Skywriting

• Originally the image above was going to read: "Surrender Dorothy or die WWW". It was later edited to the two words "Surrender Dorothy". (this is also mentioned above).

• How it was done: In Aljean Harmetz's book, The Making of the Wizard of Oz, Jack McMaster was the man who created and performed this final scene. Below he describes the procedure:

"I had a glass tank six foot square" ... "The bottom of the tank was glass. The sides were wood. The tank was only three inches deep; and the bottom was covered with an inch and a half of water mixed with calla oil. That was supposed to be the sky. The camera was beneath the tank, shooting up. The water and oil mixture was opaque, so it hid me. The miniature Witch who did the skywriting was three eighths of an inch high, and the broom she was riding was a hypodermic needle. I filled the hypodermic needle with a combination of canned milk and nigrosine dye. I wrote SURRENDER DOROTHY OR DIE upside down and backward in the fluid in the tank, using the needle in place of a pen. I practiced for two months before I did it. My hand wasn't in the tank, but the Witch and the broom needle were. The skywriting seemed to come out of the tail of the Witch's broom. To give the writing the appearance of smoke that was drifting, I had a fifty-gallon drum of water feeding into the tank. I had tinted the water the same milky color as the liquid in the glass tank. The water current was a stream--like an air stream--blowing the letters apart."