Silent Movies

When I was a child I eagerly collected all 14 titles in the Oz series. Each year I would proudly walk into the little bookshop in Carbondale, my Christmas money in my hand, and buy two or three books until I finally had them all!

Now the bindings on my old Del Rey editions are starting to break, so I will probably repurchase the set in 100th anniversary editions:

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904)
Ozma of Oz (1907)
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz (1908)
The Road to Oz (1909)
The Emerald City of Oz (1910)
The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913)
Tik-Tok of Oz (1914)
The Scarecrow of Oz (1915)
Rinkitink in Oz (1916)
The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)
The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918)
The Magic of Oz (1919)
Glinda of Oz (1920)

Note: the copyright on these books has expired and free digital versions are also available at archive.org.

My mom sewed my Halloween costumes for me and I still have two from that time. One year I was Glinda the Good in red satin with beaded collar and cuffs. The next year I was Ozma of Oz, and it was my favorite Halloween costume of all time. She made me a beautiful pale green tulle dress with a golden headband (it is still the star of our dress-up bin).

Today I unexpectedly discovered that there are several silent films from the world of Oz. Turns out that the Oz Film Manufacturing Company -- founded by L. Frank Baum and making silent movies he wrote and produced -- was an independent film studio from 1914 to 1915. It made only a few pictures before it was absorbed by Metro Pictures, later evolving into Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer.

I am really thrilled because I often want examples of silent movies to show to my U.S. History students who cannot imagine such a thing, and I never have time to track any down. Now this one just fell into my lap! I usually recommend that they watch Singin' in the Rain to get an idea of how talkies changed everything, but that was made in the 50's to show life in the 20's.

Here are the movies I want to remember for next time this comes up:

The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914)
available at Amazon Prime with a one week free trial of MGM+

His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz (1914)
available at Wikipedia for free
but without piano and the piano is important!

The Magic Cloak of Oz (1914)
available at Amazon Prime for $19.99
note: the Forest of Burzee is also the setting for The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, available for free at Project Gutenberg

I had no idea, until I started researching this, that there was a 1910 silent film version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (13 minutes) AND a 1925 silent film version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1 hour 11 minutes, available at Amazon Prime for $4.09). Did everyone know about this but me?

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