• Of Bada precursor of The Wizard of Oznow in theaters, PEOPLE takes a look back at the 1939 classic
• For years, people have claimed that the fantasy film starring Judy Garland was cursed
• Oz expert and author John Fricke explains the problems on set and debunks rumors

The Wizard of Oz is one of the most influential films of all time. It is also one of the most mysterious, due to widespread rumors that it was somehow cursed.

Several accidents and mishaps occurred during the filming of the 1939 classic about Kansas teenager Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) who is swept away to a magical land by a powerful tornado. People often point to those accidents as evidence that something was wrong.

Margaret Hamilton, the actress who played the Wicked Witch of the West, suffered second- and third-degree burns during one scene. Her stunt double, Betty Danko, was hospitalized after an explosion.

The dog who played Dorothy’s faithful Toto was injured when someone stepped on it. And actor Buddy Ebsen, the original Tin Man, had to stop filming because he had a terrifyingly negative reaction to the makeup.

Oz expert and historian John Fricke, the author of The Wizard of Oz, the official 50th anniversary pictorial history And The Wizard of Oz, an illustrated addition to the timeless film classic confirms these incidents.

But he attributes much of it to the filmmakers’ innovative filmmaking. “They did things that had never been done before and tried things that had never been done before,” he tells PEOPLE.

Indeed, both Hamilton and Danko were injured during complicated and dangerous sequences. “There was no, ‘Let’s be careless,’” he says.

After Hamilton was burned during a scene in which the Wicked Witch disappeared in a cloud of smoke and fire on the Yellow Brick Road, she was recuperated for six weeks. When she returned, she refused to film a scene where her character rides a broom with smoke coming out of the back.

Danko, Hamilton’s stunt double, filmed the scene instead. She had to press a button to release smoke from the back of the broom, and when she did, “the broom exploded,” Fricke says.

“Betty Danko flew in one direction. The hat went in a different direction. The broom went a third way and she ended up in the hospital.”

The ambitious makeup application was also problematic for the original Tin Man Ebsen (who would later star in The Beverly Hillbillies). According to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, he reacted badly to the aluminum dust in the makeup.

“One night I woke up screaming in bed. My arms were spasming from my fingers up and curling at the same time so that I couldn’t use one arm to uncurl the other. My wife tried to straighten my arm with some success, just as my toes started curling; then my feet and legs bent backwards. I panicked. I wouldn’t even be able to breathe,” Ebsen wrote in his memoir The Other Side of Oz according to The Academy. (Jack Haley starred as the Tin Man.)

Fricke says that “90 percent” of what filmmakers tried “gave us a classic movie.” The remaining 10 percent that went wrong unintentionally “has been inflated to 98 percent – ​​and now it has been fabricated and lied into legend.”

He is irritated by lurid stories that he says are simply not true. According to TimeGarland’s third ex-husband, Sid Luft, claimed in his memoir that the actors playing the Munchkins would drink and “make Judy’s life miserable by putting their hands under her dress.”

“The Munchkins did not sexually assault Judy Garland,” Fricke said. “One of them asked her out to dinner and she said no. That was as far as it went.”

After the film’s fiftieth release in 1989, a rumor spread that an actor playing a Munchkin died by suicide on set – and many claimed to be able to see a shadow of the body in a scene. But Fricke also puts an end to that rumor by saying, “There’s no Munchkin hanging in Tin Man’s house.” This is the kind of thing that is perpetuated.”

“We live in a time where everything is credible,” says Fricke. “It has become the structure of our daily lives. But we know the truth.”