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The Dark Side of the Rainbow

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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 1939 film The Wizard of Oz and watching for 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."

Corresponding moments

Fans have compiled more than 100 moments [1] of perceived 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 before reading a definitive list in order to make the event more surprising.

Template:Spoiler Here is a representative sample. (Before adding to this list, please see discussion on talk page.)

  • "Breathe": Dorothy tightropes along a fence to the lyric "...balanced on the biggest wave."
  • "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 alarm 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 then 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 little men dance in synch with the beat during "The Lollipop Song". Then, 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".
  • "Any Colour You Like": The beginning of "Any Colour You Like" marks the transition between the time when Dorothy is with the munchkins and when she is by herself on the Yellow Brick Road.
  • "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.
  • Closing heartbeats: Dorothy puts her ear to the Tin Man's chest, listening for his (missing) heart.
  • Album cover art: The cover shows a white ray of light against a black background, which passes through a prism and becomes a rainbow. Likewise, the movie goes from black-and-white to color when Dorothy arrives in Oz.

Template:Endspoiler

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." [2]

Real or imagined?

Detractors [3] 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. Psychologists refer to this tendency as confirmation bias. 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.

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." [4] 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. On March 3, 2006 at the Canadian Music Week conference in Toronto, Alan Parsons, the album's recording engineer, told an audience during a question-and-answer session that there had been no effort to integrate the album with the movie. Drummer Nick Mason, however, has stated that Pink Floyd intended the syncs to be with The Sound of Music, and not with The Wizard of Oz (he was kidding).[citation needed]

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. Since then, several waves of attention rippled through popular culture. In August 1995, the first mainstream media article about the synchronicity appeared, prompting discussions on a number of classic rock radio stations, and around this time several fans began creating websites in which they touted the experience and catalogued the corresponding moments. A second wave of awareness began in April 1997 when a Boston DJ discussed the Dark Side of the Rainbow on WZLX-FM, leading to further mainstream media articles and a segment on MTV News.

Since then, the Turner Classic Movies cable channel has aired a version of Oz with the Dark Side album as an alternate soundtrack. The band Guster alluded 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 made 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." The Dark Side of the Rainbow was also referenced in a June 2006 "Born Loser" comic strip.

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.

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 play the album through only 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.

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 perceived syncs between the tonal content of any music and any film's images appear to be fairly common.

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 the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and the lengthy Floyd song "Echoes" from the 1971 album 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 [citation needed], and that former band leader Roger Waters reportedly has said he regrets having turned down the offer.

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