Check out what was involved in the making of this scene in The Wizard of Oz movie without the convenience of digital enhancement.

Jack McMaster was the man who created and performed this scene in the late 1930’s. From Aljean Harmetz’s book, The Making of The Wizard of Oz, Mcmaster explains how he did it…

“I had a glass tank six foot square” … “The bottom of the tank was glass. The sides were wood. The tank was only three inches deep; and the bottom was covered with an inch and a half of water mixed with calla oil. That was supposed to be the sky. The camera was beneath the tank, shooting up. The water and oil mixture was opaque, so it hid me. The miniature Witch who did the skywriting was three eighths of an inch high, and the broom she was riding was a hypodermic needle. I filled the hypodermic needle with a combination of canned milk and nigrosine dye. I wrote SURRENDER DOROTHY OR DIE upside down and backward in the fluid in the tank, using the needle in place of a pen. I practiced for two months before I did it. My hand wasn’t in the tank, but the Witch and the broom needle were. The skywriting seemed to come out of the tail of the Witch’s broom. To give the writing the appearance of smoke that was drifting, I had a fifty-gallon drum of water feeding into the tank. I had tinted the water the same milky color as the liquid in the glass tank. The water current was a stream–like an air stream–blowing the letters apart.”

Originally the image above was going to read: “Surrender Dorothy or die WWW”. It was later edited to the two words “Surrender Dorothy”.

Wow! When I saw this movie as a kid (numerous times) the airplane sure looked like it was billowing smoke from its tail and that witch was scary!! check out the book

This is funny…

The driver in the image below tries to restrain the horse from licking itself. The filmmakers used a white horse and sponged it down with different colors of Jello. They had a hard time keeping the horse of a different color from trying to lick it off…

The Wizard of Oz Trivia Test @ Wendy’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz