Dark Side of the Rainbow (also known as
Dark Side of Oz or
The Wizard of Floyd) refers to the pairing of the 1973
Pink FloydPink Floyd were an English rock band who earned recognition for their psychedelic music in the late 1960s, and as they evolved in the 1970s, for their progressive rock music. Pink Floyd's work is marked by the use of philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album cover art, and...
music album
The Dark Side of the MoonThe Dark Side of the Moon is the eighth studio album by English progressive rock group Pink Floyd, and was released in March 1973. The concept album built on ideas explored by the band in their live shows and earlier recordings, but it lacks the extended instrumental excursions that characterised...
with the visual portion of the 1939 film
The Wizard of OzThe Wizard of Oz is a 1939 American musical fantasy film directed by Victor Fleming from a script mostly by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, with uncredited contributions by others. It was based on the 1900 children's novel of the same name by L. Frank Baum, who died twenty...
.
[MTV News Segment | Synchronicity Arkive] This produces moments where the film and the album appear to correspond with each other. The title of the
music videoA music video is a short film or video that accompanies a complete piece of music/song. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a [marketing] device intended to promote the sale of music recordings. Although the origins of music videos go back much further, they came into their own in...
-like experience comes from a combination of the album title and the film's song "
Over the Rainbow"Over the Rainbow" is a classic ballad song with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E.Y. Harburg. It was written for the movie The Wizard of Oz, and was sung by Judy Garland in that movie. Over time it would become Garland's signature song.In the film, part of the song is played by the MGM...
". Band members and others involved in the making of the album state that any relationship between the two works of art is merely a coincidence.
[http://members.cox.net/stegokitty4/sounds/dv_dsotmwo-oz.mp3]
History
In August 1995, the
Fort Wayne Journal Gazette published the first mainstream media article about the "
synchronicitySynchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance. The phenomenon of synchronicity was first described by Carl Gustav Jung in...
", citing alt.music.pink-floyd. Soon afterward, several fans began creating websites in which they touted the experience and tried to comprehensively catalog the corresponding moments. A second wave of awareness began in April 1997 when
BostonBoston is the capital and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is sometimes regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact. Boston city proper had a 2009 estimated...
radio DJ
George Taylor MorrisGeorge Taylor Morris was a United States disk jockey and radio personality who grew up with and on the radio. Initially working on AM Radio, then switching to the FM Radio format, Morris' career evolved to where he became a "founding father of satellite radio at Sirius XM", according to the station...
discussed Dark Side of the Rainbow on the air, leading to further
mainstream mediaThe term mainstream media denotes those media disseminated via the largest distribution channels, which therefore represent what the majority of media consumers are likely to encounter...
articles and a segment on
MTV newsMTV News is the news division of MTV, one of the first and most popular music television network in the U.S., as well as some of MTV's related channels around the world. MTV News began in the late 1980s with the program The Week In Rock, hosted by Kurt Loder, the first official MTV News correspondent...
.
In July 2000, the cable channel
Turner Classic MoviesTurner Classic Movies is a movie-oriented cable television channel, owned by the Turner Broadcasting System subsidiary of Time Warner, featuring commercial-free classic movies, mostly from the Turner Entertainment and MGM, United Artists, RKO and Warner Bros. film libraries...
aired a version of
Oz with the
Dark Side album as an alternate
soundtrackA soundtrack can be recorded music accompanying and synchronized to the images of a motion picture, television program or video game; a commercially released soundtrack album of music as featured in the soundtrack of a film or TV show; or the physical area of a film that contains the synchronized...
.
Turner EntertainmentTurner Entertainment Company, Inc. is an American media company founded by Ted Turner. Now owned by Time Warner, the company is largely responsible for overseeing its library for worldwide distribution....
has owned the rights to the film since 1986.
