The Legend of the Munchkin Suicide

The Wizard of Oz is little less than the stuff that dreams are made of. For many viewers, the 1939 film was the first time they saw color on screen. The Goldfinger legend of a woman suffocating from the gold paint on her body, finds a little truth in The Wizard of Oz, as the original Tin Woodsman (The Beverly Hillbillies’ Buddy Ebsen), had to be replaced due to his reaction to the aluminum powder in the Tin Man’s body paints. Professor Marvel’s second-hand store bought coat, coincidentally, turned out to be the former property of The Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum. Many believe Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is a perfect alternate soundtrack to the film, thus creating the “Dark Side of the Rainbow” phenomenon.

But the most chilling of The Wizard of Oz urban legends is (fortunately) as ridiculous as it is untrue. Look closely at the trees in the background when Dorothy, the Scarecrow, Toto and the freshly oiled Tin Man are skipping away from the witch and the talking trees singing, “We’re Off to See the Wizard”. What’s that in the background, swinging from that tree, just above where the Yellow Brick Road curves away from the Woodsman’s Shack?

Yes, it’s the swinging body of a hanged munchkin who killed himself right there on the set because he lost his true love. Some viewers even claim to have seen a documentary that confirms this haunting fact. Other rumors attribute this to a hapless stagehand who accidentally hung himself on set.

The Verdict: Have you ever been on a movie set, even one as big as the forest scene from The Wizard of Oz? With all the performers, directors, effects, lighting and sound technicians, there is simply no way that a suicide or accidental death could have been missed. What’s more, that was a fake tree and much smaller than it appeared (forced perspective, folks). It’s doubtful a prop like that could bear the weight of a little person, much less a full sized stagehand.

So what was that? I mean, it sure looks like a little hanging body, right? Maybe, but it’s actually a flipping bird. Watch other shots from that sequence and you’ll see a lot of large LA Zoo-provided birds like peacocks roaming around. Combine the forced perspective, the fake tree on the set, the lighting and the silhouette of a crane (or emu), moving around indecisively on legs so thin, they barely make a shadow, and it turns out you get an image that looks a lot like a suicidal Munchkin. But no matter how many times you rewind or freeze the frame, all you really get is the bird.

Still, a web search for this urban legend turns up plenty of believers in the story, believers who get as angry at the debunkers as Texas Chain Saw Massacre believers get at the true stories behind that case. Putting it simply, would a movie studio release a family film with a real dead body in it and leave it that way for decades? Let’s follow the Yellow Brick Road back to a bit of reality here, at least, in The Wizard of Oz parlance, back to that farm in Kansas.

Source: http://www.popmatters.com/column/171597-creepy-myths-curses-and-urban-legends-of-hollywood/