It occurs to me – it’d be really cool for a band to actually do this. Wouldn’t you like to hear Tom Waites do an album synchronized with the movie Unforgiven? Possibly a stupid idea.
Could someone explain to me how the band was supposed to do this technically and how they expected the audience to appreciate it? This was 1973, long before any of us had VCRs. They would have had to tape the audio from the television broadcast, pausing for commercials, and then sync their music with the dialogue. Syncing the action on the screen with music would still have been technically quite difficult. Then the audience is supposed to take the LP, cue it at just the right moment, then what- lift the needle at commercials?
“Pink Floyd has always been a band of mystery” :dubious:
Recording Dark Side of the Moon was quite technically difficult too.
I heard that the looped sound effects from, say, “Money,” were done by looping the actual magnetic tape around the studio, wound around chrome microphone stands and so on, because they didn’t have a loop tape of exactly the right length they needed. I read this in a book of Floyd sheet music some years ago.
You know, after reading the report, I have to agree with borat that it’s not very convincing. All I got from the report is that there are a lot of things that maybe “match” and a lot of things that maybe don’t; it’s all a matter of interpretation. Just based on that, who’s to say what the band’s intention was? Fish and BobLibDem’s posts in this thread are a lot more persuasive.
Back in 1987 when I was just a kid I noticed the back of our VCR had a “dub” connection on it. That meant I could take any VCR tape I had and record a new audio track over the exsisting one.
I experimented with different shows taped and just randomly recorded music I liked over them. Prince’s When Dove’s Cry over an episode of Muppet Babies had a handful of “quirky coincidences” that were really cool to watch and that was just in a 4 minute song.
The more I matched up random shows with random music the more these “coincidences” would show up. Some I would show to friends just for the “That’s kinda cool” response.
Years later when I heard about this Dark Side of the Wizard of OZ the first thing I thought was “Thhbbbtt, been there, done that!”
You want an explanation? Okay, bubeleh, I’ll give you an explanation. Goes like this.
There are billions and billions of Things in the world. Songs. Movies. Operas. Novels. Comic books. Dance routines. Television shows. Episodes of television shows. Actors in television shows. Biographies of actors in television shows. Sporting events. Doctoral dissertations. Maps. Of cities, states, rivers, galaxies, nervous systems, plumbing networks, migratory demographics, scavenger hunts, flight patterns. Theatrical programs. Architectural blueprints. Wine lists. Wallpaper patterns. Billboards. Advertising jingles. And on and on and on and on and on for pages and pages and hours and hours.
Given that, not only is it completely unremarkable that you should be able to find pairs of random Things among the billions of possibilities that happen to coincide in, yes, occasionally amazing detail… it would be utterly astonishing if there weren’t.
Or, given that I happen to be sitting in the middle of Manhattan as I write this, here’s another way to look at it: In a city of seven million people, a one-in-a-million event happens seven times a day.
There’s your explanation. It’s called context. Check it out.
I was personally there to oversee World War II but that doesn’t mean I don’t know which side won.
I just downloaded Battleship Potemkin from archive.org - it does have an orchestral soundtrack with it, but I thought I might watch it as Dark Side Of The Battleship Potemkin
Well, that’s another thing. Maybe Dark Side is trippy no matter what you watch with it.
:eek: Little Nemo is Winston Churchill!
I will. Non-professional reel-to-reel videotape machines were available then. The company I worked for around that time had one for educational videos. I recorded snippets of broadcast TV shows on the short blank ends of some tapes. It’s certainly possible Pink Floyd had one and recorded the movie.
And they didn’t need CD auto-repeat or 8-track. It’s possible (though it would be very cumbersome) that they made an incredibly long loop of audio tape.
But those bare possibilities don’t prove that they actually did this. I agree with Fish and the others: there is no positive evidence for this, and the coincidences are just that.
That’s an interesting point, but unless the delay in looping was exactly the same length as an auto-repeat CD — and frankly, no two CDs are guaranteed to loop the same way — the thing falls apart.
And, as I said, they would have been matching their album timing to that of the television cut of the film available in 1973, and yet the synchronicity we see is that of the CD to the 1980 VHS cut.
They could’ve recorded the movie from TV, and spliced out the commercials. Even if the TV cut in 1973 was exactly the same as the VHS cut in 1980, they’d have had to cut it exactly the same length to within about 1/20 of a second as that of the VHS. I don’t buy it.
