The ruby slippers are a pair of magical shoes worn by Dorothy Gale as played by Judy Garland in the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical film The Wizard of Oz.

[5][6][7] In the MGM film, an adolescent farm girl named Dorothy Gale (played by Judy Garland), her dog Toto, and their Kansas farmhouse are swept into the air by a tornado and transported to the Land of Oz.

Glinda, the Good Witch of the North arrives via a magic bubble and shows Dorothy the dead woman's feet sticking out from under the house with the ruby slippers on them.

There is an embossed gold or silver stamp or an embroidered cloth label bearing the name of the company inside each right shoe.

Three pairs of the surviving slippers had orange felt glued to their soles to deaden the sound of Garland dancing on the Yellow Brick Road.

[7][11] Another pair, the close-up or insert shoes, which is in the best shape of all, appears to be better made, has no orange felt on the soles, and has "#7 Judy Garland" written in the lining.

According to the Library of Congress, "it is widely believed that they were used primarily for close-ups and possibly the climactic scene where Dorothy taps her heels together.

[15] This is most likely the size 6B pair (owned first by Roberta Bauman, then Anthony Landini, and currently by David Elkouby) whose lining says "Double" instead of "Judy Garland".

In the film sequence where trees pelt the Scarecrow with their apples, Garland can be briefly glimpsed wearing black shoes instead of the slippers.

[17] For many years, movie studios were careless with old props, costumes, scripts, and other materials, unaware of or indifferent to their increasing value as memorabilia.

[10] This is believed to be the pair on permanent exhibition in the Popular Culture wing of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.,[8] though the donor insisted on anonymity.

Two weeks after Landini bought his slippers, this pair resurfaced and was offered privately through Christie's to the under-bidder of the Bauman shoes, Philip Samuels of St. Louis, Missouri.

[16] Actor Leonardo DiCaprio and other benefactors, including director Steven Spielberg, made it possible for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to acquire the pair for an undisclosed price in February 2012 for their forthcoming museum.

[32] Over 800 people bid on the item, including the Judy Garland Museum, attempting to buy the slippers back from Shaw, who had repossessed the pair after it had been recovered by the FBI.

[35] Unlike the originals, the hand-made British French-heeled shoes for Return to Oz were covered in hundreds of dark red crystals.

[citation needed] They were won by a British family, who sold them to prominent Oz collector Willard Carroll in a 2001 eBay auction.

While it is likely that Western would have been contracted to make some of The Wizard of Oz's many costumes, no records of the original slippers exist to either validate or disprove their claim.

[36] Super Mario Bros. is a 1993 science-fiction/adventure homage to The Wizard of Oz featuring red-accented 'Thwomp "Air" Stompers' that allow the wearer to fly upon clicking the heels together.

Reproductions were also featured in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, in which character Kahmunrah tosses them away after discovering the rubies are fake.

During the fall 2008 New York Fashion Week, the Swarovski company held a charity contest to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the film, with nineteen designers redesigning the ruby slippers, including Gwen Stefani, Diane von Fürstenberg, and Moschino.

Among them are the ability to: In this series, Dorothy remains inexperienced and unfamiliar with the shoes' magic, calling upon their power only as a last resort, often resulting in a deus ex machina scenario.

In the 2002 Charmed season 5 episode "Happily Ever After", Piper returns home using the ruby slippers after going to the Fairytale Castle to vanquish the Wicked Witch.

The slippers briefly appear in the 2012 season 4 episode "Fractures" of Warehouse 13 in the Dark Vault, seemingly having a life of their own, accompanied by a witch's cackle and a few notes of "Over the Rainbow".

Near the end of the episode, Charlie Bradbury uses the shoes to kill the Wicked Witch and foil her plot to bring her armies to Earth and take over the world.

The Ruby Slippers of Oz (Tale Weaver Publishing, 1989) by Rhys Thomas is a history of the famous shoes and Kent Warner's part in it.

In "At The Auction of the Ruby Slippers", a short story in Salman Rushdie's 1994 anthology East, West, various members of a destitute world attend an auction to bid for the ruby slippers of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, in the hope their transformative powers will help them achieve personal and political ends.

After being enchanted by Elphaba's old best friend and roommate, Glinda (the Good Witch of the North), they become items of power that allow the armless and handicapped Nessarose to magically stand and walk independently without any additional support.

The progressive band Electric Light Orchestra used a frame from the 1939 film on the cover of their fourth studio album, Eldorado, released in 1974.

In World of Warcraft, they are a pair of level 70 epic cloth shoes dropped by the Wizard of Oz-themed "opera event" in the Karazhan raid instance.