Frank Morgan posed for a test for The Wizard, made up to look as the Wizard looked in the book; this makeup was discarded and the final look was only reached after at least five more tries. The Wicked Witch has two eyes in the movie and only one eye in the book. In fact, Dorothy and her friends are the only characters who look like the ones in the book, because of changes having to do with the Hays Office.
Richard Thorpe, the original director of the film, had shot around two weeks of footage before he was fired. Among the scenes he shot were Dorothy's meeting of the Scarecrow on the Yellow Brick Road along with his song and dance, as well as all the scenes involving the Wicked Witch's castle. Thorpe's footage had a remarkably different look from what was seen in the finished film. Most striking was the look of Judy Garland's Dorothy, who in Thorpe's footage had a blonde tousled hairstyle with baby doll make-up. Ray Bolger's Scarecrow also had different make-up as well as trousers. Margaret Hamilton had different make-up as the Wicked Witch of the West. In addition, Buddy Ebsen was playing the Tin Man. In Thorpe's footage the Yellow Brick Road also had a different look, as it was not curbed and made up of artificial looking oval bricks, instead of the curbed real rectangular ones in the finished film. Thorpe's footage has not been seen since it was shot in 1938 but surviving home movies, taken by composer Harold Arlen, shows a few shots of a blonde Garland and Bolger rehearsing their Scarecrow meeting scene, giving the viewer a glimpse of what Thorpe
Bert Lahr's costume weighed 90 pounds. It was made from a real lion skin and was very hot. The arc lights used to light the set often raised the temperature on the set to over 100 degrees F. Lahr used to sweat so profusely that the costume would be soaked by the end of the day. There were two people whose only job was to spend the night drying the costume for the next day. The costume was dry cleaned occasionally but usually, in the words of one of the crew members, "it reeked".
Charley Grapewin came out of retirement to play Uncle Henry.
E.Y. Harburg and Harold Arlen were given 14 weeks (and a Hollywood bungalow) to come up with the film's musical score.
Herbert Stothart, who scored this film, also scored Marie Antoinette. A recycled piece from that film can be heard during the scene in which Dorothy and her friends attempt an escape from the Witch's castle.
Ogden Nash wrote an unused screenplay.
A recent study claimed that this is the most watched movie in film history, largely due to the number of television screenings each year as well as video which has enabled children of every generation to see it.
A reference to something in the book not included in the script can be seen in the movie. It is the kiss Glinda gives Dorothy on the forehead that protects her from the Wicked Witch, as none dare harm someone who bears the kiss of the Good Witch.
A scene was filmed in which the Tin Woodman was turned into a "human beehive" by the Wicked Witch; after he crushes a bee, the tin woodman cries and rusts his jaw shut, then has to be oiled by Dorothy to get his jaw working again. This scene was cut and so the scene of Dorothy and her companions that comes after where the "beehive" scene had to be flipped to match their continuity in the earlier scene, causing them to appear blurred slightly.
A sequence in which Dorothy and her companions make a triumphant return to the Emerald City after melting the Wicked Witch, known as the "restoration scene," was cut.
A small sign to the left of the door of Professor Marvel's wagon lists "Exhibition Balloonist" as one of his talents.
According to lead Munchkin Jerry Maren, the "little people" on the set were paid $50 per week for a 6-day work week, while Toto received $125 per week.
Although Judy Garland was always the favorite to play Dorothy, there were many other actresses in Hollywood who were also considered to play her. Among them were Shirley Temple, who was closer to the actual age of Dorothy and extremely popular at the time. Since she was under contract to 20th Century Fox, a deal was offered to trade her to MGM in exchange for Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, which was voided by Harlow's untimely death. Temple's vocal talents were deemed by producers Mervyn LeRoy and Arthur Freed to be inadequate for the scope of the role. Deanna Durbin, the operatic rival to Garland, was also a consideration, as was Bonita Granville.
Although it has been long believed that Lorraine Bridges dubbed Billie Burke's singing voice in the film, she actually did not. Ms. Burke did her own singing as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North.
Although most of screenwriter Noel Langley's ideas were used in the finished film, and he is credited as being the principal screenwriter as well as the adaptor, there were some revisions to his material. Langley was incensed that they had been done, and walked out on the project several times, although he was always persuaded to return. He was bitterly resentful of the final screenplay, and is on record as saying that he hated the finished film when he finally saw it.
At the end of the sequence in which Dorothy and the Scarecrow first meet the Tin Man, as the three march off singing "We're Off to See the Wizard", there is a disturbance in the trees off to the right. This was long rumored to be one of the crew (or, by some accounts, one of the dwarf actors) committing suicide by hanging himself, but it is in fact a large bird stretching its wings.
At the time that CBS purchased the television rights to The Wizard of Oz, MGM had sold most of its pre-1950's film library to individual stations across the U.S. The two major films they had not sold were Gone with the Wind (which MGM controlled the rights to) and "The Wizard of Oz". It would be twenty more years before "Gone With the Wind" would come to television.
At the time this film was made, film soundtracks were generally quite simple, with most of the sound recorded on the set, with post-production dubbing and looping being used only when necessary. However, due to the large number of special sound effects in this film, it was one of the rare cases in the 1930s of the use of a sound designer (another was Murray Spivack on King Kong), whose job it was just to work out and design the sound elements of the soundtrack. O.O. Ceccarini (a close friend of Albert Einstein), who occasionally did special sound work at MGM, was brought in to design the soundtrack, with the assistance of special sound effects engineer Franklin Milton (who would later head up the MGM post-production sound department, replacing Douglas Shearer and Wesley C. Miller in the 1950s). Ceccarini was a brilliant mathematician as well, and he applied mathematics to achieving some of the more complicated sound elements.
Dorothy's hair changes lengths throughout the course of the film, most noticeably in the Scarecrow cornfield sequence. This was the first sequence to be shot. As production progressed, refinements were made to Judy Garland's hair and make-up. At the end of filming, reshoots were done of the cornfield sequence and, thus, the shots do not match. The reshoots are believed to have been done by King Vidor, who also directed the Kansas sequences, including "Over the Rainbow", after director Victor Fleming left the production to direct Gone with the Wind.