Urban legend claims that if you play Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon while watching “The Wizard of Oz,” there’s an incredible synchronicity that could only come about had the band literally planned the entire album around the movie.
Pink Floyd has denied the rumor outright for years, with Floyd drummer Nick Mason giving one of our favorite answers to MTV in 1997: “It’s absolute nonsense. It has nothing to do with ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ It was all based on ‘The Sound of Music.’”
OK. So those evil flying monkeys could be symbolic Nazis. But it sure seems like Wizard of Oz is a better fit — at least, hearing the line “I don’t know; I was really drunk at the time” while we gaze upon Munchkin Land seems like a pretty realistic reaction.
There are plenty of tidy thematic coincidences between Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon. The movie’s keynote song, “Over The Rainbow,” fits neatly with the iconic, light-splitting prism design used for the album’s cover art. The album boasts the song “Great Gig in The Sky,” which sounds like the perfect name for a song to go with a movie about a tornado.
For the most part, the biggest coincidences seem to show up on the first trek through the album. That may be due to greater familiarity (and, by extension, observational powers) of what’s going on in the movie and on the album. Or, it could be that writing an album to hold up through two and a half cycles isn’t exactly easy — or, possibly, wasn’t even done in the first place.
In our book, this urban legend lands somewhere between reading a horoscope and analyzing literature: There’s probably some truth in it somewhere, but finding the “truth” relies upon the user doing a lot of mental heavy lifting, and those theories may not match up with what the authors actually intended. Judge the coincidences for yourself.
Regardless, this was a fun way to spend a Saturday night. Warning: Even if you love Dark Side, you’ll probably want to have something else to listen to for a few weeks after doing this.
