The Wizard of Oz

Corrected entry: In the opening shot, Dorothy is kneeling on the road to comfort Toto. As she stands up, you can see that she has three wet spots on her dress-front. When she arrives in the farmyard, the spots are gone.

Correction: There's a time lapse and possibly enough time for the spots to have dried.

Krista

Corrected entry: After the flying monkeys fly off with Dorothy, the Lion and the Tinman hurry over to the disassembled Scarecrow, who says "First they tore my legs off and threw them over THERE". But the legs are right below his chest; the Tinman immediately grabs them without having to reach far.

Correction: The Scarecrow is in a state of high anxiety, and he's highly overwhelmed by what they did to him. Now he and the others are facing dire circumstances, so it's merely the character's misbelief as to the status of his lower limbs, or Scarecrow may have actually meant all the straw stuffing that made up his legs which the Flying Monkeys had thrown aside, though whatever the case it's not a film mistake. Note, Tin Man even says, "They sure knocked the stuffings out of you."

Super Grover

Corrected entry: When the Scarecrow is dancing with Dorothy for the first time there is a shot where he flies into the air. When the Scarecrow lands you can see that there is an area on the yellow brick road that has been altered to make some of the dancing easier, like doing the splits.

Correction: The only scene where the scarecrow flies into the air was in a deleted scene. Deleted scenes are not valid mistakes.

Corrected entry: When Dorothy first meets Glinda in Munchkinland, and after all the songs, Glinda is telling her to go to the Wizard. She moves and hits her crown with her wand. It is easy to hear.

Correction: How is this a mistake? She didn't break character and neither did anybody else. This is more of a trivia entry than a mistake.

Corrected entry: When Dorothy and the Scarecrow first find the Tin Man, he tells Dorothy to bang on his chest. After the echoing bang, she points to Scarecrow as if to tell him it's his turn to speak before he says, "Wow, what an echo."

Correction: She wasn't pointing to the scarecrow. She was pointing to the beating like saying "listen to that" without actually saying it.

Corrected entry: During the march of the witch's guards, the guard playing the cymbals crashes them together at least four times, but there is no corresponding noise. (01:20:40)

Correction: There are no guards playing cymbals. The only guards playing something, back by the gates, are playing drums. Which you can hear.

Corrected entry: How does the lion know about the Sphinx if he's lived all his life in the land of Oz and never is told about it by Dorothy?

Correction: How do you know Dorothy never told him about it? There's plenty of time they're together that we don't see them.

Krista

Corrected entry: When the Lion, Scarecrow, Tin Man, Toto, and Dorothy are coming out of the woods, it appears that there are miles and miles of Yellow Brick Road before they reach the Emerald City. However, when it shows them emerging from the forest and walking through the flowers, it shows that the city's a couple of hundred meters away and there's no Yellow Brick Road.

Correction: Its true there is no yellow brick road because they didn't follow the road around the poppy field they took a shortcut through the poppy field.

Corrected entry: In the scene where the Scarecrow, Lion, and Tin Man are trying to free Dorothy, the door has door knobs, but after the Tin Man strikes it, the door has no fixtures.

Correction: When the Tin Man strikes the door, he hit the higher part of the door and the handles aren't visible in that shot.

Corrected entry: During the scene where the Tin man begins chopping down the door to save Dorothy there are no handles but when he continues chopping the handles appear.

Correction: The handles are there, they are just farther down the door than can be seen in the tight shot when the ax first hits the door. The wide shot as they approach the door shows the handles on the door. What I wonder is why they use the ax at all, since there doesn't actually seem to be any locking mechanism for the door on the outside or the inside.

Corrected entry: As the cyclone carries the farmhouse through the air, Dorothy views airbone animals and people through a window in the wall next to her bed, including the Witch on her broom. After the house lands, we see a shot of Dorothy emerging from her bedroom. The window has disappeared. There is now a solid wall next to the bed with what looks like a Bundt cake pan hanging on it.

Correction: The wall seen when Dorothy leaves her room after landing in OZ is NOT the same wall where the window is. The confusion could come from the fact her bed changes positions in the room after the fall. But, even so, we can even see the daylight reflection on the wall, indicating the existence of a window.

cinecena

Corrected entry: In the scene where Dorothy and the Scarecrow meet the Tinman and oil him, they do not oil his legs. Later in the scene, he begins to dance as if his legs were oiled.

Correction: As he's walking down to the Yellow Brick Road, the Tin Man's knees lock up, and they do have to oil his legs.

