This is the greatest special effect you never knew you were looking at.
The celluloid used as film at the time was thick and brittle. Splicing it was basically impossible. How to go from sepia Kansas to technicolor Oz? This was a problem that nearly sank that amazing reveal shot.
Until some crewmember said “why not just film it all in color and paint Kansas brown?”
That’s right. THAT WHOLE THING IS COLOR. ALL OF IT. Bobbi Koshay (Judy Garland’s body double) has been put in brown makeup to hide the pink of her skin. That dress isn’t blue and filmed in sepia, it’s an identical brown dress. The furniture? All painted brown. The walls and door were painted to match their color on the Kansas film rolls....a daunting task, because film at the time came out so incredibly dark that those lush Ruby Slippers were almost orange in real life, just to get that deep red color. (Early tests with actually-red shoes came out black rather than red!)
And it was done so well and so expertly that the only way to tell it’s even there is to get one of the 1970s or TNT prints where Kansas is black and white instead of sepia-tone (since the painted “sepia” will be out of place).
Today we could do this with a click of a button. Back then they had to invent a whole new set.
Drink your “respect the SFX crew” juice today!
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