Washington, DC - June 16, 2006

In the original book, of course, they were actually the Silver Shoes. But when making a big-budget motion picture with new-fangled color film, you want to take as much advantage of color as you can, and silver is not much more interesting in color than in black and white. However, due to the relatively primitive color film stock they had in 1939 and the extremely bright lighting it required, the real-life ruby slippers actually had to be a much darker red than what appears on film. If they'd actually been that color, they would've looked rather orangey in the movie.