Basically a highlights reel from a filmed recreation of the 1902 Broadway musical (which looks to have been pretty fuckin' elaborate for its time), the film is not technically sophisticated: there are no camera angles at all, no zooms, no pans – just a straight-on, one-camera, single-frame shot capturing the on-stage chaos. Now, were you watching this stage production, you'd have a lot more context than you get with the silent film—so the film seems to be less a production of Oz than mass hysteria (in full costume). Usually there are at least five and up to 25 people on the small stage simultaneously, jumping around, dancing, skipping—some dressed as dogs, cows, donkeys (?!), or monkeys. The action at times is more hyper than Natural Born Killers. At a whirlwind pace, the film hits most of the well-known plot points of Baum's book, to varying degrees of recognizability (for example, the jarring sight of a Toto who is the same size as the Cowardly Lion). Some of the visualization is similar to the 1939 version, but the 1910 one seems more like an outline or "greatest hits" from the book than a real movie. But I'll cut 'em some slack, it ain't like they knew how to make movies back then! From a post-modern standpoint, my favorite part was probably the odd ending, in which diapered Negroes bring some camels on stage, and the film abruptly just stops.
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