Studio Executives Cut “Over the Rainbow” From The Wizard of Oz Because It Slowed the Film Down. Then a Producer Fought to Put It Back

In 1938, the songwriters Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg had a big job at MGM: write the songs for The Wizard of Oz. The funny, bouncy numbers for Munchkinland came quickly. The one song that mattered most, the ballad for Judy Garland’s character Dorothy, would not.

Harburg had an idea. It would be a song for a little girl who wanted to escape from Kansas, a dry, colorless place where the only colorful thing she had ever seen was a rainbow. Arlen wanted a melody with a long, broad line. But with the deadline closing in, the tune would not come.

One day, tired and frustrated, Arlen asked his wife Anya to drive him to a movie. As they passed Schwab’s Drug Store on Sunset Boulevard, he told her to pull over. He took out the folded sheet of music paper he carried in his pocket and wrote down the melody of “Over the Rainbow.”

Garland recorded it on the MGM soundstage on October 7, 1938. In the film, Dorothy sings it early on, after the adults on the farm are too busy to listen to her troubles and Aunt Em tells her to find a place where she won’t get into trouble.

Then Hollywood nearly threw the song away. After an early preview, the studio decided the slow ballad was holding up the film. Executives thought nobody would want to hear a girl sing a quiet song in a farmyard, and it was cut.

Arlen and Harburg begged to have it put back, without success at first. The associate producer, Arthur Freed, took up the fight with studio chief Louis B. Mayer. Thanks to that push, the song stayed in the picture.

It went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Song. The American Film Institute later named it the greatest movie song of all time, and in 2017 the Library of Congress added Garland’s 1939 recording to the National Recording Registry.

Garland sang it for the rest of her career, and she kept singing it the way she had in the film. She said she wanted to stay true to Dorothy and to the idea of somewhere over the rainbow.

The video above is the song as it appears in the film: a girl in a Kansas farmyard, a dog on the farm machinery beside her, wondering about a place far away from her troubles. It came very close to never being heard at all.