The Wizard of Oz (1925 film) The Wizard of Oz (1925 film) The Wizard of Oz is a 1925 American silent fantasy-adventure comedy film directed by Larry Semon, who also performs in the lead role as a Kansas farmhand and later in the story disguised as the Scarecrow. This production, which is the only completed 1920s adaptation of L. Frank Baum's novel "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", costars Dorothy Dwan as Dorothy, Oliver Hardy as the Tin Woodman in a portion of the film, and Spencer Bell briefly disguised as a less "cowardly" Lion than in the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer version of Baum's work. The 1925 film,
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1986 TV series) and has been dubbed in English, Spanish, Italian and numerous other languages. Aside from having the same source material, this TV series bears no relation to the 1982 anime film directed by Fumihiko Takayama and produced by Yoshimitsu Banno for Toho, though both works share the same title in Japanese. However, since the 1982 film was not released in Japan until 1986—the same year in which the TV series was first broadcast—the two productions are often confused. "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" is split into four distinct parts, or story arcs, each loosely based on different Oz books originally written