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 pictures and be pleasurable to read. Carroll rejected the Victorian-era ideology that children's books should be saturated with morals, instead believing that children should be allowed to be children. Building on Carroll's style of numerous images accompanying the text, Baum combined the conventional features of a fairy tale (witches and wizards) with the well-known things in his readers' lives (scarecrows and cornfields). "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" is considered the first American fairy tale because of its references to clear American locations such as Kansas and Omaha. Baum agreed with authors such as Carroll that fantasy literature was important for