Slippers

The ruby slippers are the shoes worn by Dorothy in 1939 MGM movie The Wizard of Oz which give her the power of returning home any time she wishes. She acquired the shoes after her house fell on the Wicked Witch of the East, killing her and liberating the Munchkins. more...

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The slippers protected Dorothy from the evil magic of the Wicked Witch of the West. In the original novel by L. Frank Baum, they were silver slippers, but this was changed for the movie to take advantage of it being in color.

According to the revisionist version of the Oz history chronicled in Gregory Maguire's Wicked, the slippers were given to the wicked witch of the east (Nessarose) by her father. At the time the shoes appeard silver. After being enchanted by her sister Elphaba (the wicked witch of the west), they become items of power which allow Nessarose to walk (being that she was crippled). The energy of Elphaba's spell gave the shoes their famed ruby glow. Maguire's invention thus bridges between Baum's silver slippers and the ruby slippers of the film.

Dorothy knew that the slippers were powerful, but was unaware of their powers. It was only at the end of the film that she learned the formula: click your heels together three times, and repeat "There's no place like home."

The actual slippers worn by Judy Garland in the film were designed by Gilbert Adrian. Several pairs of slippers were constructed for the film. One pair is on permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in the United States, the others are owned by private collectors. As can be seen in the above picture, the pair featured at the Smithsonian are not matching (the right pair's bow is placed higher on the shoe). This has led to the theories that there are more pairs of ruby slippers that have yet to surface.

Several variances in sizes exist, between sizes 5 and 6 (Judy Garland's foot size in 1938). At a 1970 MGM auction, a pair sold for $15,000. On May 24, 2000, a pair of ruby slippers was auctioned for $666,000 (including a $66,000 commission). A pair was originally shown at The Great Movie Ride in Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, but have since been sold to a man named David Elkouby who owns a memorabillia shop in Hollywood and who has been convicted of allegedly selling costumes stolen from movie sets. A pair of ruby slippers from the film was exhibited in the Oz museum in Wamego, Kansas. They were stolen from the Judy Garland Museum, part of the Children's Discovery Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota in August, 2005.

An obviously fake pair of ruby slippers were shown in the 2002 movie, The Master of Disguise.

Read more at Wikipedia.org