Dark Side of the Rainbow[1] (also known as Dark Side of Oz or The Wizard of Floyd) refers to the pairing of the 1973 Pink Floyd music album The Dark Side of the Moon with the visual portion of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.[2] This produces moments where the film and the album appear to correspond with each other. The title of the music video-like experience comes from a combination of the album title and the film's song "Over the Rainbow". Band members and others involved in the making of the album state that any relationship between the two works of art is merely a coincidence.[3]
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In August 1995, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette published the first mainstream media article[4] about the "synchronicity", citing alt.music.pink-floyd. Soon afterward, several fans began creating websites in which they touted the experience and tried to comprehensively catalog the corresponding moments. A second wave of awareness began in April 1997 when Boston radio DJ George Taylor Morris discussed Dark Side of the Rainbow on the air, leading to further mainstream media articles and a segment on MTV news.[2]
In July 2000, the cable channel Turner Classic Movies aired a version of Oz with the Dark Side album as an alternate soundtrack.[5] Turner Entertainment has owned the rights to the film since 1986.
Several music groups have also alluded to the phenomenon. In February 2003, the reggae cover-band group Easy Star All-Stars released a cover album of The Dark Side of the Moon entitled Dub Side of the Moon, which features instructions on how to synchronize the record with The Wizard of Oz. In June 2003, the alternative rock band Guster released an album containing the song "Come Downstairs & Say Hello," which opens with the lines "Dorothy moves/To click her ruby shoes/Right in tune/With Dark Side of the Moon." On the DVD commentary track of Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, Jack Black states at one point that "if you start playing Dark Side Of The Moon at this point in the film... it doesn’t sound very good at all!", and "If you play this film next to The Wizard Of Oz, you'll probably end up watching Wizard instead" before laughing.
In 2004, the late night show Saturday Night Live featured a parody of the Wizard of Oz. At the end, Darrel Hammond steps onstage and says, "Now, if you want a truly awesome experience, rewind this sketch to the beginning, light up a fatty, and put on Dark Side of the Moon. Trust me, it's mind blowing." After saying this, "Money" begins to play in the background.
In 2007, a Mr. Deity comedy skit made a play on Dark Side of the Rainbow by saying "Put a copy of Dark Side on, and then start reading the Book of Revelation about 35 seconds in.", after saying "Is that not the trippiest thing you ever read?" On the episode of The Colbert Report that aired October 3, 2007, Stephen Colbert introduced his guest, former Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell, as someone who "had seen the Dark Side of the Moon." Colbert promised to ask him if "he saw it while listening to the Wizard of Oz soundtrack."[6]
Fans have compiled more than one hundred moments[1] of perceived interplay between the film and album, including further links that occur if the album is repeated through the entire film. This synergy effect has been described as an example of synchronicity, defined by the psychologist Carl Jung as a phenomenon in which coincidental events "seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality,"[7] although most accounts assume that the effect was deliberate on Pink Floyd's part. Detractors[8] argue that the phenomenon is the result of the mind's tendency to think it recognizes patterns amid disorder by discarding data that does not fit. Psychologists refer to this tendency as apophenia. Under this theory, a Dark Side of the Rainbow enthusiast will focus on matching moments while ignoring the greater number of instances where the film and the album do not correspond.
Pink Floyd band members have repeatedly insisted that the reputed phenomenon is coincidence. In an interview for the 25th anniversary of the album, guitarist/vocalist David Gilmour denied that the album was intentionally written to be synchronized with Oz, saying "Some guy with too much time on his hands had this idea of combining Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon."[3]
On an MTV special about Pink Floyd in 2002, the band dismissed any relationship between the album and the movie, saying that there were no means of reproducing the film in the studio at the time they recorded the album.
In a 2003 interview with Rolling Stone, Dark Side of the Moon engineer Alan Parsons said of the supposed effect:
"It was an American radio guy who pointed it out to me. It's such a non-starter, a complete load of eyewash. I tried it for the first time about two years ago. One of my fiancee's kids had a copy of the video, and I thought I had see what it was all about. I was very disappointed. The only thing I noticed was that the line "balanced on the biggest wave" came up when Dorothy was kind of tightrope walking along a fence. One of the things any audio professional will tell you is that the scope for the drift between the video and the record is enormous; it could be anything up to twenty seconds by the time the record's finished. And anyway, if you play any record with the sound turned down on the TV, you will find things that work." [9]
On the cover of the band's 1995 live album Pulse (album) in the background, can be seen a bike with a basket on it and a girl with ruby slippers, both references to The Wizard of Oz. Some fans have construed this as the band subtly confirming the theory.
Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason stated categorically to MTV in 1997, "It's absolute nonsense, it has nothing to do with The Wizard Of Oz. It was all based on The Sound Of Music."[10]
The fame of the Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz synchronicity has prompted some fans to search for correspondences using many other albums or films. Opportunities for perceived syncs between the content of any music and any film appear to be common, but the sheer frequency of connections that are the hallmark of Dark Side of the Rainbow have yet to be discovered on another pairing by the public at large.
Perhaps the oldest variant involves neither Dark Side of the Moon nor The Wizard of Oz. Since the mid-1990s, some websites devoted to the Dark Side of the Rainbow have also made note of a claimed synchronicity between the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" fourth act in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and the lengthy Pink Floyd song "Echoes" from the 1971 album Meddle. Again the correspondences are primarily formal/structural and not grounded in the content of the lyrics. Both the track and the sequence are approximately 23 minutes. Director Stanley Kubrick asked Pink Floyd to score the film, and Roger Waters has said he regrets having turned down the offer.[11]
Comedian Matt Herzau also claims that the Pixar film WALL-E syncs up with Pink Floyd's rock opera The Wall, which he has titled "Another Brick in the WALL-E", after the album's three part song, Another Brick in the Wall.[12][13]
Not a new idea synchronizing film and music or using Pink Floyd as the foundation, Pink Syncs as they are commonly known have been around for sometime and are quite numerous. An unofficial list of known works in a presumed order of appearance is as follows:
- 2001: A Floyd Odyssey — Pink Floyd's Echoes synched to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
- Alice On The Wall — Disney's Alice in Wonderland synched to Pink Floyd's The Wall.
- Dark Side of the Rainbow
- Floyd Reich
- Triumph of The Wall
- The Eternal Dark Side
- Ummagummolympia
   | The first mainstream media article about the Wizard of Oz synchronicity - Hometown Has Been Shutdown - People Connection Blog: AIM Community Network |
| | synchronicity - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary - synchronicity - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary |
| | A skeptical look at the phenomenon - The Straight Dope: Does the music in Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon coincide with the action of The Wizard of Oz? |
| | MTV News - MTV News Segment | Synchronicity Arkive |
| | YouTube - Star Wars Is Bringin' SexyBack - YouTube - Star Wars Is Bringin' SexyBack |
| | YouTube - The Number 23 Shadow of the Day (and What I've Done) - YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. |
| | YouTube - Sorry Jessica Alba, You're a Crazy Bitch - YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. |
| | www.rollingstone.com/artists/pinkfloyd/articles/story/5937469/dark_side_at_30_alan_parsons - "Dark Side" at 30: Alan Parsons: Pink Floyd : Rolling Stone |
| | The Willy Wonka & 2112 website - Enter a world of pure imagination... |
| | more similarities - Dark Side of Oz |
| | "The Ultimate Stoned Movie List" - The Ultimate Stoned Movie List - alt.drugs | Google Groups |
| | "TV while stoned." - TV while stoned. - alt.drugs | Google Groups |
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