Dorothy learns that her only safe route back to Kansas is through the magical assistance of the Wizard of Oz. This causes the witch’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the West, to seek vengeance. But then a tornado suddenly sweeps through Kansas, lifting Dorothy, Toto, and their house up into the air and causing it to finally land in the magical Land of Oz-but not without landing on the Wicked Witch of the East and killing her. In one of the most beloved children’s films of all time that mixes elements of witchcraft and magic, Judy Garland stars as Dorothy Gale, a girl from Kansas who risks losing her beloved dog Toto after a mean local woman threatens to tell the sheriff that Toto bit her. The Wizard of Oz (1939) Frank Morgan stars as the Wizard of Oz.
Black and white spiral floor in a magic movie series#
According to Edison films, it all formed “a series of most startling and laughable effects entirely new to animated photography.” Various characters-clowns, ghosts, a goblin, and a demon-appear, all of them assaulting the hapless hooligan. Every time the hooligan knocks them down, they manage to sit upright again. According to a description by Edison films, “On a stage a professor of magic is performing some wonderful experiments, and when he requests some assistance Happy Hooligan immediately volunteers his services and climbs upon the platform.” Suddenly the magician disappears, replaced by a pair of wooden barrels. Hooligan Assists the Magician (1900) Hooligan Assists the Magician is a very short and very old film.Ĭlocking in at 96 seconds, this is the longest of our three super-short magician films from the very early Silent Era. Edison’s company sold the film to theaters for $9. When the magician shakes the paper, three geese fly out of it.
After waving a magic wand, a table covered in tattered paper appears. Then he takes a handkerchief, holds it over his dress pants, and when he removes the handkerchief, his pants are replaced by knickers. After bowing, he removes both his coat and hat, tosses them up in the air, and they magically disappear. It begins in what appears to be someone’s parlor, where a magician wearing a top hat walks onstage. The Magician (1900) Thomas Edison’s Manufacturing Company made this film.Īnother minute-long magician film from the dawn of filmmaking, this one was produced in America by Thomas Edison’s Manufacturing Company. As with most early films about magic, the special effects were achieved via jump cuts. At the very end, a man in Elizabethan garb appears to kick the sculptor in the butt. The devil changes into a sculptor, who begins to chisel at a sculpture of a woman, which suddenly transforms into a real-life woman. When the clown sits down to eat, it disappears and is replace by a sinister devil character. The clown makes the box disappear and replaces it with a dinner table. He jumps into the box, and then out jumps a skinny clown. In this action-packed, minute-long feature by pioneering French filmmaker and special-effects maestro Georges Méliès, the director himself appears as a magician who conjures a wooden box on a table out of thin air. The Magician (1898) This French film features clowns and magicians. Movies about magicians represent the crossroads between these two worlds-the old world where humans marveled at card tricks and suddenly appearing bouquets of flowers and the new world where people could time-travel and morph into other forms right before your eyes. The advent of cinema marked a new frontier for fantasy in so doing, it probably also ended the careers of many magicians, for pulling a rabbit out of a hat simply couldn’t compete with the way movies held people spellbound. Then when movies came along, so did a whole new form of magic that stimulated the human imagination. It was metaphysical, which is why magicians were often seen as competition to religious leaders and often portrayed as sinister witches. Magic appeared to be supernatural, the opposite of what can be observed and measured. Historically, magic tricks provoked the human imagination and led it into realms beyond the five senses.
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