The movie’s end titles listed the cast members including a man named Nikko who is credited to actor Pat Walshe. He was an experienced Broadway, vaudeville, and circus performer known to have worked with and imitated monkeys and apes.

Walshe was 3’10” and the role needed someone with experience mimicking a large ape. He played the Wicked Witch’s chief assistant as well as the leader of the Winged Monkeys.

Filmmakers called him “Nikko” and it was his extensive industry experience that got him credit.

Walshe’s makeup consisted of prosthetics that were glued to his face and a fur bodysuit. Very uncomfortable but he did live to the age of 91.

American Girl Magazine isn’t a publication known to give movie reviews but Terry, Toto in Wizard of Oz, got a glowing commendation published in March 1940:

“The hardest thing this little dog ever had to do was during the drawbridge scene in the Wizard of Oz, when she was chased by the huge Winkie guards of the Wicked Witch. Toto had to come running out of the castle and was trying to cross the drawbridge. She had almost reached the middle when the drawbridge was pulled straight up. The only safety Toto had was by clutching the edge of the bridge with her little paws and balancing herself thirty feet in the air. One of a dog’s greatest fears is the fear of falling, so it took a great deal of courage to follow her master’s orders that time.”

Poor Terry was said to have regular nervous breakdowns on set due to stressful working conditions. Let’s hope she was treated well afterwards.

MGM required adult dwarfs to play the inhabitants of Munchkinland so Leo Singer, a man who ran a vaudeville troupe known as Singer’s Midgets, put up his guys in the Culver Hotel in Culver City. He pocketed most of the dwarves’ wages which naturally angered the others.

Reports of orgies at the hotel, pulling knives on studio employees and starlets, and getting drunk that cops scooped them up with butterfly nets were just some of their antics. The Munchkins were paid significantly less and even Toto the dog got better pay.

Jerry Maren (Lollipop Guild) passed away in May 2018 at the age of 98. He was the last surviving Munchkin.

There were underground rumors of a bizarre connection between Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz. Even mainstream media were in on it. They claimed that muting the film while the Pink Floyd CD played at the conclusion of the MGM lion’s third roar would have viewers seeing visual and lyrical coincidences that were deliberately coordinated.

Members of Pink Floyd denied this. It was the CD and not the LP version that was coordinated to “sync up” with the film. But the internet has places devoted to this claim.

The Wizard of Oz is still known for it’s visually astonishing costumes. Thank Adrian Adolph Greenburg who was credited as the designer of the iconic ruby slippers. Adrian resourcefully recycled previously used materials but you wouldn’t know it.

Gkinda’s spectacular gown was just altered after Jeanette MacDonald used it in the 1936 film San Francisco. Adrian eventually left MGM to start his own clothing line in 1941. He was gay but he married actor Janet Gaynor in 1939. Adrian passed from a stroke in 1959.

When Glinda rescues Dorothy and her companions in the poppy fields of Oz, the Wicked Witch receives a cap by a Winged Monkey. The witch tosses the cap aside shrieking, “Why does somebody always help that girl?!” before leaving for the “Surrender Dorothy” scene.

The cap is from the book version of the story. The possessor of the Golden Cap controlled the Winged Monkeys and in an early version of the film, the Monkeys made their way to the poppy field to retrieve the slippers.

The scene was cut rendering the cap meaningless. The film’s creators thought viewers would not notice this and they were right.

Four authentic pairs of Ruby Slippers were used in the making of the film. One pair is in the Smithsonian Institute, another is owned by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and another pair by a private collector.

The Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, MN, displayed another pair that was stolen on August 27, 2005. A reward of $1 million was put up by an anonymous benefactor for the return of the shoes. There was a 10-year deadline and unfortunately, in August 2015, it expired without the slippers being returned.

Jack Haley’s rendition of “If I Only Had a Heart” features a female voice off screen that interjects with, “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?”

That’s the uncredited voice of Adriana Caselotti. She was also the voice of Walt Disney’s Snow White. Caselotti’s uncredited voiceover in “It’s a Wonderful Life” has her singing “Vieni, Vieni”. That’s when a dejected Jimmy Stewart enters Martini’s bar.

Disney had Caselloti under exclusive contract. They did not want her voice in any other film, fearing conflict with the success of Snow White.

