Above is a photo of a video re-issue of Larry Semon's 1925 silent-movie version of The Wizard of Oz, in which Oliver Hardy played the Tin Woodsman and his farmhand alter-ego. According to John Fricke, Jay Scarfone, and William Stillman's book The Wizard of Oz: The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History, Semon's "wildly original" version of Oz bore "little relation to Baum's book." However, it provided an inspiration to the more famous 1939 movie version, in that Hardy and his contemporaries played farmhands in the pre-Oz sequences, a bit of exposition not provided in the original book.
(C) 2002, Steven Bailey.
Related links:
Purchase the 1925 Wizard of Oz on video from Amazon.com
Purchase the book The Wizard of Oz: The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History from Amazon.com
