Hard to find real evidence of this but legend has it that it was supposed to be…
SURRENDER DOROTHY OR DIE -WWW
The effects guy made his job half as onerous by suggesting the skywriting should just say SURRENDER DOROTHY.
Geez, it wasn’t just a little extra work by some “guy”… it was a practical effect by Margaret Hamilton on a broom. Doing extremely difficult AND DANGEROUS acrobatics while the broom was belching out smoke, making visibility almost non-existent.
The recently-unearthed ‘Diary Of A Flying Monkey’ says they did at least twenty takes, and were lucky to get two legible words out of it…
Between that and catching fire later in the movie, is it any wonder that the poor woman ended up taking low-budget witch roles just to feed a Maxwell House addiction?
You may be interested to learn about the resemblance between the scene in the movie and the repeated painting of a bridge over the Washington, D.C. beltway near the Mormon temple there with the words “Surrender Dorothy”:
As is well known, in Jonathon Swifts 'Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts", (Gulliver’s Travels), one of the parts is Gulliver’s time in the land of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos.
Swift was an Anglican Cleric: he studied Greek, Latin and Hebrew at Trinity College Dublin, wrote sermons and pamphlets, and throughout his career regularly read through the entire bible as part of daily Anglican services. He was doubtless familier with 2nd Kings 9:20, and the common European/Hebrew pronunciation of the character rendered “J” in the English bible:
The lookout reported, “He has reached them, but he isn’t coming back either. The driving is like that of Jehu son of Nimshi—he drives like a maniac.”
Yahoo sun of Nimshi is a Yahoo. He drives like a maniac.
I’m pretty sure “Yahoo!” as an exclamation preceded Swift.
Sir Richard Burton, in his footnotes to the Arabian Nights, opined that “Yahoo” derived from Arabic “Ya hou” = “O. Man”. Swift seems to have some familiarity with Islam in his writings, so it’s a possibility.
In anticipation of 28 Years Later, I’m rewatching Days/Weeks. I noted that in Days, the scene where Cillian and Brendan Frasier are standing on the roof of the apartment building, surrounded by buckets and pots and pans to catch the rain, there are at least two laundry baskets that have slotted sides, won’t be catching much rain with them.
You had me scratching my head there for a minute. That was Brendan Gleeson.
Reading Sgt Fury when I was a teen I was unaware of the origin of his tagline “You bunch of Yahoos”
D’ooh
Those usually have an inch or two on the bottom before the mesh starts. It’d take an awful lot of rain before those started leaking.
Of course, you’d want to be careful carrying them, because it’d be really easy to spill. Most likely, you’d tip it over carefully on the spot to pour it into some deeper container.
I watched Spinal Tap 2 last week and got very confused. During one of the musical scenes I noticed that the two lead guitar players were holding basses. Very odd, and it tickled my brain for a while. Turns out, one of the songs from the first movie, Big Bottom, doesn’t have any guitar, all 3 guys played bass.
40 years and I had no idea.
Spinal Pap had even more than three bass players for the song when they played at Live Earth.
I thought in the original movie they introduced each member at playing lead bass over the mikes.
No, underneath the names Nigel Tufnel and David St. Hubbins, it says “lead guitar.” I watched it the other night.
I vaguely remember as the song starts up Michael McKean saying “On lead bass, Nigel Tufnel, on lead bass, Derek Smalls” or something like that. Maybe it was from one of their shows, not the original movie.
see next post
I have no idea if this is going to show up. If not, perhaps you can copy the link.
That’s it!
A song about Big Bottoms is going to be ‘all about that bass’ though, isn’t it? 