Dark Side of the Rainbow
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The Dark Side of the Rainbow is a perceived effect created by playing the 1973 Pink Floyd concept album The Dark Side of the Moon simultaneously with the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz and watching for moments where the film and the album appear to correspond with each other. The title of the music video-like experience comes from a combination of the album title and the film's song "Over the Rainbow."
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[edit] Synchronicity
Fans have compiled more than 100 moments [1] of perceived interplay between the film and album, including further links that occur if the album is repeated through the entire film. For example, the line "balanced on the biggest wave" from "Breathe" is sung as Dorothy balances on the rail of a pig pen; "who knows which is which" from "Us and Them" is sung as the good and evil witches confront each other; and the closing heartbeats sound as Dorothy listens to the Tin Woodsman's empty chest.
This synergy effect has been described as an example of synchronicity, defined by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung as a phenomenon in which coincidental events "seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality." [2] Detractors [3] 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 confirmation bias. 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.
[edit] Accident or planned?
Pink Floyd band members have repeatedly insisted that the phenomenon is coincidence. In an interview for the 25th anniversary of the album, guitarist/vocalist David Gilmour 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 with combining Wizard of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon." [4] On an MTV special about Pink Floyd in 2002, the band dismissed any relationship between the album and the movie as an accident, saying that there were no means of reproducing the film in the studio at the time they recorded the album. On March 3, 2006 at the Canadian Music Week conference in Toronto, Alan Parsons, the album's recording engineer, told an audience during a question-and-answer session that there had been no effort to integrate the album with the movie.
[edit] History
Although the Dark Side of the Rainbow effect has become famous, its origin is murky. In 1994, some fans of Pink Floyd discussed the phenomenon on the Usenet message board alt.music.pink-floyd, but knowledge of who first thought of combining the two works, and why, was already lost. Since then, several waves of attention rippled through popular culture. In August 1995, the first mainstream media article about the synchronicity appeared, prompting discussions on a number of classic rock radio stations, and around this time several fans began creating websites in which they touted the experience and catalogued the corresponding moments. A second wave of awareness began in April 1997 when a Boston DJ discussed the Dark Side of the Rainbow on WZLX-FM, leading to further mainstream media articles and a segment on MTV News.
Since then, the Turner Classic Movies cable channel has aired a version of Oz with the Dark Side album as an alternate soundtrack. The band Guster alluded to the phenomenon in their song "Come Downstairs and Say Hello," which opens with the lines "Dorothy moves to click her ruby shoes/Right in tune with Dark Side of the Moon." The animated television show Family Guy made several references to the effect. In the episode "The Story on Page 1", Peter Griffin says to Luke Perry, "I'm telling you, Dark Side of the Moon totally synchs up with the Wizard of Oz!" And in the episode "Stuck Together Torn Apart," the character Mort Goldman tells Griffin that he and his wife "like to watch old movies while listening to Hotel California to see if it synchs up in a significant way. And so far, no. Nothing has." The Dark Side of the Rainbow was also referenced in a June 2006 "Born Loser" comic strip.
[edit] Replicating the effect
Real or imagined, the effect is usually created by pausing a CD of the album at the very beginning, starting the DVD or tape of the film with the TV volume muted, and un-pausing the CD when the black-and-white MGM lion roars for the third time. (Note some versions have a color lion also. The black and white lion is the right one to use for the synch.) A minority of devotees argue that un-pausing the CD on the first roar produces a superior alignment.
Most users have explored this phenomenon using the original or 1994 re-issue editions of the album. Note that 1993's 20th Anniversary re-issue edition (the version included in the "Shine On" box set) altered the runtimes of many of the tracks, so that version is not recommended for creating the "Dark Side of the Rainbow" effect. By contrast, 2003's 30th Anniversary re-issue edition is acceptable because it largely restored the original runtimes.
Another factor that could affect the quality of the perceived synch is the version of the film used. The USA version runs 101 minutes, for example, while the UK version runs 98 minutes (due to the PAL system's transfer rate of 25 rather than 24 frames per second). Most users who have made websites touting the effect appear to be based in the USA. When using a PAL version of the DVD, digitally speeding up the album by 4.16% prior to starting fixes any problems with synching.
Most fans play the album through only once, but some devotees believe that the experience can be extended by continuing to watch the movie while starting the album over again. While repeat-play viewers have reported many additional perceived tonal synchs later in the film, the frequency of lyrical matchings drops significantly.
[edit] 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 other albums or films. No other combination has been reported to produce the frequency of lyrical matchings that are the hallmark of Dark Side of the Rainbow, but opportunities for perceived syncs between the tonal content of any music and any film's images appear to be common.
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" third act in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and the lengthy Floyd song "Echoes" from the 1971 album Meddle. Again the correspondences are primarily tonal rather than lyrical; among them, both the track and the sequence are the same length, about 23 minutes. Fans also note that director Stanley Kubrick reportedly asked Pink Floyd to score the film , and that former band leader Roger Waters reportedly has said he regrets having turned down the offer. (Shaffner, Nicholas (1991). Saucerful of Secrets: The Pink Floyd Odyssey. Harmony Books. ISBN 0517576082.)
[edit] External links
- Google Video of the synchronization
- The first mainstream media article about the Wizard of Oz synchronicity: Savage, Charles. "Somewhere Over the Prism's Rainbow." The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. August 1, 1995.
- The Synchronicity Arkive One of the first websites devoted to cataloguing Dark Side of the Rainbow and other audio/video synchronicities. Online since August 8, 1995. [5]
- One of many lists of synchronized Dark Side of the Rainbow moments
- A skeptical look at the phenomenon
- "The Ultimate Stoned Movie List", a USENET thread from alt.drugs. The entry posted on 8 February 1995 is the earliest available USENET posting of the phenomenon. (alt.music.pink-floyd archives exist back to 1997 only.)
