The Fairylogue and Radio Plays

The Fairylogue and RadioPlays was an early attempt to bring L. Frank Baums Oz books to the motion picture screen. It was a mixture of live actors, handtinted magic lantern slides, and film. Baum himself would appear as if he were giving a lecture, while he interacted with the characters both on stage and on screen. Although acclaimed throughout its tour, the show experienced budgetary problems with the show costing more to produce than the money that soldout houses could bring in and folded after two months of performances. It opened in Grand Rapids, Michigan on September 24, 1908. It later moved to New York City, where it reportedly closed December 16. It was scheduled to run through December 31, and ads for it continued to run in The New York Times until then.

The films were colored credited as illuminations by Duval Frres of Paris, in a process known as RadioPlay, and were noted for being the most lifelike handtinted imagery of the time. Baum once claimed in an interview that a Michael Radio was a Frenchman who colored the films, though no evidence of such a person, even with the more proper French spelling Michel, as secondhand reports unsurprisingly revise it, has been documented. It did not refer to the contemporary concept of radio or, for that matter, a radio play, but played on notions of the new and fantastic at the time, similar to the way hightech or sometimes cyber would be used later in the century. The Fairylogue part of the title was to liken it to a travelogue, which at the time was a very popular type of documentary film entertainment.The production also included a full original score consisting ofcues by Nathaniel D. Mann, who had previously set a couple of Baums songs in The Wizard of Oz musical. It debuted four months before Camille SaintSanss score for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise, and is therefore the earliest original film score to be documented. ........

Source: Wikipedia