What do you do with your free time? Paint? Smell the flowers and the coffee? Write operatic librettos? Apparently there exists a frightening large minority of people who suck on strips of acid and then spend literally hours poring over footage of The Wizard of Oz while listening to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon album. Just in case you haven’t heard there is a devoted following who believe that starting Pink Floyd’s masterpiece as the MGM lion roars just before The Wizard of Oz begins result in nothing less than an eerie set of coincidences that can only be explained by coming to the conclusion that the members of Pink Floyd deliberately set out to make a kind of rock soundtrack to the classic film featuring more midgets than Terror of Tiny Town.
Never mind that Pink Floyd recorded The Dark Side of the Moon before the advent of videocassettes, meaning they’d have had to get themselves a copy of The Wizard of Oz on actual film. The very idea of a bunch drugged-up sixties musicians taking the time necessary to view, review and then re-review the movie as they made music is even too surreal for my ability to suspend disbelief. Of course, most devotees of this myth agree it was simply a case of synchronicity; that Pink Floyd certainly didn’t set out to write a rock soundtrack. I would counter, of course, that you could take just about any rock album and play it while watching just about any movie and come up with any number of strange and bizarre coincidences. Alas, I don’t have as much free time as many of these Floydians do. I was perusing this site devoted to the coincidences and I simply couldn’t get over just how rich some of the stretches sent in by fans were.
Consider this, for example.
During the third playthrough, when Dorothy and Professor Marvel are getting into the balloon to take Dorothy home, the chimes and bells at the start of the song “Time” play loudly. My interpretation of it is that the chimes and bells are representative of an alarm clock saying “Time to go!
I mean is that some kind of leap or what? Imagine, a song called “Time” and a movie that has the sound of chimes in it. What, I ask you, are the odds of that? Surely this truly unexpected and bizarre coincidence finely underlines the chilling synchronicity involved in this enterprise. It almost points definitively to the fact that Pink Floyd most assuredly did intend for The Dark Side of the Moon to act as a post facto soundtrack for acidheads.
And if that doesn’t do it for you, then maybe this one will:
After Scarecrow is handed his “Doctorate of Thinkology” he says “The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles TRIANGLE is equal to the square root of the remaining side.” Of course the triangle being a recurring theme in this synchronicity as well as the image we find on the cover of DSOTM.
Let’s just toss aside any doubts we may have had, okay. I mean this is the best proof of all. There is a triangle on the cover of the album of The Dark Side of the Moon and the Scarecrow actually mentions a triangle! Seriously, how often have you EVER seen or heard a reference to a triangle in a movie. Never, that’s how often. In fact, now that I think about it, not only have I never seen or heard a reference to a triangle in any movie other than The Wizard of Oz, but I haven’t seen or heard a reference to a circle or square, either.
Still not convinced? How about this particularly trenchant observation:
“I think I need a Learjet” …as Glinda appears from the bubble. Maybe she’d prefer a Learjet over traveling in a bubble?
It takes a stupendously fecund imagination to make the kind of intellectual leap from the mention of a Lear jet to the possibility that Glinda the Good Witch wishes she had a Lear jet instead of a bubble to travel in, don’t you think? But wait, you haven’t read the single most amazing observation yet. This one was made by the kind of incredibly fertile mind that makes you think of what would have resulted had Albert Einstein and Donna Haraway produced children:
The last five songs of DSOTM, in reverse order, and skipping the last track, ECLIPSE, the first letter of the remaining four tracks, spells out B-A-U-M, as in L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Wow. I really mean that. Wow. That is simply stunning. Of course, I’ve got something even more amazing. In order to have discovered all the amazing coincidences that exist between The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz, you’d probably have to engage in some heavy duty drug use. And-get this now-there is actually a song on the album that points exactly to the kind of people who expend incalculable time poring over these coincidences: “Brain Damage.”