Synchronicity
Fans have compiled more than one hundred moments of perceived interplay between the film and album, including further links that occur if the album is repeated through the entire film. This synergy effect has been described as an example of
synchronicitySynchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance. The phenomenon of synchronicity was first described by Carl Gustav Jung in...
, defined by the psychologist
Carl JungCarl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker and the founder of analytical psychology. Jung is considered as the first modern psychologist to state that the human psyche is "by nature religious" and to explore it in depth...
as a phenomenon in which coincidental events "seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality," although most accounts assume that the effect was deliberate on Pink Floyd's part. Detractors argue that the phenomenon is the result of the mind's tendency to think it recognizes patterns amid disorder by discarding data that does not fit. Psychologists refer to this tendency as
apopheniaApophenia is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".In statistics,...
. Under this theory, a Dark Side of the Rainbow enthusiast will focus on matching moments while ignoring the greater number of instances where the film and the album do not correspond.
Coincidence versus intent
Pink Floyd band members have repeatedly insisted that the reputed phenomenon is coincidence. In an interview for the 25th anniversary of the album, guitarist/vocalist
David GilmourDavid Jon Gilmour CBE is an English rock musician, best known as the lead guitarist, one of the lead singers, and one of the main songwriters in the progressive rock band Pink Floyd. In addition to his work with Pink Floyd, Gilmour has worked as a record producer for a variety of artists, and has...
denied that the album was intentionally written to be synchronized with Oz, saying "Some guy with too much time on his hands had this idea of combining
Wizard of Oz with
Dark Side of the Moon."
On an
MTVMTV is an American cable television network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs...
special about Pink Floyd in 2002, the band dismissed any relationship between the album and the movie, saying that there were no means of reproducing the film in the studio at the time they recorded the album.
In a 2003 interview with
Rolling StoneRolling Stone is a United States magazine devoted to music, politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J. Gleason.The magazine was named for the 1948 Muddy Waters song of the same name...
, Dark Side of the Moon engineer
Alan ParsonsAlan Parsons is a British audio engineer, musician, and record producer. He was involved with the production of several successful albums, including The Beatles' Abbey Road and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon for which Pink Floyd credit him as an important contributor...
said of 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 fiancee's kids had a copy of the video, and I thought I had 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."
On the cover of the band's 1995 live album
Pulse in the background, can be seen a bike with a basket on it and a girl with ruby slippers, both references to The Wizard of Oz. Some fans have construed this as the band subtly confirming the theory.
Pink Floyd drummer
Nick MasonNicholas Berkeley "Nick" Mason is the drummer for Pink Floyd. He has been the only constant member of the band since its formation in 1964...
stated categorically to
MTVMTV is an American cable television network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts known as VJs...
in 1997, "It's absolute nonsense, it has nothing to do with
The Wizard of OzThe Wizard of Oz is a 1939 American musical fantasy film directed by Victor Fleming from a script mostly by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf, with uncredited contributions by others. It was based on the 1900 children's novel of the same name by L. Frank Baum, who died twenty...
. It was all based on
The Sound Of MusicThe Sound of Music is a musical with music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. It is based on the memoir of Maria von Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers...
." While it seems likely that this statement was a joke, some fans have begun to notice synchronization between
The Sound of Music and
The Dark Side of the Moon.
Variations on the theme
The fame of the
Dark Side of the Moon and
The Wizard of Oz synchronicity has prompted some fans to search for correspondences using many other albums or films. Opportunities for perceived syncs between the content of
any music and
any film appear to be common, but the sheer frequency of connections that are the hallmark of
Dark Side of the Rainbow have yet to be discovered on another pairing by the public at large.