I’m glad this got some people thinking and talking, but I’m mostly disappointed that many of you seem to have written this whole experiment off without even trying it. For a website that claims to be “fighting ignorance”, it’s a little surprising how many of you are so ready to ignore something rather than try it out for yourself. See for yourself, there are many sites on the internet telling you how to do it, and most of these sites have lists of the “coincidences”, so try it out. Let your ego go for 40 minutes and just witness something without having the little man in your head scream about how it can’t be possible. Stop coming up with reasons why it couldn’t have happened - it DID happen, check it out!
And remember, if “fighting ignorance” is taking “longer than you thought”, then maybe some of you should stop being so ignorant when someone presents you with an idea that you hadn’t thought of before…? Don’t kill the messenger, and try something new. You may be surprised and may look at things in a different way, so PLEASE just let go of the “I’m so smart”/big ego talk and just try it out; even though I know half of you would already have made up your mind before pushing the ‘play’ button… So much for fighting ignorance…
Just a little ironic comment on how an outsider is treated when he tries to take part in a very closed community that is untrusting of outsiders.
It seems I have fared just about as well as he did… Don’t be surprised if my comments synch up perfectly with that movie…
Dude … nobody is arguing that it doesn’t happen. The argument is (and the argument that you’ve provided NO evidence for) is whether PF did it on purpose.
Dude, I believe you that there are some coincidences with the lyrics. I don’t need to try it myself, because there’s no question in my mind that I would see coincidences if I did try it.
That doesn’t make this particular album-movie sync-up unusual. Coincidences happen all the time and it doesn’t presuppose intent.
Your argument goes something like this: if you hold out an egg at arms’ length and drop it, it falls to the Earth and breaks. That means God hates eggs!
Us: Lots of things fall and break if you let go of them.
You: But you didn’t even try it!
Ok, since my words have been twisted so much, and the argument has changed a few times now, let me point out a few facts:
-The question printed at the top of the original article is “Does the music in Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon coincide with the action of The Wizard of Oz?”
-The question asked by a reader named ‘Colin’ is “Is it true that when Pink Floyd’s album Dark Side of the Moon is played along with The Wizard of Oz, music changes coincide with plot changes in the movie?”
These two questions are essentially asking the same thing, to which you, and some others, seem to have agreed to. However, the conclusion of the original article COMPLETELY changes what the question was by concluding that “in summary, as far as anybody can tell, no, Pink Floyd did not purposely record Dark Side of the Moon to synch up with The Wizard of Oz. In fact, I would argue that it really doesn’t synch.”
I’m sorry, but whether or not Pink Floyd did it on purpose WAS NOT the original question, nor should it even matter, since it would seem very strange that anyone who believes this works would argue that it was unintentional. As for me providing no evidence for whether it was done intentionally, that is not my argument, nor did I ever make a claim on this issue. In fact, I did comment that it makes no difference what any producer or engineer said since it doesn’t really matter, they didn’t have to know about it for it to be a real phenomenon.
This question is completely ridiculous anyway, and utterly unprovable. You can quote as many people who claim to have worked on the album and claim to have no knowledge of it, it won’t make a difference, since it changes absolutely nothing, as someone has already stated earlier.
For anyone interested, it’s not just the music that synchs, as there are several instances in which lyrics also seem to be describing events in the film. For example, the Wicked Witch of the West, dressed all in black, appears during the song ‘Us and Them’ and is shown in close-up just as Gilmour sings the line “Black…” Of course, the next line is “…and blue”, at which point Dorothy is shown, wearing her blue dress… Also, many of the sound effects synch up as well, such as the very last sound on the album, which is a heartbeat. This part synchs up with when Dorothy and the Scarecrow first encounter the Tin Man, who explains that he does not have a heart. Dorothy moves her head closer to the Tin Man’s chest to listen for a heartbeat, and this is when the heartbeat on the album is heard. There are DOZENS of more examples like this and of course, most will dispute every single one of them, but please just check it out for yourselves. I’ve personally done this experiment almost 10 times over the last five years, and it’s mindblowing every time! Yes, there are some people who take this thing WAY too seriously and have gone to ridiculous extremes of interpretation, but at least they’re open minded, and their exuberance is a lot more refreshing than some of the cynicism I’ve encountered here.
For the curious, here are a couple of sites that I think do a pretty good job, but there are a few of these sites, so do a google search if you’re interested…
http://www.turnmeondeadman.net/DSotR/Intro.html
And the argument of the original article went something like this:
“If the parts of the album don’t match up with the parts I think they should match up with, none of it synchs up at all”
Which is like this:
I think Tokyo and Osaka would have been better targets for the nuclear bombs than Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of their larger populations and greater infrastructure. So therefore, because they didn’t bomb the cities I think they should have bombed, Japan was never bombed with nukes.