Welcome to Public Domain Theater, your home for the wonderful world of films that have (in the United States, at least) fallen into the public domain, and are free for everyone to see!

Given the hotly anticipated musical Wicked: For Good will soon be out in theaters, I thought this would be great time to look at another version of the Oz story for the silver screen. Long before MGM’s landmark, Judy Garland-starring The Wizard of Oz, there was the 1925 silent film The Wizard of Oz – a flick that takes so many liberties with the source material, it makes Wicked looks like a slavishly faithful adaptation.

This version was directed by and stars Larry Semon, one of those silent film comedians who did much the same sort of schtick as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, but never got their enduring fame. Semon’s The Wizard of Oz is largely an excuse for showing off their slapstick comedy routines (with one Oliver Hardy as a game co-star), and those really are quite good! It’s just a shame they come at the expense of sidelining Dorothy, removing all actual magic from the story, and generally being all-but unrecognizable as an Oz adaptation.

(Also, the one black character in the movie is introduced slacking off from work to chow down on some watermelon, so … yeah.)

I recommend this picture, not as a good movie, nor as a so-bad-it’s-good movie, but as a curiosity. These days, it’d be unthinkable to make a Wizard of Oz adaptation like this – even deliberately twisted versions like Wicked or the Tin Man mini-series know that certain key characters and iconography need to be maintained. Larry Semon’s Wizard of Oz is an interesting artifact of that time before the 1939 film permanently shaped public perception of the story. A time when the most well-known version of The Wizard of Oz wasn’t a movie, nor L. Frank Baum’s original book, but the popular stage musical that debuted in 1902 – if viewed as an adaptation of that now-obscure play, many of this film’s weird divergences make a lot more sense (not all of them, but many).

I find that glimpse into the oddball past of a pop-culture mainstay to be fascinating. But maybe that’s not your cup of tea. Maybe you’re an Oz purist who wants a more faithful take on the story – well, have no fear! We also have a short film version of The Wizard of Oz from 1910, which hews a lot closer to the original book. While not without its own oddities (why’s Dorothy meet the Scarecrow before going to Oz?), it’s overall a charming little exercise in telling the barebones of the Wizard of Oz story in just thirteen minutes.

So come along folks, down the Yellow Brick Road, to a marvelous land just over the rainbow, a land we call … the Public Domain!

Opening Short:

Feature Presentation: