Wildlife: A row of ducklings with their mama duck sat in a row on our log, with a few gaps -- they weren't really spaces, but turtles sunning themselves alongside their neighbors.



Visit: A Tale of Two Movies

Weather: No rain yesterday, but do late-nite fireworks count as weather?

Charity Alert: The Animal Rescue Site I'm not through with helping them, or the other five click-to-donate sites.

Media Watch: A film version of the Wizard of Oz from 1910, followed by the 1939 MGM classic on TCM.
The 1910 Wizard looked like it might have been a "highlight reel" from the VERY successful stage play which toured the world before and after WWI. Nine year old BeBee Daniels played Dorothy Gale. (She played Dorothy Brock in 42nd Street, twenty two years later.) The Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow looked a lot like the characters in the preceding book, and later MGM musical. Toto, Cowardly Lion, and a number of unnamed farm creatures were played by people in full-body masks and costumes, crawling around on their hands and knees. The magic was made by trap doors, smoke bombs, and lifting wires -- common theatrical effects at the time, although there were a few film dissolves. The film had more than a few moments of inept, crowded blocking, and most scenes ended with some silly dance steps from the characters. There were chorus-girl guards turning a few kicks -- wearing black-leg, white-leg tights for some unusually visual photo-play for those days.
It is my understanding that many early films were made and distributed as "highlights" of famous theatrical productions -- if this is one of them, then its possible that some of the original cast were captured on film. My previous reading tells me the stage actors who played Tin Woodman and Scarecrow did so for twenty years or so, and created the template that Ray Bolger and Jack Hayley followed in the Technicolor version. (Bert Lahr had already created his own character, on the hardscrabble stages of Vaudeville, and I'm glad he was encouraged to clown away with it.)