Google Celebrates Wizard Of Oz 80th Anniversary With This Intricate Easter Egg
Google often likes to have a bit of fun with its search engine and other services, with occasional tie-ins to pop culture and tributes for different occasions (remember when Pac-Man chewed up the streets in Google Maps?). For its latest trick, Google has 'hidden' an Easter Egg to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the release of The Wizard of Oz, which gave a generation of kids nightmares about flying monkeys and evil witches.
The Easter Egg is rather easy to find—just perform a Google Search for "The Wizard of Oz" and look for a pair of shiny, ruby red shoes. The sparkling shoes appear on the right-hand side of the screen. Click (or tap) on them and the heels will click together three times, with a sound blurb of Judy Garland saying, "There's no place like home." Spoiler alert: that's how she ultimately gets back home in the movie (80 years is long enough to avoid posting spoilers, right?).
Doing this also causes the screen to spin in a dizzying fashion. When it stops, you'll be greeted to a sepia makeover of your browsing window. If you recall, the beginning of The Wizard of Oz was in black and white, before Dorothy gets caught up in a tornado and transported to the colorful world of Oz.
You can scroll down while the browser window maintains its sepia tone, though it quickly disappears whenever you click on a link or navigate to a new page. Additionally, you can click or tap on the floating tornado that takes the place of the ruby red shoes, and the screen will spin once again, restoring the normal color tone.
Be warned, though—if you are prone to dizziness, you should probably skip this particular Easter Egg (or at least close your eyes for a few seconds after clicking). That said, this works on both desktop and mobile, and in any browser.
This is reminiscent of the Avengers: Endgame Easter Egg, which is still available. If you perform a search for Thanos, there is a clickable Infinity Gauntlet (or "glove," if you prefer) in the same spot as the ruby red slippers. Clicking it causes part of the browser window to go up dust. while a subsequent click restores the disintegrated contents. This still works, by the way.
Fun stuff.
