AKA: His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz
In this dip into the Oz universe, is Princess Gloria, stuck in one of those classic situations, where the King wants her to marry the rich old guy, but she is in love with someone else. Meanwhile, another girl, named Dorothy, is captured and made a prisoner in the castle. Also, a scarecrow is put up in one of the local fields. To thwart the Princess' love for Pon, the King has the wicked witches (in really bad costumes), freeze her heart. The scarecrow comes to life and falls in love with Gloria. Since her heart is frozen, Gloria now wanders around like a unemotional zombie not caring at all. The evil witch Mombi beats all the hay out of the Scarecrow and he needs to be rescued by Dorothy and Pon.
The actor portraying the Scarecrow looks like he is a clown performer, in fact, the Scarecrow looks more like a clown than a scarecrow. Probably another reason why early audiences didn't like these films, bad costumes and make-up. After Gloria wanders off, the rest of the crew runs into the tin woodsman, who is in a much better costume then anyone else, even though parts of him look like they are about to fall off. Then he cuts off Mombi's head. Next up is the Cowardly Lion. Who actually looks kind of cool, but still a guy in a lion costume. They do attempt some effects in this film, such as the Scarecrow underwater. Not bad attempts for 1914.
As the film rolls along in its totally unorganized fashion, we also see another reason why audiences didn't react well to this film. They shot these films in the forests, streams and lakes that can be found just about anywhere. All they were giving the audience was people in bad costumes running around in someone's back yard, not visiting an enchanted world. This dizzying story, fraught with strange little dancing skits, doesn't give the audience of the day what they were looking for. This film was re-released after its initial run a second time as the New Wizard of Oz and it actually did better just because of a title change, because the Scarecrow is not a very exciting character in this film and that part gets lost by the time you get to the end. No wonder it did better. This kind of storytelling needed some more time for the artform of filmmaking to grow some more. It needed to wait until 1939.
4.4 (E- MyGrade) = 5 IMDB.
