The Wizard
of Sync
The man behind the curtain for movies
and music and matchups, oh my!
by Mary Ought Six
It's a stoner staple, an urban legend that pretty
much everyone's either heard of or experienced: the alchemical
cocktail of "The Wizard of Oz" cued to Pink Floyd's
"Dark Side of the Moon". From the movie's opening
credits--eerie and nostalgic, suspended on the soft laughter,
chiming, moaning and familiar opening notes of "Speak to
Me"--to the first burst of Technicolor and the flower-garbed
midgets matched to the cha-ching, cha-ching, bu-buh-da-dum of
"Money", it's a phenomenon...and one best experienced
stoned out of your gourd.
Wait! Hold the bong! If you’re wracking your
brain trying to remember where you put that old “Wizard”
VHS, and if your scratched CD of “Dark Side” has been
missing in action for a while now, The DeVille’s got you
covered. A detail man saved from a job at the IRS by his curious
found-art passion, The DeVille, the master of syncmovies (syncmovies.com),
has been served with papers more than once to make him cease
and desist from his trippy reproductions. But The DeVille remains
undeterred: He’s done around 20 pairings so far and has
more waiting in the wings, including “The Shining”
set to “Hotel California” (think “Heeeere’s
Johnny!” intertwined with “Johnny Come Lately…”).
It’s not just the cool melody/action matches
or the unexpected symmetries of lyric and story that get the
DeVille and other fans fired up; it's also things like the link
between "Dark Side's" cover at, featuring that well-known
prism- refracted rainbow, and "The Wizard's most famous
song, "Over the Rainbow." This particular coincidence
is what The DeVille calls the "rainbow connection",
and every pairing in his syncs must meet its gold standard of
uncanny synchronicity.
In his coupling of the sci-fi classic Logan's
Run to Powerman 5000’s “Tonight the Stars Revolt!”,
for example, The DeVille notes that on the back of the album,
there’s a robot, and on the back cover of “Logan’s
Run”, there’s also a robot, and “it’s like
the same guy designed the robots!” He adds: “There’s
also numbers appended to their names in Logan’s Run and
to the members of the band like Adam 12 and Dorian 27.”
Obsessed with bringing these things “beyond
coincidence” to the forefront in his labors of love, The
DeVille syncs his syncs with an almost frightening exactitude:
“48th of a 1,000th of a second, to be precise,” he
notes. An avid pot-smoker himself (duh), The DeVille points
out that you don’t have to be stoned to see these things,
but it’s cool if you are, because you’ll notice more
stuff.” Then he adds mystically: “Everything’s
created from the same ether.”
And so it is. But take our word for it: Skip the
ether, because these concoctions are truly best enjoyed stoned.
