Wizard of Oz / Dark Side of the Moon

Regardless of soundtrack, The Wizard of Oz is just a strange movie. It freaked me out as a kid--the flying monkey bit had me running for mom--and the movie is still bizarrely psychedelic today. After that, I created my own Technicolor, gingham, flying house, altered-state dilemmas with Dark Side of the Moon. Doesn't surprise me that the two would work together, but I won't be playing with that combo too soon. :-O

I have tried this several times. I completely DO NOT believe that Dark Side of the Moon was composed as a soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz.

Popular music in general, and Dark Side of the Moon in particular, has many key changes, tonal changes, and lyrics which espouse general themes of love, fear, loss, and longing. Movies have many camera, scene, and set changes and also use universal themes of love, fear, loss, and longing.

If you put any movie and music album together you will find occasional coincidences between them. Combining a movie about a girl's dream fantasy (Dorothy), and an album about a acid-using musician who went off the deep end (Syd Barrett), you are bound to find more than the usual amount of coincidences. See this website for some of the coincidences you may see when combining them:

http://www.ingsoc.com/waters/info/oz.html

However, there are many more key and song changes, lyrics, and other aspects of the album that DO NOT match up with the scenes and plot of The Wizard of Oz than there are connections. But the human mind works by trying to find meaning in the world, trying to find connections between everything we experience, particularly when we experience them simultaneously. So we do find connections between the album and the movie. But it is not unique between these two creations.

Try matching up The Wall with Alice in Wonderland. If you want to try dozens more coincidental "synchronicities" between movies and albums then check out this website:

http://www.synchronicityarkive.com/

I tried it and enjoyed it. It's amazing how many hits come up about it when you Google it. As far as PF's involvement, I would vote coincidence but as Snofun3 says, there are some interesting ones.

I have to ask Thomasedison...exactly how would you convey a key change via visuals? You keep going on about key changes and I just don't get it. When a song's key changes from Cmaj to F#min exactly how would you show that through a visual clue?

I am not a musical theorist, nor do I pretend to know much about how the minds works. I don't mean to come across that way. I don't know if there is a specific visual correlation between a key change in the music and some visual change in a movie.

What I am saying is that in my opinion, when we hear any noticable change in a piece of music (e.g. music starts, music ends, chorus begins, key changes, tone changes (different lead instrument or group of instruments,)

AND SIMULTANEOUSLY

we see visual changes in a movie (scene begins, scene ends, special effects begin or end, change of camera, closeup, cut-away, etc.)

THEN WE MAKE A CONNECTION BETWEEN THE AUDITORY AND VISUAL CHANGES.

Movies already use their own soundtracks to intensify feelings (e.g. shark music in Jaws) or startle us (shower scene in Psycho).

In my opinion, when we play random music along with a movie then our minds can't help but notice when changes in the music occur simultaneously to changes in the visuals.

In addition I believe that we also notice connections between the lyrics in the songs and the visuals on the screen.

Most of the time specific lyrics of any song played randomly with a movie won't relate to what we see on the screen. But when coincidences do occur we notice it.

Just my opinion.