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 Bobbs-Merrill Company. The editions they published lacked most of the in-text color and color plates of the original. It was not until the book entered the public domain in 1956 that new editions, either with the original color plates, or new illustrations, proliferated. Notable among them are the 1986 Pennyroyal edition illustrated by Barry Moser, which was reprinted by the University of California Press, and the 2000 "Annotated Wizard of Oz" edited by Michael Patrick Hearn, which was published by W.W. Norton and included all the original color illustrations, as well as supplemental artwork by Denslow. Other centennial editions included