Dark Side of the Rainbow

From The Book of THoTH (Leaves of Wisdom)

The Dark Side of the Rainbow is a perceived effect created by playing the 1973 Pink Floyd concept album Dark Side of the Moon simultaneously with the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Depending on the version of the film used (since different formats run at different speeds), parts of the film and the album appear to correspond with each other. The title of the music video-like experience comes from a combination of "Dark Side of the Moon" and the song "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" featured in the film. It is also sometimes referred to as "The Dark Side of Oz."

Contents

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Corresponding moments

Fans have compiled more than 100 moments of interplay between the film and album, including further links that occur if the album is repeated through the entire film. Some suggest, however, that people who want to try the experience for the first time do so without first reading a definitive list in order to make the event more surprising.

Here is a representative sample of some of the corresponding moments:

  • "Breathe": Dorothy tightropes along a fence to the lyric "and balanced on the biggest wave.", as she falls off the lyric is "race towards an early grave."
  • "On the Run": Dorothy falls off the fence into the hog pen (causing farm hands to run over and jump in to rescue her) just as the track switches from the calm "Breathe" to the frantic "On the Run."
  • "Time": Mrs. Gulch's appearance on her bicycle corresponds with the sounding of bells and chimes at the beginning of this song. Dorothy runs away from home to save Toto to the lyric "no one told you when to run." Professor Marvel's sign reads "Past, Present, Future."
  • "Breathe (Reprise)": Professor Marvel advises Dorothy to go home to the lyric "Home, home again."
  • "The Great Gig in the Sky": The wordless choral seems to be choreographed with the tornado scene - rising as the storm gathers strength, climaxing and subsequently falling when the window knocks Dorothy unconscious, rising as the house flies into the sky, and falling when the house lands in Oz.
  • "Money": The opening cash register coincides with Dorothy opening the door to find the Land of Oz as well as the transition from black and white to color. Glinda the Good Witch of the North floats in on her bubble to the lyric "Don't give me that do-goody-good bullshit."
  • "Us and Them": The Wicked Witch of the West, dressed in black, appears and confronts Dorothy, dressed in a blue dress, to the lyric "Black... and blue." The good and wicked witches then face off to the lyric "and who knows which is which." With the lyric "Down and out", Glinda leaves in her bubble at the word "out".
  • "Brain Damage": Coincides with the movie's "If I Only Had a Brain." The Scarecrow, stuffed with dried grass, flops around like a madman on the Yellow Brick Road to the lyrics "The lunatic is on the grass" and "Got to keep the loonies on the path."
  • "Eclipse": The lyric "and everyone you meet" corresponds with Dorothy finding Tin Man and shaking his hand.
  • At the end of the album, a heartbeat plays as Dorothy puts her ear to the Tin Man's chest, listening for his (missing) heart.
  • The album artwork could also be considered a correspondence. The light starts out white and then goes through a prism and turns to color. The movie starts out in black and white, then turns to color.
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Synchronicity

Some have explained this synergy effect as an example of synchronicity, described by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung as a phenomenon in which coincidental events "seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality." [1]

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Real or imagined?

Detractors [2] argue that the phenomenon is the result of the mind's tendency to look for and recognize patterns, real or not, amid disorder. In the same way, people sometimes believe that they recognize shapes in random clouds, that they see the image of a religious figure in a random blotch, or that they detect an ordered conspiracy amid a set of unrelated events. Under this theory, a viewer will focus on matching moments while ignoring the greater number of instances where the two works do not correspond.

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Accident or planned?

While some fans argue that there are nevertheless far too many syncs between these two works to have arisen by accident, the band members have insisted that the phenomenon is pure coincidence. In an interview for the 25th anniversary of the album, guitarist/vocalist David Gilmour flatly 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 with combining Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon." [3] And on an MTV special about Pink Floyd in 2002, the band dismissed any relationship between the album and the movie as an accident, arguing that there were no means of reproducing the film in the studio at the time they recorded the album.

