The Ruby Slippers - The Most Famous Shoes in the World

They were magic. A click of the heels and you could go home again saving you lots of money on airfare and doing a world of good for the environment.

There's lots of stories behind those slippers from how they became ruby to where they are now. So get your blue socks on and get ready to drop your house because we're going shoe huntin'.

In L. Frank Baum's original novel, The Wonderful Wizard of OZ, Dorothy's shoes were silver, not ruby.

However, when the MGM musical went into production, Hollywood had just begun using a process known as Technicolor. The filmmakers decided that silver wouldn't pop quite that well once the film went from black and white to color and thus, it was decided that Dorothy's slippers would become ruby.

And two are still missing.

According to film historians, there were at least seven pairs of Ruby Slippers made for Judy Garland. For some time, one of those pairs was on display at Disney World's then named Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando, Florida. They have since been removed.

Currently, one pair is on display at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. This same pair recently made a trip to the Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago. The pair of slippers required two security guards and an armored truck to transport them from the plane to Harpo Studios. The shoes even flew first class.

While the others are owned by mostly private collectors, one pair is owned by a rather well known private collector, actress Debbie Reynolds.

For the Broadway production of Wicked, based on Gregory Maguire's novel retelling the story of OZ from Elphaba's (the Wicked Witch) point of view, the slippers originally owned by the Wicked Witch of the East were returned to their original silver hue.

In Wicked, it's discovered that Elphaba's obsession with the shoes goes beyond just the fact that they belonged to her sister, but also that they held a connection to the distant father whose attention she so greatly craved.

Once again, those are some serious shoes.