Rumor additionally had it—due to the celebs of the film, no much less—that the little individuals forged because the residents of Munchkinland ran amok of their free time.

“They were little drunks,” Garland mentioned in a 1967 interview with Jack Paar. “They got smashed every night and the police used to scoop them up in butterfly nets.”

Jerry Maren, who performed the inexperienced plaid-wearing member of the Lollipop Guild and was the final surviving Wizard of Oz Munchkin when he died at 98 in 2018, pushed again at the characterization of him and his costars.

“Judy was telling it according to her pills and booze that day,” Maren wrote in his 2006 memoir (with Stephen Cox) Short and Sweet: The Life and Times of the Lollipop Munchkin. “She left behind a legacy of untruths about us.”

And among the many 120 or so little individuals within the movie, “There were a couple of kids from Germany who liked to drink beer,” he wrote. “They drank beer morning, noon and night, and got in a little trouble. They wanted to meet the girls, but they were the only ones.”

Margaret Pellegrini, who performed a Munchkin villager, had fond recollections of the expertise. “My father worked in a hotel and earned about $5 a week. I got paid $50 a week,” she recalled. “It took eight weeks to make the Munchkinland scenes, after which I stayed in Hollywood for a month to sightsee.”