Holiday Break: What’s Hiding in the Wizard of Oz?
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Hello, everyone. We're taking some time off to enjoy the holiday, and we hope you are too. In the meantime, please enjoy one of my favorite episodes from the Conspiracy Theories feed. Due to the nature of this episode, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of sexual assault, ableism, and suicide. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen.

To get help on mental health and suicidal thoughts, visit Spotify.com slash resources. There's no place like home. When I think of The Wizard of Oz, I think about those flying monkeys, which absolutely terrified me as a kid, and hot air balloons, because I don't think I'd ever really seen one before. The movie had a huge impact on me as a kid.

Another one of the best things about The Wizard of Oz is how rewatchable it is. Even when you know the story, the visuals, and the music are pure fun.

Though, let's be honest, plenty of people don't watch it with the original music. They watch it while listening to Pink Floyd's "The Dark Side of the Moon." When you hit play on the vinyl record, right as the MGM Lion lets out its third roar, the two sync up in a way that's uncanny. Almost as if the album was written to use the movie as a music video. It's called "The Dark Side of the Rainbow."

Now, members of Pink Floyd have gone on record saying there's no intentional connection between their album and the film. But just because the dark side of the rainbow is a coincidence, doesn't mean there isn't something darker hiding behind the Hollywood classic. Today, we're following the yellow brick road all the way to ruined childhoods.

We'll look at a few conspiracy theories around the movie, that they captured a death on film, that all film productions of the story are cursed, and that the movie has a hidden secret agenda. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Stay with us.

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BuzzBalls 15% ABV, Carrollton, Texas. Please enjoy responsibly. After the sets of The Wizard of Oz were struck in March 1939, most of the cast were pleased to take off their cumbersome costumes and makeup for the last time. Jack Haley, who played the Tin Man, called it the worst job in the world. The film's dangerous set had landed many actors and crew members in the hospital. Some were lucky to escape alive.

But our first conspiracy theory is that not everyone survived production. Allegedly, one of the actors died on set, and you can actually see it on film.

Theorists claim that if you pause the movie around the 48-minute mark, the image is clear. It's right after Dorothy and the Scarecrow meet the Tin Man and continue down the yellow brick road. They point the way forward, straight at a blurry shadow in the trees hovering back and forth. For years, people have said it's an actor's dead body.

Specifically, one of the actors who played a munchkin. And not just because of the shadow's size. The on-screen death is actually one of many upsetting rumors about the actors who played munchkins. It all started in 1967, when Judy Garland made an appearance on a talk show called Tonight Starring Jack Parr. When asked about the Little People actors, she said, quote,

Well, this is obviously offensive, but at the time, it was presented as a funny anecdote. And it got worse. In 2005, Judy's third husband, Sid Luft, published a memoir titled,

In it, Luft claimed that Judy had confided in him about more inappropriate behavior on set. Allegedly, she told him she'd been molested by actors playing the munchkins, that they'd slipped their hands up her dress in between scenes.

The rumors didn't start or end with Judy, though. A biography of Burt Lahr, who played the cowardly lion, made some pretty awful accusations about his co-stars, including that actors playing munchkins engaged in gambling and sex work in their off hours. And the first recorded comments came from the film's producer, Mervyn LeRoy.

Leroy told one news outlet that the actors treated their hotel like a brothel. He reported them swinging on chandeliers, hosting raucous orgies, and trashing the place. Allegedly, their parties got so out of hand that production had to hire police officers to monitor their floors.

But the thing is, Leroy got all of his information secondhand from other crew members. Every morning he'd arrive on set and hound his employees about what they'd overheard from the night before. Leroy was an intimidating producer. He had no qualms about firing people or their replacements. During the course of filming, he burned through four different directors. Crew members felt like they needed to impress Leroy to keep their jobs.

which could have led to film industry creatives doing what they do best, making up stories. Because there's no evidence to back any of this up.

Author Stephen Cox interviewed over 30 of the film's 124 Little People actors for his book, The Munchkins of Oz. They all told him there wasn't any time for partying while they were shooting the film. They had a demanding production schedule. Unfortunately, the collective voices of those actors weren't as amplified as Judy Garland's, Burt Lahr's, or Mervyn LeRoy's.