Perhaps the oldest variant involves neither
Dark Side of the Moon nor
The Wizard of Oz. Since the mid-1990s, some websites devoted to the
Dark Side of the Rainbow have also made note of a claimed synchronicity between the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" fourth act in the 1968 film
2001: A Space Odyssey2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film directed by Stanley Kubrick released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke...
and the lengthy
Pink FloydPink Floyd were an English rock band who earned recognition for their psychedelic music in the late 1960s, and as they evolved in the 1970s, for their progressive rock music. Pink Floyd's work is marked by the use of philosophical lyrics, sonic experimentation, innovative album cover art, and...
song "
Echoes"Echoes" is a song by Pink Floyd, including lengthy instrumental passages, sound effects, and musical improvisation. Written by all four members of the group , "Echoes" provides the extended finale to Pink Floyd's album Meddle...
" from the 1971 album
MeddleMeddle is the sixth studio album by English progressive rock group Pink Floyd. It was released in October 1971.The album was recorded at a series of locations around London, including Abbey Road Studios...
. Again the correspondences are primarily formal/structural and not grounded in the content of the lyrics. Both the track and the sequence are approximately 23 minutes. Director
Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
asked Pink Floyd to score the film, and
Roger WatersGeorge Roger Waters is an English rock musician, singer-songwriter and composer. He gained fame as the principal songwriter, lyricist, bass player, co-lead vocalist, and one of the founding members of the rock band Pink Floyd....
has said he regrets having turned down the offer.
Comedian Matt Herzau also claims that the
PixarPixar Animation Studios is an American CGI animation film studio based in Emeryville, California, United States. To date, the studio has earned twenty-four Academy Awards, six Golden Globes, and three Grammys, among many other awards, acknowledgments and achievements and has made $5.5 billion...
film
WALL-EWALL-E, promoted with an interpunct as WALL•E, is a 2008 computer-animated science fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by Andrew Stanton. The story follows a robot named WALL-E, who is designed to clean up a waste-covered Earth far in the future...
syncs up with Pink Floyd's rock opera
The Wall, which he has titled "Another Brick in the WALL-E", after the album's three part song,
Another Brick in the Wall"Another Brick in the Wall" is the title of three songs set to variations of the same basic theme, on Pink Floyd's 1979 rock opera, The Wall, subtitled Part I , Part II , and Part III , respectively, all of which were written by Pink Floyd's bassist, Roger Waters...
.
Other synchronizations
"Pink Syncs," synchronizing film and Pink Floyd music, include:
- 2001: A Floyd Odyssey — Pink Floyd's Echoes synched to Stanley Kubrick's
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...
2001: A Space Odyssey.
- Alice On The Wall — Disney's Alice in Wonderland
Alice in Wonderland is an American animated film produced by Walt Disney and based primarily on Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with a few additional elements from Through the Looking-Glass. Thirteenth in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, the film was released in New York...
synched to Pink Floyd's The WallThe Wall is the eleventh studio album by English progressive rock group Pink Floyd. It was released as a double album on 30 November 1979. It was subsequently performed live, with elaborate theatrical effects, and adapted into the film Pink Floyd The Wall.As with their previous three studio...
.
- Wish You Were Here/It's A Wonderful Life http://www.pinkfloydonline.com/synchronicities/synch11/
- Floyd Reich
Floyd Reich is the franchise title of a Sublime Sync produced trilogy of independent films created by Thaltruistic. This experimental genre of synchronizing film to music features visual material from one source paired with music from a second unrelated source placed together into a single film...
- Triumph of The Wall
- The Eternal Dark Side
- Ummagummolympia
- Inglorious Animals
- The Black Matrix
- Break The Butterfly
- City Kid
- The Curse Of Dracula's Daughter
- Tim Burton's Code Atom Hollow
- Devil Rekall
- Tim Burton's Eternal Nightmare
- Fallen Dracula
- The Fellowship Of The IV
- Friday The 13TH Step
- Load The Matrix
- Logan's Revolt!
- Nevermind The Menento
- Night Of The Living Zombie
- Ok Hackers
- The Ozzorcist
- Planes, Trains AND Candy-O
- T3: Rise Of The Machina
- Toy Story In The Attic
- Ziggy Starfighter
- The Pink Floyd Movie Synchronization Story at MovieSyncs.com