If you want to check out something even more strange than The Dark Side of Oz or The Wizard of Floyd — AKA the stoner staple of setting Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon over muted footage of the Judy Garland vehicle The Wizard of Oz — then you're in for a trippy delight, i.e., a version of the MGM classic rearranged in alphabetical order.
Created by a coder named Matt Bucy, Of Oz the Wizard rearranged each word uttered or sung in the film alphabetically, matching the full length of the original film at roughly one hour and 41 minutes. Each word is also given a subtitle so that the viewer can read along — including sounds and verbal non-words like "aaiee."
Bucy conceived of the project in response to a friend who posited that nothing original could be made anymore — so the coder set out to prove him wrong.
In an interview with Vox, Bucy explained the process for making the reassembled movie musical, which began with an app the coder designed himself to break the movie down into word-sized fragments.
"[Manually], I used a nifty little technique to visually display the soundtrack such that words were easy to spot and locate. It went very fast. That program spit out a big text file with all the words and their locations in the film, which I then imported into a spreadsheet, sorted in alphabetical and then chronological order, and fed into another little program that took the sorted list and produced the edit. So basically, it was edited in Excel. The credits were done straightforwardly in a video editor. The clouds behind the titles were shot from my roof."
The project, which Bucy completed over the course of a few months, did have some wearying — or grating — byproducts.
"It was literally hard to talk after moving word by word, or syllable by syllable, through the film," Bucy continued. "English stopped sounding like language, and at times I had to stop because I could not figure out what a word was — I just couldn't hear it right."
While the quick shots in a rapidfire succession can sometimes feel like the effect of a seizure-inducing strobe light, the experience is simultaneously mind-bending (another highlight: the full magnanimity of how many times the word "witch" is used in the movie is astounding — and after hearing the word over and over and over for a good few minutes straight, you'll begin to ask yourself, "Well, which witch, indeed?").
This isn't the first time someone has gone the Dark Side of Oz route and decided to remix the MGM classic: YouTube user goldpikpikcarrots created a deconstructed and reassembled track of most of the movie's highlights for Pogo's Mellow Brick Road Competition, and placed third in the contest in 2011. The end product is something that resembles mix between a dubstep rave, a musical theater fan's fevered speed dream and a Garland tribute at a piano bar. Which is to say: mesmerizing.
Watch Of Oz the Wizard in the video below.
Via: The Verge