So the rumors continued to snowball in the public consciousness, culminating in the conspiracy theory that an actor died by suicide and the production covered it up. Save a few blurry frames of film. Now, back to that film. The image does look slightly like a body suspended near the trees,

But you really have to use your imagination to get there. In fact, this theory didn't circulate until after The Wizard of Oz was released on VHS in 1980, and people could fast forward, rewind, and pause to analyze each frame. But here's the kicker. In 1989, the studio released a remastered 50th anniversary edition of the film. And in this new remastered version, the shadow is gone.

It's just enough to suggest a cover-up because if it came out that someone had died on set, it could have sunk The Wizard of Oz and ruined the entire studio. Remember, this was the late 1930s when the Hays Code dictated the morality of films and the reputations of people who made them. It was so serious that MGM and other movie studios employed fixers who

whose job was to maintain squeaky clean images for the companies and their stars. And an on-set death is just about the worst PR a movie, studio, or actor can get. Just look at the news surrounding the tragedy on the set of the movie Rust in 2021. And in the case of The Wizard of Oz, there was a lot riding on this movie.

MGM spent more money and more time on The Wizard of Oz than any other movie in 1938. They had to release it. So there was ample motive to cover up any on-set deaths. Theoretically,

A combination of bribery and fear tactics from Hollywood fixers could have squashed the story and kept witnesses and family members quiet. A studio cover-up would also explain that there are no police or coroner's reports lining up with an on-set death. And by the time this conspiracy theory came out in the early 1980s, a lot of the people involved in the film had passed away, taking the secret to their graves.

But there is a much simpler explanation. According to Snopes, it's a bird. The film was primarily shot indoors on a soundstage, but it mostly takes place outdoors. To make it feel more real, production reportedly borrowed exotic birds from the Los Angeles Zoo.

And there are plenty of obvious birds in the film, like a peacock outside the Tin Man's shack and a toucan when Dorothy and the Scarecrow first travel down the yellow brick road together. Apparently, that blurry shadow is a giant crane.

The way Dorothy and her friends point to it is a coincidence. And the fact that it's not visible in early versions is due to low-quality film prints. In the remastered version, you can clearly see a crane throughout that scene. It's also hard to buy that in all the years of press coverage, everyone kept quiet. And again, there aren't police or coroner's reports matching the circumstances.

In 2001, independent newspaper reporter Jeffrey McNabb interviewed some of the Little People actors, including 86-year-old Meinhardt Robbie. He played the coroner of Munchkinland. When the journalist asked Robbie about the legends of suicide, he answered frustratedly, if that had actually happened, do you think they would have left it in the film?

Robbie had an excellent point. The team had to make major cuts to the original version of the film. Why remove an entire song and dance number but keep the moment the stars point directly at a dead body? Today, the dead Munchkin is widely considered an urban legend, but all of this begs a larger question. Why were there so many false rumors about the actors playing the Munchkins?

In the article, McNabb said Robbie seemed incredibly professional. He was a public speaker, had his pilot's license, and qualifications as a master gardener. Robbie didn't seem like someone who would have caused trouble. In fact, he admitted he was hurt by the remarks from Judy Garland.

McNabb also interviewed Joanne Engle, Robbie's publicist. At the time, she also managed the careers of several other little people who'd been in the movie. She'd heard there was one bad apple in the group, but that certainly didn't represent all 124 of them. And after doing research for her book "The Making of the Wizard of Oz," author Algene Harmetz claimed there was almost no trouble involving the little people on set.

The only evidence of those actors ever stepping out of line came from one December 1938 memo. According to a 2018 article in the New Yorker, production manager Keith Weeks asked to dismiss an actor who had allegedly been caught in a domestic abuse scandal and another who'd threatened an assistant. There's no actual record of wild parties.

And as for the story that one of them assaulted Judy Garland, well, that didn't come from her directly. It came from her ex-husband, Sid Luft. Emphasis on ex. During their divorce trial, Garland actually alleged domestic abuse by him. And journalist Anne Helen Peterson pointed out that Luft was a somewhat...

questionable man about town. Which, all goes to say, his claims should be taken with a grain of salt. Stephen Cox, author of The Munchkins of Oz, said from what he found, the actors were extremely kind and cooperative, and they showed up to set with a smile despite the conditions they were working under. So, why all the rumors? One answer is ableism.

The Little People actors were the butt of cruel jokes that spun out of control. Before and after The Wizard of Oz, there weren't many roles for Little People. And in the years since, acting roles for Little People haven't extended that far beyond the goblins of Gringotts and Harry Potter or the Ewoks of Return of the Jedi.

Serious and leading roles traditionally aren't offered to Little People actors, especially when the part doesn't call for it. Peter Dinklage, famous for playing Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones, is a rare exception. But many, including Dinklage, are trying to end the prejudice in Hollywood and, in turn, alter the unconscious bias surrounding Little People.

But there's another, even darker explanation for the rumors. Not only were they ableist disparagement, but they were spread to cover up the real crimes behind the scenes of The Wizard of Oz. The men in charge of the movie may have been deflecting bad press onto the little people in order to keep heat off of themselves. Because the set of The Wizard of Oz was so dangerous, people say it was cursed.

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Journey Back to Oz, The Muppets' Wizard of Oz, Oz the Great and Powerful. Each of these were attempts to, as another film titled itself, return to Oz, and each was critically panned. In fact, pretty much every film adaptation of The Wizard of Oz has flopped. Before MGM got a hold of the book rights in 1937, there'd already been several attempts to turn the book into a motion picture, including a silent film and

an animated version, and a movie directed by the wonderful Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum himself. None succeeded. Even the various attempts to adapt Oz into a TV series were all canceled within a season, if they even made it to air. Adaptations have succeeded in the theater, live on stage, but Hollywood has yet to replicate the magic of The Wiz on screen.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios has owned the rights to produce a film version of Wicked since 1998. They've been actively developing the movie musical for over a decade, and even though the film has a 2024 release date, skeptics still think it may never come out.

It already faced delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and more recently, production was paused due to the Screen Actors Guild strike. Because, as our second conspiracy theory goes, there's a curse plaguing anyone who tries to produce a film about the Wizard of Oz. Even the 1939 film We Know and Love flailed in its first box office outing. Though it's now considered a classic, initial reviews were bad.

Some called it a Disney knockoff. Others said the film, quote, displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity. Worst of all, one reviewer called it a stinkaroo.

By the end of its run, The Wizard of Oz had earned a little over $3 million at the box office. But between the cost of production, advertising, distribution, and so forth, the movie actually lost the studio close to a million dollars. It didn't make money until decades later. In August 1956, MGM signed a deal with CBS to broadcast The Wizard of Oz on TV. They

They planned to play the movie in November leading into the holiday season. It did so well, they kept bringing it back every year for the holidays. And even before all that, the movie was almost never completed. I mentioned the high budget, rotating directors, and culture of fear earlier, but that barely scrapes the surface of the on-set chaos.

Looking at everything that went wrong on set, it's not hard to imagine some supernatural force was trying to end production. Allow me a moment to ruin your childhood. About two weeks into shooting, Buddy Ebsen, who played the Tin Man, sat down for a quick dinner break. But as he ate, he struggled to breathe. The team rushed him to the hospital. There, doctors found his lungs coated with pure aluminum dust. It was a mystery.

How could one man have inhaled so much toxic metal? Simple. It had been powdered on his face since the start of production. As makeup. And instead of giving Ebsen the time he needed to recover from the workplace injury, producer Mervyn LeRoy fired him and replaced him with another actor. Ebsen wasn't the only person hospitalized, since most of the cast had to do their own stunts.

Today, the industry is full of licensed, highly trained stunt professionals. Actors like Tom Cruise are the exception, not the rule, and even he trains intensely for his Mission: Impossible scenes. But the Wizard of Oz actors had limited training. The actors who played flying monkeys were hired specifically because they were small and thin, and a few still fell from their wires.

Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West, literally caught fire. Later, her stand-in's broom exploded. Toto got stepped on, the dance director fell through a roof, and several actors fainted from the dangerous combination of heavy costumes and hot lights. Jack Haley, who played the replacement Tin Man, said, quote,

It was the most horrendous job in the world, with those cumbersome uniforms and the hours of makeup, but I had no choice.

Neither did the star, Judy Garland. She was only 16 when she played Dorothy. Today, there are laws protecting underage actors, but that wasn't the case in 1938. At one point, Victor Fleming, who was the third director in just a few months, grew frustrated that Judy was giggling at co-star Burt Lahr. So he slapped Judy in the face. Then he told her to get back out there and work.

And he wasn't the only man who hurt her. In Judy's unpublished memoir, she alleged that studio executive Louis B. Mayer emotionally and sexually abused her during production. Some, like her ex-husband Sid Luft, believe all of this may have contributed to Judy's later struggles with an eating disorder, substance misuse, and suicidal thoughts.

This is all tragic, but is it evidence of a curse? Well, there's no record of anyone specifically cursing The Wizard of Oz or its film productions, but there are plenty of people who've taken issue with the story, because it's possible the children's classic is hiding something much darker.

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For full safety information, visit BotoxCosmetic.com or call 877-351-0300. See for yourself at BotoxCosmetic.com. We've reached our final conspiracy theory for this episode. The Wizard of Oz is more than meets the eye. This episode has gotten heavy, so as a little palate cleanser, we thought we'd cover a few fun fan theories before going dark again.

Like the idea that Glinda the Good Witch is actually the villain. Think about it. Glinda knew those ruby red slippers would send Dorothy home right away. Instead of saying that, she sends her on a wild goose chase across Oz? Some fans believe Glinda's evil plan was to make Dorothy get rid of her remaining enemies in competition, the Wicked Witch of the West and the Wizard, so that she had the sole power over Oz.

That's a fun interpretation, though it only applies to the movie. In the book, Dorothy actually meets a different witch in Munchkin Land, and Glinda doesn't appear until the very end. The movie combined those two good witches. But that's not the only witch theory. Some people say Dorothy herself is the Wicked Witch of the East from an alternate universe.

In the film, every person in Kansas has a counterpart in Oz, played by the same actor. Miss Gulch is the Witch of the West. The farmhands are the Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Man. Professor Marvel is the Wizard. But Dorothy?

No counterpart. If you apply the rules of most multiverse movies, only one version of a person can safely exist in a universe for an extended time. Dorothy does so well in Oz because she immediately killed her counterpart, who we never see. All we know is they wear the exact same shoe size.

Okay, one last fun fan theory: the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is part of the Wizard of Oz cinematic universe. Because Willy Wonka's dad is the wizard.

It seems to have stemmed from an innocuous detail that the spiral at the beginning of the yellow brick road looks identical to the one at the beginning of the red carpet leading up to Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. The theory goes that Willy Wonka went searching for his father and ended up in Oz where he met the Munchkins. Over time, he built two roads.

A yellow brick one to lead him back to Emerald City and a red one to lead him to his factory. The two interconnected spirals. Then he recruited some munchkins to work at his chocolate factory.

and renamed them Oompa Loompas. Now this theory only applies to the movies. The spirals in the two roads are set design, not something explicitly described in L. Frank Baum or Roald Dahl's books. So it would have to be confirmed by the Willy Wonka filmmakers. Our team couldn't reach them, but we do have a producer with a film degree who proposed a simpler explanation.

It's a visual homage. Filmmakers routinely take shots and images from other films and mimic them in their work. Sometimes it's just something they liked, other times it's a literary reference.

In this case, the Willy Wonka filmmakers used a similar road pattern to create an intentional comparison. The kids entering the chocolate factory feel the same way Dorothy did waking up in Oz. They've entered a magical new reality. It's also probably why the first room in the factory, with the chocolate waterfall, looks an awful lot like Munchkin Land. Or the wizard wanted to give the Oompa Loompas a home away from home.

You pick. While movie fan theories are fun, it's also possible there are hidden political agendas inside The Wizard of Oz, and maybe author L. Frank Baum or the filmmakers were trying to influence children. In fact, when L. Frank Baum's book was released, some Christian ministers actually tried to have the book banned, since the story implied someone's greatest gifts came from within instead of the hands of God.

They thought it promoted atheism. By their reading, the story shows that the wizard, a god-like figure, is nothing but a mere mortal hiding behind a curtain. And Heaven, or rather Oz, isn't perfect, but all a dream. The moral of the story is that Dorothy can solve her own problems and doesn't need a higher power.

In 1928, several public libraries banned The Wonderful Wizard of Oz for being, quote, not literature, but somehow rather evil for children.

They disliked it for, quote, "depicting women in strong leadership roles." After all, the male characters are comically lacking, missing a heart, a brain, and courage. Even the wizard himself turns out to be a powerless imposter. Meanwhile, the powerful characters are female, Dorothy and the witches.

Surprisingly, this actually might be true. L. Frank Baum had a lot of feminist influence in his life. Primarily, his mother-in-law was a radical suffragist named Matilda Jocelyn Gage who worked with Susan B. Anthony.

In fact, one of Gage's theories was that vilifying witches was a way to devalue women. So maybe that's why Baum flipped the script on attacking witches instead of burning them. He killed them with water. Though if you talk to high school history teachers, there's another popular idea Baum may have been pushing.

Populism. The populist movement came about in the 1890s, shortly before Baum penned his first Oz book. With industrialization growing, many farming communities in the U.S. felt the effects of lower incomes and higher prices.

