the album which spent a record-busting
>591 straight weeks on the Billboard charts can be found in practically
>every record collection.
>Dave Herman at WNEW-FM in New York mentioned the buzz a few weeks ago. The
>response more than 2,000 letters was the biggest ever in the deejay's
>25-year on-air career.
>"It has been just unbelievable," said WNEW program director Mark Chernoff.
>"I've never seen anything like this. "
>The station plans to show the movie using the album as
>soundtrack at a small private screening tomorrow.
>Rock fans always have loved to speculate about hidden messages
>in their favorite albums. But seeking connections between the beloved 1939
>classic kid flick and the legendary 1973 acid-rock album pushes he envelope
>of the music conspiracy genre.
>Nobody from the publicity-shy band would comment, but Morris
>asked keyboardist Richard Wright about it on the air last month. He looked
>flummoxed and said he'd never heard of any intentional connections between
>the movie and the album.
>But the fans aren't convinced it's just a cosmic coincidence.
>"I'm a musician myself and I know how hard it is just to write music, let
>alone music choreographed to action," said drummer Alex Harm, of Lowell,
>Mass.,who put up one of the two Internet web pages devoted to the
>synchroneities. "To make it match up so well, you'd have to plan it."
>Morris is convinced that ex-frontman Roger Waters planned the
>whole thing without letting his fellow band members in on the secret.
>"It's too close. It's just too close. Look at the song titles.
>Look at the cover. There's something going on there," Morris said.
>Here's how it works. You start the album at the exact moment
>when the MGM lion finishes its third and last roar. It might take a few
>times to get everything lined up just right. Then, just sit back and
>watch. It'll blow your mind, man.
>During "Breathe," Dorothy teeters along a fence to the lyric:
>"balanced on the biggest wave." The Wicked Witch, in human form, first
>appears on her bike at the same moment a burst of alarm bells sounds on the
>album.
>During "Time," Dorothy breaks into a trot to the line: "no one
>told you when to run." When Dorothy leaves the fortuneteller to go back to
>her farm, the album is playing: "home, home again."
>Glinda, the cloyingly saccharine Good Witch of the North,
>appears in her bubble just as the band sings: "Don't give me that do goody
>goody bull ---t."
>A few minutes later, the Good Witch confronts the Wicked Witch as the band
>sings, "And who knows which is which" (or is that "witch is witch"?).
>The song "Brain Damage" starts about the same time as the Scarecrow
>launches into "If I Only Had a Brain."
>But it's not just the weird lyrical coincidences. Songs end when scenes
>switch, and even the Munchkins' dancing is perfectly choreographed to the
>song "Us and Them."
>The phenomenon is at its most startling during the tornado scene, when the
>wordless singing in "The Great Gig in the Sky" swells and recedes in
>strikingly perfect time with the movie.
>When Dorothy opens the door into Oz, the movie switches to rich color and
>and that exact moment the album starts in with the tinkling cash register
>sound effects from "Money."
>Anyone who has ever nursed a hangover watchin MTV with the sound off and
>the radio on can tell you how quick the brain is to turn music into a
>soundtrack for pictures. But this is uncanny.
>The real fanatics will point out that side one of the vinyl album is the
>exact length of the black-and-white portion of the movie. And then there's
>that iconic album cover, with its prism and rainbow echoing the movie's
>famous black-and-white-into-color switch not to mention Judy Garland's
>classic first song.
>The real clincher, though, the moment where eventhe most skeptical of
>cynics has to utter a small "whoa!," comes at the end of the album, which
>tails off with the insistent sound of a beating heart. What's happening on
>screen? Yep, you guessed it:
>Dorothy's got her ear to the Tin Man's chest, listening for a heartbeat.
>Maybe it's just a string of coincidences. Maybe the mind is just playing
>some really cool tricks. Maybe some people just have waaaay too much time
>on their hands. Or maybe, as Pink Floyd sings to close out the album,
>everything under the sun really is in tune.
>

________________________________________________________________________
Martin Roberts
Foreign Languages & Literatures / Film & Media Studies, MIT
14N-421
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 253-4536 (voice)
(617) 258-6189 (fax)
http://web.mit.edu/mroberts/WWW/mdr.html



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