Krista

Corrected entry: When the four of them are in the haunted forest searching for the wicked witch with the weapons, after the tin man is lifted in the air and falls the scarecrow throws his gun to the ground, and as it hits, the gun suddenly disappears.

Correction: The Scarecrow steps on the gun, which hides it from view.

Corrected entry: The crown that falls off the lion's head falls behind the scarecrow as they sit in front of the door. When they get up it is gone.

Correction: If you look very close you can just see the crown at the lower right of the screen as they go inside.

Corrected entry: The red smoke that makes the witch disappear effect begins coming out of the ground about a second before the witch gets to her mark.

iceverything776

Correction: The witch is the one making the smoke. She's magical she can make the smoke come up 5 minutes before she intends to leave if she wants.

Corrected entry: When the scarecrow is singing, "If I Only had a Brain", as he dances around the flowers on the fence seem to disappear and then appear again.

Correction: The flowers don't disappear, they're still there. The shot that you're talking about just shows the edge of the fence, which is not covered with the flowers.

Correction: Not really an audio problem. I'm sure it was written and directed that way. It seems pretty obvious.

Corrected entry: When the 4 characters are in the witch's forest, the flying monkeys come out and take them, when they take the Scarecrow apart, the scene changes to the castle then back to them fixing the Scarecrow's straw, when he stands up and says "Don't you see, he's come to take us to Dorothy" as he stands up you can see a small black ditch that Ray Bolger was sitting in to make it look like his head was lying there.

Correction: It is not a ditch, it is a rock. In the first scene, where he is unstuffed, he is in an open area. In the second scene he is sitting up with a tree right behind him. There is no ditch because this is not the place where he lay when he was unstuffed.

Corrected entry: After the scarecrow gets a brain, he states the Pythagorean Theorem. However, he incorrectly says it applies to an isosceles triangle when it applies to a right triangle. He also not only gets the wrong kind of triangle, but he gets the equation wrong. He says "the sum of the square roots of any two sides...is equal to the square root of the remaining side." But it is really the sum of the SQUARES (not square roots). And it is not the sum of ANY two sides. It is the sum of the two sides that form the right angle. Ray Bolger, who played Scarecrow, couldn't get the theory right on any of the many takes because he had to say it very fast. In the end, the filmmakers decided to simply use the best take, even though he says it wrongly.

Correction: I think this was an intentional mistake - proving that even with a brain the scarecrow is still quite stupid - and I guess it was thrown in for humour. If you've seen the episode of The Simpsons where homer finds a pair of glasses in the toilet, puts them on and states the above mentioned quote - a guy in one of the cubicles replies: "That's a RIGHT triangle, ya idiot!"

The Wizard of Oz mistake picture

Revealing mistake: When the Wicked Witch scares the Munchkins in Munchkinland, where Dorothy lands, she disappears into a cloud of smoke she creates. But you can see her sneak down into a trap door below. [As a sidenote to this entry, Margaret Hamilton was hospitalized for severe burns after a take of this shot (not the final one used) when the stage elevator got stuck and the explosion went off.] (00:30:45)

More mistakes in The Wizard of Oz

Wicked Witch: Ohhh... You cursed brat! Look what you've DONE! I'm melting! Melting! Oh... What a world, what a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?!

More quotes from The Wizard of Oz

Trivia: "Over the Rainbow", which the American Film Institute recently named the greatest movie song of all time, was nearly cut from the film.

More trivia for The Wizard of Oz

Question: It is implied strongly in this movie that water makes witches melt, and this is spoofed in other media. I've only ever seen this referenced to wicked witches. Does water make good witches, such as Glinda, melt too?

Answer: In all likelihood, probably not. Water is often depicted and represents purity, and cleansing. It flows smoothly, is beautiful, clear, and responsible for life on Earth. Everything the Wicked Witch is not. Where as the good Witch is pure and of a true heart. So it makes sense that something so evil and impure as the evil witch would be effected by the purest substance there is, yet not harm the good witch because she is good.

Quantom X

Answer: In the original book, water caused the wicked witches to melt away because they were so old and shriveled that all the fluid in their bodies had long since dried away. Meanwhile, the film Oz: The Great and Powerful instead implies that the Wicked Witch of the West is weak against water due to being a fire-elemental witch, which could also be the case for this incarnation, meaning it wouldn't apply to other witches like Glinda (whose element in both films appears to be ice) or even the Wicked Witch of the East (whose powers are never shown in this film, but were electricity-based in Oz the Great and Powerful).

More questions & answers from The Wizard of Oz

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