Posted on 11/16/2011 1:28:58 PM PST by massmike
Karl Slover, one of the last surviving actors who played Munchkins in the 1939 classic film, "The Wizard of Oz," has died. He was 93.
The 4-foot-5 Slover died of cardiopulmonary arrest Tuesday afternoon in a central Georgia hospital, said Laurens County Deputy Coroner Nathan Stanley. According to friends, as recently as last weekend, Slover appeared at events in the suburban Chicago area.
Slover was best known for playing the lead trumpeter in the Munchkins' band but also had roles as a townsman and soldier in the film, said John Fricke, author of "100 Years of Oz" and five other books on the movie and its star, Judy Garland. Slover was one of the tiniest male Munchkins in the movie.
Long after Slover retired, he continued to appear around the country at festivals and events related to the movie. He was one of seven Munchkins at the 2007 unveiling of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame dedicated to the little people in the movie. Only three remain of the 124 diminutive actors who played the beloved Munchkins.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
God bless him...gone to that great lollipop tree in the sky.
Died after a short illness, lol
Will he be buried in shoebox?
Yep...6 inches under ground.
But we have to verify it legally
To See (To See)
If he (If he)
Is morally, ethically, spirtiually, physically, positively, abosolutely undenially unreliably dead.
Good crowd, good crowd...
I saw that when Wizard was made, many of the actors suffered burns. The reason was that because of the technicolor setup they were using, to be able to film in color, they had to boost the lighting up so bright it literally burned them, like a sunburn!
The history of technicolor is pretty fascinating. They didn’t have a film at that time to be able to record all the colors. So the camera would split the image into three images, put each one through a red green or blue filter, and record that image in black and white.
Then, each of the image streams would be projected using plain old white light through the correct color filter and the images recombined, yielding a color image.
I have the 75th Anniversary edition of Gone With the Wind, and they went back to the original B&W negatives and digitally reprocessed and resynced them.
And truly, it is STUNNING!! Given the time, the equipment they were working with, the limitations, it was a very creative solution to the problem.
Technicolor faded away in the 50’s when gels were developed that could film the entire spectrum. But the history is very, very interesting.
RIP..(I had a funny statement but I thought it would make me look small...)
OH MAN that sucks I just saw Wizard of the OZ on TBS network this past weekend
Follow the Yellow Brick Road you will. < /Yoda>
After all, he was a big man.
Midget history ping.
Undeniably and reliably Dead.
Well, maybe that too, but I heard that Margaret Hamilton got nailed by a flamethrower that was a tad off in the timing and blocking of a scene.
There's also a story that after successive test shoots, the thinner and thinner wires were used to avoid detection, and more that one actor had wires break.
Stop...lol.
So many good memories..good lines in that one movie.
Are you a good witch..or a bad witch? I still get asked that. ;-)
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