This weekend sees the discharge of Depraved, the highly-anticipated adaptation of the hit Broadway musical, which, regardless of what sure tie-in toy packages point out, isn’t any manner affiliated with the porn studio of the same name.
However Depraved is hardly the primary Wizard of Oz film, along with the 1939 MGM basic, there was the current Ouncesthe Nice and Highly effective with James Franco, the ‘70s Motown-produced The Wiz and even a TV model starring the Muppets. And the much less mentioned concerning the animated sequel that includes live-action scenes of Invoice Cosby because the Wizard, the higher.
However whereas all of us consider the ‘39 model because the definitive cinematic tackle the story, it wasn’t truly the primary Oz function movie. Greater than a decade earlier than Judy Garland performed Dorothy Gale, there was a feature-length silent model of The Wizard of Oz made in 1925. And it’s utterly bonkers.
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Within the ‘25 movie, Dorothy is a 17-year-old dwelling with an abusive uncle. She’s lusted after by two farmhands, and finally seems to be the rightful Princess of the fantastical Land of Oz. The Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion are simply the farmhands who throw on low cost costumes whereas in Ouncesfor some cause.
There’s a complete lot of old-timey slapstick comedy (a swarm of bees stinging folks’s butts, for instance) and monarchical politics, however there’s no Toto, no Yellow Brick Highway and even the Depraved Witch was by some means left on the reducing room flooring. As an alternative, the villains have been the not-so-subtly-named Ambassador Wikked and Prime Minister Kruel.
If all that wasn’t bizarre sufficient, towards the top of the story, the Tin Man rats on his buddies and joins up with the baddies, and throws the Lion and the Scarecrow in a dungeon. They escape and try to flee Ouncesin a biplane, just for the Scarecrow to fall 1000’s of ft to his demise a minute earlier than the film concludes.
This Wizard of Oz is of interest to comedy fans specifically, however, owing to the fact that the unnecessarily horny Tin Man was played by Oliver Hardy, of Laurel and Hardy fame. That’s because the liberal adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s classic children’s book was written and directed by a guy named Larry Semon. Semon was a major silent film comedy star, and at one point, his popularity rivaled that of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
So Hardy ended up in The Wizard of Oz as a result of he usually labored with Semon, “often taking the part of Semon’s adversary,” which might clarify their Oz dynamic.
Sadly for Semon, Hardy and everybody else concerned in The Wizard of Oz, the costly manufacturing triggered the impartial studio behind it, Chadwick Footage, to go bankrupt, which upended plans for the movie’s distribution. Semon himself had invested closely within the bomb, and died simply three years later on the age of 39 after himself declaring chapter. On the time, Variety partly blamed his untimely demise on current monetary stress.
Say what you’ll about that crappy James Franco film, a minimum of it didn’t kill anybody.