They also pushed the gold standard for currency, placing a higher debt on farmers. From that came the Populist Party, who challenged everything from banking to the railroad industries. They proposed that these corporations be regulated solely by the government rather than independent businessmen, and that the nation return to a combination of gold and silver-backed currency to keep inflation low.

One theory posits that L. Frank Baum might have written The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a parable. Theoretically, Dorothy represents the common Midwesterner. She's taken away by a tornado, which symbolizes a revolutionary upheaval. She and her friends follow the yellow brick road, the gold standard. It takes them to the wizard, who represents President Grover Cleveland, but he's a fraud who can't actually help anyone.

The gold standard gets them nowhere. In the end, Dorothy's shoes, which are silver in the book, get her home. The silver standard saves the day.

If it is a populist parable, it seems optimistic. But this theory didn't really take shape until a historian named Henry Littlefield proposed it in 1964, which means Baum wasn't around to confirm anything when it reached the public. But his great-grandson was.

And he said the populism theory was, quote, insane. Then on the movie side, there's the fact that Louis B. Mayer, a wealthy studio head, was much more likely to take the capitalist side over the populists. He might have argued that Dorothy got home by pulling herself up by her own bootstraps. Or, in this case, ruby red slipper straps.

But perhaps some of the people he hired might have attempted to push political ideas. Like songwriter Yip Harburg. Harburg was blacklisted from Hollywood after his political expressionism, or rather his refusal to name alleged sympathizers towards the Communist Party, made him a threat during the McCarthy era.

Perhaps someone thought he was slipping socialist ideology into his work. All to say, while Mayer, MGM, and other powerful Hollywood players may not have had an agenda with the film, it seems there were others who might have used the opportunity to bolster their own agendas. Even after the film was made, our final theory is the scariest and the most fringe,

It involves MKUltra, the CIA's historic study of mind control and brainwashing. From the 1950s to the 1970s, they experimented with psychological conditioning methods like LSD and hypnosis. It was highly illegal, especially because many human subjects were experimented on without their knowledge or consent.

The official goal was to learn more about the limits of human psychology for purposes of interrogations. But a lot, and I mean a lot,

of the study remains classified today. We don't know the full extent of MKUltra. Considering the facts, it's highly theorized the CIA attempted to create sleeper agents or super soldiers. Think the Manchurian candidate. And one fringe internet theory suggests their hypnosis involved the Wizard of Oz.

elements of the movie were used as code. For example, follow the yellow brick road meant to follow their military orders. There are arguments to be made about the trippy psychedelic nature of the film,

But the clearest piece of evidence for this theory is that starting in the 1950s, The Wizard of Oz was on TV all the time. Sleeper agents got their commands and the rest of us got fond childhood memories. However, this theory can't be proven until more information about MKUltra is declassified. We'll mark it down to revisit in a few years. Or not.

The Wizard of Oz is, on its surface, an innocent childhood classic. And still there's a push to make it dark. But it's not the only movie getting this treatment. The last few decades have brought a trend of gritty reboots of childhood classics and the internet meme, Ruin My Childhood. People are re-examining innocence and finding darkness. Or creating it.

On some level, we're collectively yearning for the experience that there's more than meets the eye. That there is, in fact, a man behind the curtain. Which is what The Wizard of Oz is all about. Maybe that's why there are so many conspiracy theories about the film. It appeals to those who question what's presented by authority. So, do we ignore the man behind the curtain? Or do we keep seeking him out at our own expense?

Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at TheConspiracyPod. If you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts or email us at conspiracystories at spotify.com. For more information on The Wizard of Oz,

We found Aljean Harmitz's book, The Making of the Wizard of Oz, and the 2013 documentary, The Making of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, incredibly helpful for our research. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth.

This episode was written by Lori Marinelli and Maggie Admire, edited by Mallory Cara and Andrew Kelleher, researched by Sapphire Williams, fact-checked by Cheyenne Lopez and Lori Siegel, and sound designed by Spencer Howard. Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Carter Roy.

This episode is brought to you by Buzzballs. I love the packaging on these guys. Every time I walk into a store and there's a stack of Buzzballs, I just have to smile. And I love the flavor Watermelon Smash. I think it's my favorite. Well, now you can get your favorite cocktails and more in these cute, ready-to-drink ball cans from Buzzballs. From the classics like Espresso Martinis to fun new flavors, find a Buzzballs near you.

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