Watch: THE WIZARD OF OZ Edited in Alphabetical Order is Totally Hypnotic
When was the last time you saw The Wizard of Oz? I actually caught it on TV a few days before Christmas, and it's still pretty damn amazing to think about how that film was made in 1939. But here's something else that's completely mind-blowing: Matt Bucy re-edited the entire movie to appear in alphabetical order. And while someone else did this with Star Wars a year or so ago, Bucy took it a step further and actually reorganized all of the text in the opening credits to be alphabetical as well.
The result is completely mesmerizing. DangerousMinds.net (via Uproxx) spoke with Bucy about the project, and I've included a brief passage from that interview below the video:
Dangerous Minds: GOOD GOD, MAN, WHY DID YOU DO THIS CRAZY THING?
Matt Bucy: It was a challenge from a friend, Ray Guillette, to do something never done before. While on a short road trip, he said he didn’t think anything original was possible. I said nonsense! He asked for an example. I hatched the idea then, pretty much complete, and we riffed on the idea for a while. Then I totally forgot about it. But a couple years later he asked me when I was going to make this original thing. I said I’d hop on it right away and thanked him for saving the project!
DM: When was this done and how long did it take?
MB: The idea was hatched in 2001 (I think) and then I actually did it in April 2004. It has been shown sporadically since then, most recently at MIX in NYC a couple years ago.
It didn’t take too long. In a couple of days I wrote a bit of code to help disassemble the movie, then the disassembly took me and another friend three days to complete. It was a manual process but it went very quickly. It was pretty difficult to speak after a day of disassembly! It really messed with my head. The credits took another day. I had to wait for the right moody clouds to show up where I live so I could re-shoot the sky pan that lies under the credits. In total no more than a week of work.