It’s the 70th anniversary of the ‘Wizard of Oz’ movie, an American classic, which means a few theaters will be showing a remastered version of the film. Is there a hanging in the Wizard of Oz? Questions of a hanging in background Wizard of Oz footage are not new.

But chatting up online tonight is the same question – when Dorothy heads down the yellow brick road, there appears a small dark figure moving in the background …. is that a crew member hanging?

Answer is no. The questions first arose when the Wizard of Oz was released on home video. If you watch the scene on a big screen, reports say the dark figure is obviously a bird, a big bird believed to be one of the cranes rented by MGM for the scene.

For the creation of “over the rainbow”, MGM brought in everything from peacocks to turkeys. Even in moments before and after, Dorothy has birds flying around her. The result was to make a studio set appear more like the outdoors. The result – birds in the background, not a hanging.

When “The Wizard of Oz” first hit theaters in August 1939, flying monkeys were the least of America’s worries.

The Depression, already almost a decade long, continued to grind away, and Germany stood on the verge of invading Poland, igniting a global conflagration that would envelop the United States just two years later.

Moviegoers needed escape. And along came Judy Garland’s Dorothy Gale, a Kansas farm girl whose ruby slippers stepped out of the dreary present and into a Technicolor future, a magical Oz populated by talking scarecrows, Munchkins, bubble-riding witches and a con man of a wizard who showed that all we ever needed was within ourselves.

Hard as it is to believe, the Judy Garland-starring fantasy classic “The Wizard of Oz” is 70 years old, and to mark the event, a special one-night-only theatrical presentation of the film in newfangled high-definition is set for 7 p.m. Wednesday in theaters nationwide, including more than 20 in Southern California.