"The Jitterbug" was a song sung by Judy Garland

Judy Garland

Judy Garland was an American actress and singer. Through a career that spanned 45 of her 47 years and for her renowned contralto voice, she attained international stardom as an actress in musical and dramatic roles, as a recording artist and on the concert stage...

 as Dorothy, together with the Scarecrow, Tinman and Lion, that was cut from the soundtrack of the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz

The Wizard of Oz (1939 film)

The Wizard of Oz is a 1939 American musical fantasy film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was directed primarily by Victor Fleming. Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf received credit for the screenplay, but there were uncredited contributions by others. The lyrics for the songs...

. It was both a jazzy development of the plot and a nod to the then popular bobby-soxer dance craze. As the song begins, the four friends see a jitterbug flitting in the shadows from tree to tree and become frightened. The refrain that they sing is: "Oh the bees in the breeze and the bats in the trees have a terrible, horrible buzz. ... So, just be careful of that rascal. Keep away from the jitterbug." The jitterbug puts a magical influence on the characters, forcing them to dance the Jitterbug frenetically. Soon there are many jitterbugs. Everyone collapses from exhaustion and can easily be subdued by the witch's army of flying monkeys.

The song is a play on words. The Wicked Witch of the West had sent "a little, tiny insect... to take the fight out of them", a line which was left in the film and is perhaps the most obvious continuity error in the film. The original Baum novel has a reference to little insects in Chapter 12.

The song has been restored in various stage versions of The Wizard of Oz, including the 1942 Muny production

The Wizard of Oz (1942 musical)

The Wizard of Oz is a musical commissioned by the St. Louis Municipal Opera based on the novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz and using the film's songs by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg...

 and 1987 RSC version. It does not appear in the 2011 West End version

The Wizard of Oz (2011 musical)

The Wizard of Oz is a musical based on the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz and L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The adaptation is by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jeremy Sams. The musical uses all of the Harold Arlen and E. Y...

.

History

According to Aljean Harmetz

Aljean Harmetz

Aljean Harmetz is a Hollywood journalist and film historian. She has written as a Hollywood film correspondent for The New York Times since 1981....

 in her book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a children's novel written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow. Originally published by the George M. Hill Company in Chicago on May 17, 1900, it has since been reprinted numerous times, most often under the name The Wizard of Oz, which is the name of...

, "The Jitterbug" was an artifact left over from premises made in early drafts of the script. The original producers thought that a 1939 audience was too sophisticated to accept Oz as a straight-ahead fantasy; that was why it was reconceived as a lengthy, elaborate dream. Because of a perceived need to attract a youthful audience through appealing to modern fad

FAD

In biochemistry, flavin adenine dinucleotide is a redox cofactor involved in several important reactions in metabolism. FAD can exist in two different redox states, which it converts between by accepting or donating electrons. The molecule consists of a riboflavin moiety bound to the phosphate...

s and styles

Style (fiction)

In fiction, style is the manner in which the author tells the story. Along with plot, character, theme, and setting, style is considered one of the fundamental components of fiction.-Fiction-writing modes:...

, the script originally featured Dorothy's journey as a series of musical contests. A spoiled, selfish princess

Princess

Princess is the feminine form of prince . Most often, the term has been used for the consort of a prince, or his daughters....

 in Oz (a part originally written for Betty Jaynes

Betty Jaynes

Betty Jaynes was a B-movie actress in the late 1930s to mid-1940s.She was born in Greeneville, Tennessee but attended high school in Chicago. At the age of 15 she made a "sensational debut" with the Chicago City Opera Company in La boheme...

) had outlawed all forms of music except classical

Classical music

Classical music is the art music produced in, or rooted in, the traditions of Western liturgical and secular music, encompassing a broad period from roughly the 11th century to present times...

 and operetta

Operetta

Operetta is a genre of light opera, light in terms both of music and subject matter. It is also closely related, in English-language works, to forms of musical theatre.-Origins:...

, and went up against Dorothy in a singing contest in which Dorothy's jitterbug style enchanted listeners and won the grand prize. The only remnant of this contrivance was "The jitterbug".

Cutting room floor

The song was recorded in the studio but was evidently cut from the final release print. It was the most famous of a number of cuts that were made to scenes and musical numbers from the film. The conventional reason for its being cut was fear that it would "date" the film too much and/or that the upbeat number was out of place juxtaposed with the group's harrowing experiences in the haunted forest. A more prosaic reason could have been the same argument that was supposedly once made against "Over the Rainbow

Over the Rainbow

"Over the Rainbow" is a classic Academy Award-winning ballad song with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E.Y. Harburg. It was written for the movie The Wizard of Oz, and was sung by Judy Garland in the movie...

", that it was a show-stopper that took too much time, or simply that it made the characters appear too silly by having them suddenly break out into a jitterbug dance after all the fantasy that preceded it.

The only film footage that exists is a grainy home movie shot by Harold Arlen, taken during dress rehearsal, which is included in the DVD special section. It shows the characters, in full costume, doing the dance.

However, the song and some of the establishing dialogue was preserved from the soundtrack as the B-side of the disc release of Over the Rainbow.