Have not watched this in many years, but it is something I recommend everyone do at least once. You play the movie Wizard of Oz with the sound muted and instead listen to the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon. Start the music at the beginning of the movie on the third roar of the MGM lion and there are all kinds of trippy coincidences between what you are watching and what you are listening to.
I recall that in particular the song Brain Damage fits really well. It starts when the scarecrow is doing his "If I Only Had a Brain" dance, only it is to the line "The lunatic is on the grass". When the song gets to the line "You raise the blade, you make the change. You rearrange me 'til I'm sane", the word "blade" hits exactly as we see the tin man and his ax. If you replay the album immediately when it ends (since the movie is longer than the album), it synchs up again and the next time that line shows up is exactly when the ax is used to chop down the door to rescue Dorothy from the wicked witch's castle.
Dark Side of the Moon audio engineer Alan Parsons in 2003 dismissed the supposed effect:
It was an American radio guy who pointed it out to me. It's such a non-starter, a complete load of eyewash. I tried it for the first time about two years ago. One of my fiancée's kids had a copy of the video, and I thought I had to see what it was all about. I was very disappointed. The only thing I noticed was that the line "balanced on the biggest wave" came up when Dorothy was kind of tightrope walking along a fence. One of the things any audio professional will tell you is that the scope for the drift between the video and the record is enormous; it could be anything up to twenty seconds by the time the record's finished. And anyway, if you play any record with the sound turned down on the TV, you will find things that work.[8]
Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason told 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."[9]
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That said, I've done this, and I think it fits better than the band gives it credit for, especially if you're, umm... TOS.
