Their lips are moving they continue to say SOMEthing (even though it’s not on the soundtrack), but what they’re actually doing is beginning to sing, “Hail! Hail! the Witch is Dead….” Their rendition continued for eight bars of music, at which point there was a screen dissolve to a joyous parade of some three hundred green-clad Emerald City extras, who not only sustained the song but escorted the Fab Four through the streets to their second audience with the Wizard. have commandeered her broomstick, and the Winkie Guards chanted one last time, “The Wicked Witch is Dead!” In the film as it premiered, the scene quickly dissolved to the Head of the Great Oz, asking, “Can I believe my eyes? Why have you come back?” But watch the mouths of the Winkie Guards as the picture segues from castle to throne room. This routine began in the tower of the Wicked Witch of the West she’s been melted, Dorothy & Co. But if I could have just one segment to reinstate – all of sixty seconds long – there’s no question: It would be the musical number colloquially described as the “triumphal return” (or as it’s officially titled on the music cue sheets, “Ding-Dong! Emerald City” ). What remains is its prelude, as Uncle Henry cries out, “Hickory! Where’s Hickory? Doggone it….” In the next – deleted – scene, Henry spotted Haley endeavoring to rev up the wind machine once again: “This is my chance! The cyclone is coming! Let me show you what my machine can do!” Instead, Uncle Henry ordered him off to “help Hunk get them horses loose!”Īnyway, those are a couple of the moments I miss from THE WIZARD OF OZ. Also dropped: Hickory’s brief, subsequent on-screen moment at the approach of the tornado. This entire sequence hit the cutting room floor when MGM trimmed the two-hour “rough cut” of THE WIZARD OF OZ to a more manageable (and customary for the time) 101 minutes in length. (Earlier in the same scrapped sequence, Haley-as-Hickory actively complained, “Oh, it feels like my joints are rusted.” He also described Miss Gulch as “a poor, sour-faced old maid ain’t got no heart left” and recommended that Dorothy “have a little more heart yourself and have pity on her.”) It’s the “contraption” that Aunt Em – moments later – accuses Hickory of “tinkering with,” spurring his regal posture. It’s worth noting that a reference to the never-seen wind machine remains in the finished film. ![]() ![]() Of course, in the rough cut of the film, he did! In between Judy Garland’s conversation with Bolger and Lahr, she wandered across the barnyard to the spot where Hickory was working on his latest invention: an odd contraption devised (as he tells her) “to break up winds, so we don’t have no more dust storms.” When he attempted to demonstrate its prowess, however, the machine spurted oil in his face – certainly an allusion to the “Oil can what?” segment to come in Oz. Have a little courage!" But apart from striking a frozen (i.e., rusted) pose - while declaiming, "Someday, they're going to erect a statue to me in this town - Jack Haley as "Hickory" doesn’t share a suggestion of the Tin-Man-to-come. In Kansas, Ray Bolger's farmhand "Hunk" foreshadows his Scarecrow incarnation in several lines of dialogue with Dorothy: "You'd think you didn't have any brains at all," and "Your head ain't made of straw, you know." Moments later, "Zeke" (Bert Lahr) anticipates the Cowardly Lion role by encouraging the Kansas girl to stand up to evil Almira Gulch: “She ain’t nuthin’ to be afraid of. (I'm willing to bet there are Oz fans reading this blog - and countless more besides - who pretty much know the movie scene-by-scene, or line-by-line.or frame-by-frame!) But while I was in the process of reviewing OZ in my mind, I found myself concentrating on some of the stuff that ISN’T there. I realize such a question might require explanation, so here's some back-story: Just for the fun of it the other day, I started to reflect on what we know about Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 1939 classic motion picture. What do YOU miss most in THE WIZARD OF OZ film?
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