EDITOR’S NOTE: Under the Rainbow was on the CBS Late Movie on June 26, 1987.

Filmed at the original Culver Hotel, the same place the Munchkin actors stayed at while making The Wizard of Oz, this movie brings together a series of strange people: MGM employee Annie Clark (Carrie Fisher); an Austrian duke (Joseph Maher), duchess (Even Arden) and their Secret Service agent Bruce Thorpe (Chevy Chase); Nazi Otto Kriegling (Billy Barty); Kriegling’s Japanese spymaster Nakamuri (Mako) and more than a hundred little people, all cast as Munchkins and staying under the not-so-great watch of Henry (Adam Arkin), in charge of the hotel for the first time.

The Munchkins are out of control. The Nazi thinks that his Japanese connection is one of the many Japanese tourists, while his contact thinks he’s one of the many little people. A killer is trying to murder the royalty staying there. A Nazi map is hidden in the script for the movie. And it’s all a dream, causing when one of the little people, Rollow Sweet (Cork Hubbert), falls off a roof in Kansas.

Unfortunately, none of it works. Directed by Steve Rash — who later in his career would make direct-to-video sequels to Road Trip, Bring It On and American Pie — and written by Pat McCormick, Harry Hurwitz, Martin Smith, Fred Bauer and Pat Bradley, it has charming leads who don’t get to do much. Fisher would later say that this was one of the worst movies she had been in, and Chase said it was one of the worst movies ever made.

It was the first movie for Phil Fondacaro and Debbie Lee Carrington, featuring at least two real Munchkins in the cast, including Jerry Maren and Ruth Duccini. While she had only two roles in her life, Maren also appeared in Terror of Tiny Town, Planet of the Apes, The Being, House, and many more. He was the last cast member of The Wizard of Oz to die.

Make-up artist Fred B. Phillips also worked on both movies.