I just visited a website, and this is what they had to say about my last question about the "hanging man" in the wizard of oz.
It's true that you can see a shadowy figure fluttering in the background at the end of the scene in the Tin Woodman's forest, just as Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman are marching offscreen to the strains of "We're Off to See the Wizard." And if you ever get a chance to see the film projected onto the big screen of a movie theater, you can quite clearly see that it is a stork flapping its wings. (Other exotic birds sharp-eyed viewers can also see in that forest are a toucan, a crane, and a peacock.) Let me say that again to make it perfectly clear to those who still believe it's a hanging man:
IT IS A STORK FLAPPING ITS WINGS. The problem is, most people today don't see The Wizard of Oz on the big screen, they watch it on television or videotape. And the scan lines that make a TV picture possible do the disservice of making the picture less clear than on a movie screen. The small size of most TV screens and the lack of clear prints before 1989 doesn't help, either. So on a television screen, the stork is not very clear. And for some reason this shadowy figure passed into urban legend as a hanging man (although some also thought it was a stagehand accidentally caught in the shot, or the Wicked Witch still lurking in the background) -- despite the fact that studio security was tighter than usual on Oz, and it's extremely unlikely that a major studio like MGM wouldn't notice such a macabre sight, or allow it to be included in one of its highest profile pictures. Besides, most of those trees were on a painted backdrop, and the rest were artificial, and thus too fragile to hang from. And towards the end of the scene, all three actors look directly at the object in question. If it was something that wasn't supposed to be there, especially something so macabre, doesn't it make sense that at least one of them would alert the crew and stop filming right then and there? Don't forget, there would be a lot of people on the set watching what was going on, with the director and his assistants, the cameramen, the lighting crew, and so forth. Would all of them not notice something suspicious?
Some amusing variants of this story have surfaced:
The hanging man was one of the Munchkins -- unlikely, as the forest scenes were actually shot before the Munchkinland scenes, and the little people playing the Munchkins hadn't arrived in town at that point. The man hanging himself is the director's son, upset that he didn't get a part in The Movie or on the crew -- impossible, as Victor Fleming only had two young daughters at the time. MGM was forced to leave the shot in, as they couldn't afford to reshoot the scene -- extremely unlikely, as MGM was the biggest studio of the day, and could well afford another take. The man who hanged himself was the grandfather of the boy who became the ghost in Three Men and a Baby, another popular Hollywood urban legend. The stork was added in later to mask the hanging -- well, then, couldn't they have made the stork clearer? You can join Unsolved Mysteries and post your own mysteries or interesting stories for the world to read and respond to Click hereScroll all the way down to read replies.Show all stories by Author: 55023 ( Click here )
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