If you were anything like most nipper , The Wizard of Oz ’s Wicked Witch of the West was n’t the most terrifying part of the 1939 classic . No , that honor was reserved for her flying monkeys , those awful winged humanoid creatures that could swoop down and make for havoc without any warning .
Several of the primate parts were toy by real people : Nikko , the head imp , was played by actor Pat Walshe , while vaudevillian role player Harry Monty was both a Munchkin and a monkey . But in the creepy scene where thousand of monkeys descend upon our heroes in the Haunted Forest , the monkeys were all tiny rubber figures no more than a few inches tall .
The number were hung from a gauntry machine with four fibril of extremely fragile music conducting wire , resulting in about 1100 wires summate . As the gauntry moved down the soundstage , it ask all of the little monkeys with it , making it appear as if they wereflying . That ’s about 275 lilliputian small winged rapscallion in all — but grant to the Oz museum in Wamego , Kansas , only four of these models survive to this day . They have two of them .
Stacy Conradt
They ’re so small-scale , in fact , that despite being hype as one of the cool exhibits in the museum , I walked right by them without realizing what they were . So , the next fourth dimension you watchThe Wizard of Ozand chance yourself shuddering at that swarm of wing primates , remind yourself how tiny and nonthreatening they actually were . Now , the monkeys flirt by actors … we ca n’t help you with that fear . They ’re still pretty shuddery .
By the room , the “ small insect ” the Wicked Witch mentions in the beginning of the video was a reference to a picture that was cut from the final picture . Before the rapscallion show up , the Wicked Witch of the West sent little pink and blue mosquito - like insect called Jitter Bugs to make Dorothy and her friends dance and tire them out . Despite the $ 80,000 it cost to shoot the Sung dynasty - and - dance identification number , the footagewas cutto aid with the run time of the movie . Though most of the Jitter Bug film has been destroyed , there is some mealy footage of the number being performed in dry run . Here it is , mixed it with some other images from the moving picture :
