If I Only Had A Brain deleted scene

During the “If I Only had a Brain” sequence, there was originally a spectacular dance that displayed Ray Bolger’s vaudeville dancing history. In the final version, he sang the first and second verses of “If I Only had a Brain”, then fell over. In the original, though, he sang the first and second verses, began to dance, and went into several offshoot routines where a crow takes a large patch of his straw, the scarecrow flies in the air to get it back and succeeds, does some splits (forward and backward), and then a pumpkin rolls down the road and hits the scarecrow from behind, sending him high into the air. He comes down, bounces against the fences, sings a third verse of “If I Only Had a Brain”, then falls down.

The scenes show the character as a weightless and loose man of straw and is a lively upbeat segment, but is obviously wrong for the pacing of the movie and its easy to see why it was cut. Thank goodness the footage survived though, which can’t be said of the fates of several other scenes from Oz.