Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914)

In the mid-1910s, author L. Frank Baum decided to further cash in on the popularity of his Oz children’s books by producing his own motion picture adaptations. This allowed him to control the cinematic productions, presumably to ensure they captured the tone of his books, but also to reap more profits than if he’d simply license the stories to another film company. The adaptations were inexpensively and imaginatively made, but the company lasted only a few months before production was suspended.

The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914) features the familiar Baum characters, including Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion, and also other characters that are familiar to Oz book fans, including Scraps, the patchwork girl.

In a supporting role as Dorothy is Mildred Harris, only four years before she became the first wife of Charles Chaplin. Direction is by actor J. Farrell MacDonald.

This 3-disc Blu-ray Disc Emerald Edition of The Wizard of Oz contains in its supplemental materials five surviving silent era adaptations of L. Frank Baum Oz stories. This edition of The Patchwork Girl of Oz has been mastered from a good to very-good 16mm reduction print from Glenn Photo Supply. The reasonably detailed source print is moderately dusty, speckled, with several distracting vertical scratches and some beginning print decomposition. The second reel is a little darker than the rest. The full-frame video transfer, however, runs at faster than natural speed, causing the five-reel film to go by in a mere 51 minutes.

While the source print appears to have been transferred to video in high-definition, it also appears that the standard-definition masters of the silent era Oz films prepared for the 2005 Warner Home Video DVD edition (noted below), including The Patchwork Girl of Oz, have been utilized without HD remastering for this Blu-ray Disc edition. To be clear, we think that a HD video transfer of The Patchwork Girl of Oz was converted to standard-definition for Warner’s 2005 DVD edition, and that the film transfer has been encoded to this Blu-ray Disc at standard-definition resolution rather than at high-definition resolution. The results still look pretty good, but nearly any still frame will reveal the artifacts of picture compression for DVD encoding.

The film is presented without musical accompaniment of any sort.

This is the best-looking edition of The Patchwork Girl of Oz that is currently in print, and the new HD transfer of The Wizard of Oz (1939) is stunning and itself worth the cost of this BD disc set. Still, it would have been best for Warner Home Video producers to either put these video transfers on a standard-definition DVD or remaster all of the films at high-definition for Blu-ray Disc.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region A Blu-ray Disc edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.

This is our recommended out-of-print DVD home video edition, which will be easier to find than the Smithsonian edition noted below.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 1 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 1 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

This budget DVD edition of The Patchwork Girl of Oz has been transferred from a good to very-good 16mm reduction print, which has been digitally colored amber tones. The full-frame, natural-speed video transfer is a bit dark, with picture details swallowed up in black, featureless shadows. The print is lightly speckled and dusty, but is nonetheless OK.

The musical accompaniment composed and performed by Paul David Bergel on MIDI synthesizers shows marked improvement over his previous compositions for silent film.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is also available directly from . . .

This cheap DVD edition collects all four films previously released on Brentwood Home Video VHS videotape, and this edition of The Patchwork Girl of Oz is easily the worst-looking of several home video editions. The most noticable feature of the print is its dark flatness greytones range, which makes discerning picture details tough going. The video transfer is slightly stretched horizontally making everyone a little wider than they should be.

The film is accompanied by a sonically muted piano score, which may originate from the source print’s optical soundtrack.

Compared to what else is out there, this edition of The Patchwork Girl of Oz is horrible.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
Canada: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.ca. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD edition has been discontinued and is . . .

The film is likely to be accompanied by a soundtrack compiled from preexisting recordings.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.

Both films accompanied by a music score performed by Donald Sosin.

This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is available from REELCLASSIC DVD through . . .