Episode #233 - Is The Wizard of Oz Secretly About American History?

Our Fake History

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Education, Talk Radio, Society & Culture, History

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2025

⏱️ 83 minutes

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Summary

The beloved children's novel The Wonderful Wizard of OZ has been celebrated as the quintessential American fairytale. But, many believe that the book is more than just a pleasing adventure story for kids. It's been argued that hidden in the text is a subtle allegory that satirizes the politics of late 19th century America. Some believe that the author L. Frank Baum used his fantasy story to make a point about the election of 1896 and the candidates William Jennings Bryan and William McKinley. However, many Baum biographers have disputed this claim. Was L. Frank Baum writing a populist parable or does that idea stem from a deep misunderstanding of his politics? Tune-in and find out how dorm-room bonding rituals, the Great Gig in the Sky, and Sebastian's greatest moment of synchronicity all play a role in the story.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Have you ever heard of the dark side of the rainbow?
0:12.0	It's one of those great pieces of dorm room lore passed around between music-obsessed undergrads, sometimes called the Dark Side of Oz.
0:24.5	It involves the beloved 1939 cinematic classic, The Wizard of Oz, and the equally beloved 1973 classic rock behemoth, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.
0:41.7	Turns out these two massive pop culture artifacts are secretly in conversation.
0:49.7	Or at least, so goes the tale.
0:53.3	By the time I entered university in the early 2000s, it was well established among music heads,
1:00.8	psych rock aficionados, and really anyone enamored with The Trippy, that if you played
1:07.4	dark side of the moon while watching The Wizard of Oz on mute, the two would weirdly sink up.
1:16.7	So, of course, my friends and I had to try it.
1:20.5	And what I now realized was a textbook first year bonding ritual, a crew of us living on the same university residence floor,
1:29.8	got a VHS copy of Wizard of Oz, and Darkside on CD.
1:36.5	If memory serves, the young lady in the room next to mine had one of those TVs with the VCR built right in, and of course a serviceable CD
1:46.8	player. And by the way, I think this is the optimum way to experience the dark side of the
1:53.6	rainbow, in a dorm room surrounded by like-minded kids, primed with contraband substances, ready to be tripped out.
2:04.5	I also think the compact disc is the ideal format on which to play the album for this experience.
2:12.5	You see, for the effect to work, it's all about timing.
2:16.5	There is a perfect delay between when you push play on a
2:20.2	CD player and when the music actually starts playing. No need to get all audio file on this one.
2:29.4	If you're using a fancy vinyl copy of Dark Side of the Moon, flipping the record will actually throw the
2:35.6	whole thing off. No, no, you want a CD. We had read on some message board online that for
2:44.2	Dark Side of the Rainbow to work, first you had to start the video of Wizard of Oz, and then you had to wait until the old MGM logo with the lion appeared on screen.
2:57.2	After the third roar of the lion, you pressed play on the CD player,
	...

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