DarkSideofOz.net

Dark Side of Oz 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. 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.

History

In August 1995, the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette published the first mainstream media article 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 furthermainstream media articles and a segment on MTV news.

In July 2000, the cable channel Turner Classic Movies aired a version of Oz with the Dark Side album as an alternate soundtrack. Turner Entertainment has owned the rights to the film since 1986.

References in popular culture

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 stepped onstage and said, "Now, if you want a truly awesome experience, rewind this sketch to the beginning, light up a fatty, and put onDark Side of the Moon. Trust me, it's mind blowing." After saying this, "Money" began 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 theWizard of Oz soundtrack."

Synchronicity

Fans have compiled more than one hundred moments 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 ofsynchronicity, defined by the psychologist Carl Jung as a phenomenon in which coincidental events "seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality," although most accounts assume that the effect was deliberate on Pink Floyd's part. Detractors 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.

Coincidence versus intent

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."

Created by TheLiamMurphy