Is there a hanging in the Wizard of Oz? Questions of a hanging in background Wizard of Oz footage are not new.

But chatting up online tonight is the same question – when Dorothy heads down the yellow brick road,  there appears a small dark figure moving in the background …. is that a crew member hanging?

Answer is no. The questions first arose when the Wizard of Oz was released on home video. If you watch the scene on a big screen, reports say the dark figure is obviously a bird, a big bird believed to be one of the cranes rented by MGM for the scene.

But when you watch the video on tv, and certainly online, the smaller image can seem to look like a person. The confusion came from birds rented from the Los Angeles Zoo for the scene.

For the creation of “over the rainbow”, MGM brought in everything from peacocks to turkeys. Even in moments before and after, Dorothy has birds flying around her. The result was to make a studio set appear more like the outdoors. The result – birds in the background, not a hanging.