Walt Disney said, “I’m sorry, but that voice can’t be used anywhere. I don’t want to spoil the illusion of Snow White.”

Snow White remains Caselotti’s only credited role throughout her career.

Buddy Ebsen was originally cast as the Tin Man. He left the film when aluminum dust from his makeup put him in an iron lung. Then the Munchkinland sequence had a faulty trap door that inflicted serious burns on Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the West. She had to miss six weeks of filming with her stand-in taking care of scenes involving fire.

The stand-in was Betty Danko and she was made to sit on a makeshift pipe that spewed smoke for the “Surrender Dorothy” scene. The pipe was fitted to look like a broomstick, and it exploded during filming. Danko spent 11 days in a hospital with permanent scarring on her legs.

Margaret Hamilton’s copper-based makeup proved so toxic that her green complexion slowly faded in the months that followed.

Judy Garland’s career problems are well documented from her time on the set of Wizard of Oz, and in Hollywood which included forced abortions, breast binding, forced anorexia, and a drug problem. Garland lived through hell to live the dream. She blamed Oz for making her so famous.

So when Garland met the Queen Mother who told her “Over the Rainbow” made her cry, Garland allegedly responded with,”Ma’am, that song has plagued me all my life.”

MGM had Garland endure a brutal publicity campaign with the actress going back and forth between the East and West Coasts so fans could see her in various cities. There was a three-week-long series of live routines performed before screenings in New York which was pretty odd.

The film’s initial run at Loew’s Capitol Theater in Manhattan had Garland and Mickey Rooney performing a song-and-dance routine. Rooney had nothing to do with the film, adding to many questions surrounding the marketing drama.

Garland, exhausted from all the promoting, eventually collapsed and had to have medical attention.

Richard Thorpe was the man when production started but producer Mervyn LeRoy dismissed him for his inability to create that important fairy tale atmosphere. Dorothy had blonde hair and heavy make up when he was in charge.

Then came George Cukor, director of The Philadelphia Story, My Fair Lady, and Gaslight. The same man who slapped Katherine Hepburn for spilling ice cream on an expensive costume. He was a temporary replacement and fired later that year, allegedly because he was gay and had knowledge on Clark Gable’s secret gay past. Cukor did get rid of Dorothy’s heavy makeup and blonde hair. He even suggested that Garland play Dorothy as innocent and wide-eyed, not coy and knowing.

Victor Fleming arrived and took charge, even slapping Garland for giggling during a take. He finished 80% of the movie before he was called to direct Gone with the Wind, from which Cukor was also fired. That’s the second time in a year Fleming took over for Cukor.

King Vidor came in to finish Oz. He was largely unknown at the time though he directed his first film in 1913 with his last in 1980. His career boasts of an honorary Oscar in 1979 for “his incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator.”

Vidor just had to shoot the Kansas scenes.

Fleming came back to edit Oz and he found Vidor’s work boring. He cut “Over the Rainbow,” concerned about the pacing at the start. The song was restored by writers Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, who both argued that it was the most important song in the film.

In the book, Dorothy’s magical slippers are known as The Silver Shoes. Stage productions of Oz did use silver shoes but the 1939 version of the film did away with silver since it was deemed too nondescript for Technicolor.

Red leather shoes became orange on film, so costume designer Adrian decided to sew thousands of red sequins on them producing the shoes that have delighted fans and movie goers ever since.

Carl Spitz trained many animals in his Hollywood Dog Training School. Many of whom appeared in Hollywood films. Terry, a female cairn terrier was cast as Toto. The film made Terry so popular that she was renamed Toto in real life. The dog played roles in other films until she passed in 1944. It was Spitz who buried Terry on the school property near Laurel Canyon Boulevard in Studio City, CA.

Caltrans acquired the 10-acre parcel in 1958. It stood in the path of the proposed Ventura Freeway so when driving by the Laurel Canyon exit on the 101 Freeway, people are literally passing over the former school and Toto’s final resting place.

Author L. Frank Baum moved to Los Angeles in 1910, hoping to find more business opportunities in relation to his books. He soon built “Ozcot”, his four-bedroom mansion at the corner of Yucca and Cherokee streets in Hollywood.

Baum lived there until his passing on May 6, 1919. The Wizard of Oz premiered on August 15, 1939, at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, just three blocks away from Ozcot. It was demolished in the late 1950s in place of an apartment building that still stands today.