I was reading the forum and saw a post in the Today in History forum about The Wizard of Oz. It reminded me of an Urban Legend about the movie.
The most popular Urban Legend about the movie is that one of the Munchkins committed suicide during the scene where Dorothy, the Scarecrow and Tim Man are walking down the road heading towards Emerald City. It is said that the suicide was captured during filming and can be seen in the movie.
The truth is that they used real birds in the film and what people say is a Munchkin suicide is actually a large bird.
That is one big bird. We watched the movie once to see if it was true.
I want to think that I read somewhere that is was an Emu or a Crane..
Hello, my daughter who is 22 years old is an OZ fan. The scene you are talking about is not legend, but true. When the Scarecrow and Dorothy found the Tin Man and started to help him by oiling him, one can see a cast member hanging from a tree, who committed suicide by hanging himself.
In all the books and speciality items for OZ, there is no mention of a munchkin committing a suicide.
Watch the movie and play it back a few times and focus on the trees, and you should be able to see it!
I have gone back through everything I have on this and did check out some websites and they are all saying that it is nothing but an Urban Legend. They say that it is hard to believe that someone would hang himself or herself on set and they would actually leave it in the film. The other point used to back up the claims of this being false is the lack of response by the actors.
Apparently Birds were borrowed from a zoo for the film and that is actually what is being seen.
I also went back and looked at the clip of movie and yes you can see something back there but I personally am not convinced it was someone hanging.
http://www.amazon.com/Making-Wizard-Oz-S...TF8&s=booksRead the book, The Making of the Wizard of Oz, as it tells the truth about the suicide. It was not a munchkin, but someone working on the set. Sad though... I will ask my daughter if I can use her book and find the page that has the information.
This week my article was about Marilyn Monroe and the rumor that she had 6 toes. This all came about because of a book that was published, 41 years later, with pictures of her taken when she was around the age of 20. The author claims that he did not notice the "sixth toe" until he was putting his book together.
The problem with Urban Legends is that you very rarely can track down if there is some truth to it or not. It is also next to impossible to find the person who started the claim.
While many are convinced that someone did commit suicide on the set there are just as many convinced that it is not true. The only ones that really know what happened are the ones that were there the day that particular scene was filmed.
I thank you for posting on this topic as it is great for people to see both sides. You have also given me the idea of posting a poll to see how many think that this is an Urban Legend or if it is true.
I'm posting a few links:
[url=BellaOnline ALERT: For anti-spam reasons, we restrict the number of URLs allowed in a given post. You have exceeded our maximum number of URLs.