Richards Favorite Videos

Clips on the casting back stories from a documentary made in the mid 90s on the MGM classic film ‘The Wizard Of Oz (1939)

Margret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch:

Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale:

Ray Bolger as The Scarecrow. Bolger had originally been cast as The Tin Man, but faught and won his dream role he played in the movie.

The story of why Buddy Ebsen lost the role of the Tin Man:

Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion

Frank Morgan as the Wizard:

I’m happy to report that I had noticed and lectured about every one of these bloopers, with the exception of the hair length (which also occurs later in the movie).

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.