Who really said it

Fly, my pretties, fly!

Not quite — the actual line is “Now, fly! Fly! … Fly, fly, fly!” Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson & Edgar Allan Woolf Credited screenwriters · The Wizard of Oz (1939), MGM

Disputed In copyright

The Wicked Witch of the West does send her Winged Monkeys off with the word “fly” — five times — but she never calls them “my pretties.” Wikiquote’s transcription of the film ↗ ends the speech “Now, fly! Fly! … Fly, fly, fly!” The “pretties” appear to have drifted in from a different scene, and the line is an invention of the 1939 screenplay — credited to Langley, Ryerson and Woolf, though the script went through at least ten screenwriters ↗, so no one hand can be pinned to these words.

Last verified 16 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed wording — copy with the correction

“Fly, my pretties, fly!” the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939), screenplay credited to Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson & Edgar Allan Woolf. The popular "Fly, my pretties, fly!" is a misquote; the film never says "pretties," and the line is not in L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel. Via Quotle.info

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Warner Bros. / Turner Entertainment Co. (originally Loew's Inc. / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson & Edgar Allan Woolf — The Wizard of Oz (1939), MGM. Theme: "Fly, my pretties, fly!". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Fly, my pretties, fly!". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

What she actually says

Film: The Wizard of Oz
Released: 1939 · Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Written by: Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson & Edgar Allan Woolf (credited screenplay; at least ten writers worked on the script)
Spoken by: The Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) — a fictional character

Take your army to the Haunted Forest and bring me that girl and her dog. Do what you like with the others, but I want her alive and unharmed. They’ll give you no trouble, I promise you that. I’ve sent a little insect on ahead to take the fight out of them. [cackles] Take special care of those ruby slippers. I want those most of all. Now, fly! Fly! [The winged monkeys fly out of the castle] Fly, fly, fly! The Witch’s order to the Winged Monkeys

Transcribed at Wikiquote ↗. Independent transcriptions of this speech differ in small ways — the film’s talk page ↗ renders it “Do what you want with the others” and “take the fight out of ’em” — but every version agrees on the point at issue: there is no “pretties” in it.

Wikiquote: The Wizard of Oz (1939 film)

How we verified this

The film, transcribed. Wikiquote’s page for the 1939 film ↗ gives the Witch’s dispatch of the Winged Monkeys ending “Now, fly! Fly! … Fly, fly, fly!” The same page records her one use of the word in question — singular, to Dorothy, in an earlier scene: “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too!”
The novel, searched in full. The Witch of Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) ↗ does not order the monkeys to fly at all: she puts on the Golden Cap and recites “Ep-pe, pep-pe, kak-ke! … Hil-lo, hol-lo, hel-lo! … Ziz-zy, zuz-zy, zik!”, then tells their leader, “Go to the strangers who are within my land and destroy them all except the Lion.” Our own full-text search of the Gutenberg edition returns no “my pretty” and no “pretties.”
Whose words, then. Wikipedia ↗ credits the screenplay to Langley, Ryerson and Woolf but notes it “went through at least ten screenwriters,” with Cukor, Vidor, Brecher, Harburg and others contributing uncredited — which is why no single writer can be named for this speech.
Already noticed. Wikiquote contributors have flagged the drift themselves: the film’s talk page ↗ opens with a reader asking where “Fly, my pretties, fly!” comes from, and concludes the phrase “seems to be a conflation of different lines.”

In copyright

Screen writing is work-for-hire, so the rights sit with the studio, not with Langley, Ryerson or Woolf. Wikipedia’s survey of the Oz copyrights ↗ records that the 1939 film’s copyright “was renewed in 1967, so it will remain copyrighted for a 95-year term, entering the public domain in 2035,” and names WB/Turner Entertainment Co. as the current owners. Note the split: Baum’s 1900 novel entered the public domain in 1956, but the film’s dialogue — including this line, which is not in the novel — is still protected.

Fact-check

Where the “pretties” came from

Nobody is falsely credited here. The film is real, the Witch is the right speaker, and she really does shout “fly” at her monkeys. The error is purely in the words — and it is a case of two scenes fusing in public memory.

“Fly, my pretties, fly!” Never said

The Witch’s actual order ends “Now, fly! Fly! … Fly, fly, fly!” She addresses the monkeys as an army, not as “pretties” — the word does not occur in the speech at all, in Wikiquote’s transcription ↗ or in any transcription we found.

“I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too!” Different scene

This line is in the film — but it is singular, it is aimed at Dorothy, and it comes much earlier, as the Witch vanishes in smoke. A Wikiquote contributor makes the same point on the talk page ↗, noting the misquote “seems to be a conflation of different lines” and that “my pretty” was “not a term of endearment.”

L. Frank Baum Not the origin

Worth stating plainly, because the opposite is the usual pattern: this line was not inherited from the book. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) ↗ the Witch summons the monkeys with the Golden Cap and a nonsense charm — “Ep-pe, pep-pe, kak-ke!” — and never says “fly” or “pretty” to them. The screenwriters invented the moment.