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History

Although the Dark Side of the Rainbow effect has become famous, its origin is murky. In 1994, some fans of Pink Floyd discussed the phenomenon on the Usenet message board alt.music.pink-floyd, but knowledge of who first thought of combining the two works, and why, was already lost. Awareness exploded in August 1995 with the appearance of a mainstream media article on the effect [4], which sparked widespread discussion about the concept on a number of classic rock radio stations. Soon a community of fans put together a series of competing sites [5] on the then-relatively new World Wide Web in which they further explored the idea.

Interest in the synchronicity between the album and the film eventually made its way into the culture well beyond the small community of technologically savvy Pink Floyd fans. For example, the Turner Classic Movies cable channel has aired a version of Oz with the Dark Side album as an alternate soundtrack. The band Guster alludes to the phenomenon in their song "Come Downstairs and Say Hello," which opens with the lines "Dorothy moves to click her ruby shoes/Right in tune with Dark Side of the Moon." The animated television show Family Guy makes several references to the effect. In the episode "The Story on Page 1", Peter Griffin says to Luke Perry, "I'm telling you, Dark Side of the Moon totally synchs up with the Wizard of Oz!" And in the episode "Stuck Together Torn Apart," the character Mort Goldman tells Griffin that he and his wife "like to watch old movies while listening to Hotel California to see if it synchs up in a significant way. And so far, no. Nothing has."

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Replicating the effect

Real or imagined, the effect is usually created by pausing a CD of the album at the very beginning, starting the DVD or tape of the film with the TV volume muted, and un-pausing the CD when the black and white MGM lion roars for the third time. (Note some versions have a color lion also. The black and white lion is the right one to use for the synch.) A minority of devotees argue that un-pausing the CD on the first roar produces a superior alignment.

Most users have explored this phenomenon using the original or 1994 re-issue editions of the album. Note that 1993's 20th Anniversary re-issue edition (the version included in the "Shine On" box set) altered the runtimes of many of the tracks, so that version is not recommended for creating the "Dark Side of the Rainbow" effect. By contrast, 2003's 30th Anniversary re-issue edition is acceptable because it largely restored the original runtimes. The only variation in the 30th Anniversary edition is quickly corrected: the first track, "Speak to Me," is 13 seconds longer than in the original, but the second track, "Breathe," makes up the gap by coming in 13 seconds shorter.

Another factor that could affect the quality of the perceived synch is the version of the film used. The USA version runs 101 minutes, for example, while the UK version runs 98 minutes (due to the PAL system's transfer rate of 25 rather than 24 frames per second). Most users who have made websites touting the effect appear to be based in the USA. When using a PAL version of the DVD, digitally speeding up the album by 4.16% prior to starting fixes any problems with synching.

Most fans only play the album through once, but some devotees believe that the experience can be extended by continuing to watch the movie while starting the album over again. While repeat-play viewers have reported many additional perceived tonal synchs later in the film, the frequency of lyrical matchings drops significantly.

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Variations on the theme

The fame of the Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz synchronicity has prompted some fans to search for correspondences using other albums or films. No other combination has been reported to produce anywhere near the frequency of lyrical matchings that are the hallmark of Dark Side of the Rainbow, but opportunities for synch between the tonal content of music and a film's images appear to be fairly common.

For example, some fans have tried using Oz with other albums, including playing Disc 2 of Pink Floyd's The Wall following the first play of Dark Side of the Moon or using Pink Floyd's Meddle the final time around. Others have tried using Dark Side of the Moon with other films, including the original non-extended version of The Fellowship of the Ring. In each of these experiments, they have reported modest success in finding some corresponding moments.

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" third act in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the lengthy Floyd song "Echoes" from Meddle. Again the correspondences are primarily tonal rather than lyrical; among them, both the track and the sequence are the same length, about 23 minutes. Fans also note that director Stanley Kubrick reportedly asked Pink Floyd to score the film, and that former band leader Roger Waters reportedly has said he regrets having turned down the offer.

In another twist, some fans of the punk band NOFX say the 18-minute single "The Decline" can be synched with Pink Floyd's movie The Wall. [6]

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External links

--MAD 13 June 2006

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