The Wizard of Oz Broken Apart and Put Back Together in Alphabetical Order

WARNING: This film con­tains extreme­ly fast edit­ing, flash­es of light, abrupt changes in image and sound.

Back in 2001, Matt Bucy had the inspi­ra­tion to do some­thing tru­ly orig­i­nal — take the entire Wiz­ard of Oz, cut it up, and put it back together–this time in alpha­bet­i­cal order. And that’s pre­cise­ly what he did sev­er­al years lat­er, in 2004. A coder, Bucy cre­at­ed an app that made it easy to decon­struct the beloved 1939 film. He told Vox:

That [app] 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.…

All told, I think it took about sev­en days spread out over a cou­ple of months. Dis­as­sem­bly was mind-bend­ing in itself. It was lit­er­al­ly hard to talk after mov­ing word by word, or syl­la­ble by syl­la­ble, through the film. 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.

When final­ly alpha­bet­ized, the film, says Bucy, had a sur­pris­ing ener­gy to it. A cer­tain je ne sais quoi. Yes it’s hard to describe. Maybe you can put your own words to it.

In 2016, Bucy final­ly made the alpha­bet­ized Wiz­ard of Oz avail­able to the rest of world. You can watch it here. And do heed the warn­ing above.

via Vox

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Com­plete Wiz­ard of Oz Series, Avail­able as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books

Watch the Ear­li­est Sur­viv­ing Filmed Ver­sion of The Wiz­ard of Oz (1910)

Dark Side of the Rain­bow: Pink Floyd Meets The Wiz­ard of Ozin One of the Ear­li­est Mash-Ups