A 1980s FedEx commercial Unverified

On the same talk page ↗, a contributor suggests an ad in which a winged monkey is handed a parcel and told “Go! Fly, my pretty one!” may be “the version most people were exposed to.” We could not locate the advertisement, and the claim is one anonymous editor’s recollection — we record it as a hypothesis, not a finding.

The Witch is guilty of a great many things, but not of saying “Fly, my pretties, fly!” She says “Fly, fly, fly!” — and she wrote none of it herself. See the transcription ↗.

Context

Why this one drifted

The misquote is unusually well-engineered. Almost every other famous movie misquote swaps a word or tidies a rhythm; this one imports a phrase from elsewhere in the same film and welds it into a different scene. The Witch says “my pretty” once, venomously, to Dorothy’s face. Much later she screams “fly” five times at a sky full of monkeys. Memory, which stores gist rather than transcript, files both under the Witch being witchy and hands them back fused — with “pretty” helpfully pluralised to fit the new audience.

There is a second reason it sticks: the invented line is simply better copy. “Fly, my pretties, fly!” is a complete, quotable sentence with a beginning and an end — the kind of thing a Halloween costume or a headline can use. “Now, fly! Fly!” is a fragment torn out of a long tactical briefing about ruby slippers and a little insect sent on ahead. The misquote is what the scene felt like, compressed into something you can actually say.

Memory stored the gist — the Witch, the monkeys, the menace — and reassembled it into a better sentence than the one that was filmed.

The part that surprises people: Baum didn’t write it either

The instinct with a famous movie line is to check whether the book got there first — that is how “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” turns out to be Margaret Mitchell’s with one word added. Here the check comes back the other way. Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West is a minor figure, and she controls the Winged Monkeys by bureaucratic magic rather than menace: she owns the Golden Cap, which obliges them to obey the wearer three times, and she has already spent her earlier turns before she uses the last one on Dorothy’s party.

The summoning itself is a small ritual, not a command — she stands on her left foot, then her right, then both, reciting “Ep-pe, pep-pe, kak-ke! … Hil-lo, hol-lo, hel-lo! … Ziz-zy, zuz-zy, zik!” Her actual order, when the leader asks what she commands, is flat and administrative: “Go to the strangers who are within my land and destroy them all except the Lion.” No “fly.” No “pretty.” The words “my pretty” and “pretties” do not appear anywhere in the 1900 text.

So the credit runs to the screenplay — and the screenplay resists being pinned to a person. Wikipedia notes the script “went through at least ten screenwriters,” three of whom got the card and seven or more of whom did not. The honest answer to “who wrote it” is the credited trio, with an asterisk that no line in this film has a clean single author.

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Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

The Wizard of Oz (1939 film) — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

The transcription this page rests on. Gives the Witch's order to the Winged Monkeys ending "Now, fly! Fly! … Fly, fly, fly!", and separately her "I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too!"

Talk: The Wizard of Oz (1939 film) — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Editors working the same problem: a reader asks where "Fly, my pretties, fly!" comes from, another supplies the real speech, a third calls it "a conflation of different lines." Also the unverified FedEx-ad theory.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) — full textwww.gutenberg.org

Baum's novel, searchable. Chapter 12 has the Golden Cap charm — "Ep-pe, pep-pe, kak-ke!" — in place of any "fly" command. Neither "my pretty" nor "pretties" occurs in the book.

The Wizard of Oz — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

The writing credit (Langley, Ryerson, Woolf), the note that the script "went through at least ten screenwriters," and the list of uncredited contributors including Cukor, Vidor, Brecher and Harburg.

Why the book is free and the film is not: the novel entered the public domain in 1956; the film's copyright was renewed in 1967 and runs to 2035, held by WB/Turner Entertainment Co.

Wicked Witch of the West — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Background on the character across book and film, including the Golden Cap that "compels the winged monkeys to obey her on three occasions" in Baum — the novel's mechanism the film discarded.

The author of a screen line is the writer — not the witch, and not Margaret Hamilton

Who actually wrote it

Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson & Edgar Allan Woolf

Credited screenwriters · The Wizard of Oz (1939), MGM

Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf hold the screenplay credit on MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939), the film that put this line on screen. That credit is a simplification: Wikipedia records that the script “went through at least ten screenwriters,” with Richard Thorpe, George Cukor, King Vidor, Irving Brecher, Herbert Fields, Arthur Freed, Yip Harburg, Samuel Hoffenstein, Jack Mintz and Sid Silvers all contributing without credit. Because of that, the Witch’s speech to the Winged Monkeys cannot honestly be assigned to one of the three — the credited trio is the most precise attribution the record supports.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Langley, Noel, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf. The Wizard of Oz. Directed by Victor Fleming. Culver City, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939. Dialogue as transcribed in “The Wizard of Oz (1939 film),” Wikiquote. Compare L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chicago: George M. Hill, 1900), chap. 12, Project Gutenberg ebook no. 55.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Fly, my pretties, fly!’?” Last verified 16 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/fly-my-pretties-fly