Ok my friends and I watch “The Wizard of Oz” while playing Pink Floyd’s “Dark side of the moon”. And being the weird pool playing cult film watching people we are arguments ensued on how this is possible, whether it was planned or what. Has there been anything published or other wise brought forth on this occurrence?
It has always been vehemently denied by Waters.
Funny you should ask.
The entire question is ridiculous on the face of it, especially since it presupposes “Dark Side of the Moon” was originally recorded on CD.
CD’s didn’t exist in 1973, nor did videocassettes (as a consumer item – a version of them were used in TV stations, but they were thicker than current ones), so no one would have been able to play the two simultaneously. The first side of the LP would have stopped after “Great Gig in the Sky.” Then you would have needed to stop the movie – which you couldn’t do without a VCR – and recue everything. It would have been very difficult to match up the second side of the LP to the same points where the CD works.
And don’t bring up 8-track tapes. 8-tracks were not continuous music – they stopped or faded out for several seconds when switching tracks, sometimes in the middle of songs. In addition, it was routine for record companies to change the order of songs on an LP to fit better onto an 8-track.
It’s unlikely in the extreme that Pink Floyd could set things up so that they’d work with two technologies that didn’t exist until years after the album was released.
The synch allows for time to flip the record over. I always liked to pause the CD for a second or two.
Well, dismiss it if you want, but AMC (before they started having commercials :mad: ) ran W of Oz with Dark Side of the Moon on the SAP audio channel.
I set my CD player and flipped back and forth to see how well my audio synched with the movie/SAP.
They detailed how you had to hit “Play” exactly as the MGM Lion roared the third time at the very first of the movie to get the sync right.
I watched it, and it’s so-so on the cool scale…
Not precise enough to go “Ooohh…Ahhh” but different.
What I would like to see/hear would be a version where the dialog could still be heard with Dark Side of the Moon playing in the background.
IIRC, Duke of Rat, one of the Turner stations (TBS or TNT) has done this in the past and may well do it again.
This is a bit of a running joke with me and my brother. Whenever we are listening to Dark Side of the Moon, we turn on the TV and marvel at how whatever’s on “works” with Dark Side. Try it! You’ll see amazing coincidences.
I wish I sold drugs.
“Lets get them meek bastards NOW!”
The first time we did this we used the record and it worked our just fine.
A second or two?!!! To flip a record over takes at least 20-30 seconds (longer if you wait for the side the automatically shutoff, which is how most people listened to records in the 70s). Worse, different stereos of the time had different lengths of time until they turned off, plus people worked at different speeds (some would, for instance, always wipe the disk off before playing it). Without a cue point, every time you played it, the timing would vary each time.
And during this entire time, you couldn’t pause the VCR, since you had no VCR. You could only watch the movie if it was being broadcast (with commercials, BTW – another complicating factor).
So it was virtually impossible to listen to the album when it came out in a way to connect the music and the movie.
Well, you could use something similar to this technique.
I wanted to get the audio set up so that I could watch the first season of South Park and hear both the show and the audio commentary simultaneously. (The audio commentary is on seperate CDs due to “standards issues.”) Anyway, what I wound up doing was putting the show audio out from my DVD player through my minisystem as normal and then used the headphone jack with a male-male cable. I put the commentary in my portable MD player (for several reasons) and used another male-male cable. Both of these then ran into a Y-jack so that the audio would combine coming out the single end. This particular splitter was designed to take a signal and output it to two different pieces of equipment, so that’s why I had to use the male-male cables to input. I then took a coupler (female-female), put it on the single end of the Y, and then plugged my headphones into it. Result? Controllable audio levels of both the show and commentary, and it worked fine. You can probably rig something similar–just think it through and get whatever adapters are needed.
Heck, now that I’ve written all this, I should go rent Wizard of Oz and try it. (I’ve already got Dark Side of the Moon.)
Well, you could use something similar to this technique.
I wanted to get the audio set up so that I could watch the first season of South Park and hear both the show and the audio commentary simultaneously. (The audio commentary is on seperate CDs due to “standards issues.”) Anyway, what I wound up doing was putting the show audio out from my DVD player through my minisystem as normal and then used the headphone jack with a male-male cable. I put the commentary in my portable MD player (for several reasons) and used another male-male cable. Both of these then ran into a Y-jack so that the audio would combine coming out the single end. This particular component was designed to take a signal and output it to two different pieces of equipment, so that’s why I had to use the male-male cables to input. I then had to take a coupler (female-female), put it on the single end of the Y, and then plugged my headphones into it. (I suppose it’s be easier if you could find a two male, one female Y.) Result? Controllable audio levels of both the show and commentary, and it worked fine. You can probably rig something similar–just think it through and get whatever adapters are needed.
Heck, now that I’ve written all this, I should go rent Wizard of Oz and try it. (I’ve already got Dark Side of the Moon.)
You might be on the right track…maybe it was TCM. I get the movie hosts on that channel and AMC mixed up.
And in my first post, I didn’t mean to imply that there was an concerted effort by Pink Floyd to mesh the album up with the movie. There are too many places where it just doesn’t work, it would have been a very sloppy attempt on Pink Floyd’s part if it was intentional. And as RealityChuck points out, the logistics just don’t pan out.
All I meant was the idea had floated around enough for a cable TV channel to broadcast them together. IIRC they even said it wasn’t anything but a coincidence
It’s a really fun coincidence, too. One day my friend Jho was watching the Wizard of Oz with his little sister, only he had Dark Side of the Moon on earphones. When the CD was over, he put in Wish You Were Here. It matches up with the second half, he says, even better than the original theory. When the lion is singing, there is a yowling noise, and in the Wash and Brush Up place, it sounds like a washing machine, with an especially loud whirring noise when the tin man is being buffed. Then there is chattering of people which coincides with the door to the palace being opened, and then later, which is the coolest part, when the tin man gets whisked up into the air, there is a whooshing noise, and the music gets quieter. Then during the song Wish You Were Here, Dorothy is looking into the crystal ball and seeing her aunt.
I don’t really believe they did it on purpose, but it’s fun to think about.