From today’s van­tage, the first decade of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry can look like an even more dis­tant peri­od of his­to­ry than it is. In many cor­ners of urban civ­i­liza­tion, the cabarets, tea­rooms, and oth­er near-par­a­lyt­i­cal­ly man­nered insti­tu­tions of the Belle Époque were very much going con­cerns. To those who lived in that era, it must have been easy enough to believe that the ways of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry-style aris­toc­ra­cy and empire could per­pet­u­ate them­selves for­ev­er. Yet those were also the years of Georges Méliès Le Voy­age dans la Lune, the Wright broth­ers’ first flight; the pro­lif­er­a­tion of auto­mo­biles and sub­way trains; Rus­si­a’s loss in war to Japan and first rev­o­lu­tion; Ein­stein’s dis­cov­ery of rel­a­tiv­i­ty, the pho­to­elec­tric effect, and Brown­ian motion; and Picas­so’s Les Demoi­selles d’Av­i­gnon.

The world as it was, in oth­er words, was giv­ing way to the world as it would be. Such is the con­text of the doc­u­men­tary footage col­lect­ed — and col­orized, and upscaled — in the video at the top of the post. Begin­ning in a bustling work­ing-class street in Hollinwood, Eng­land, this tour of the nine­teen-hun­dreds con­tin­ues on to places like Spain, India, Chi­na, New York, Japan, Brazil, Den­mark, Aus­tria, and Ger­many.

One aspect of all this footage liable to catch the twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry eye is all the myr­i­ad forms of trans­porta­tion on dis­play, some run­ning on sole­ly ani­mal or even human mus­cle, and oth­ers pro­pelled by the kind of engines then at the heart of indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions the world over. (You can even catch a glimpse of Wup­per­tal’s sus­pend­ed Schwe­be­bahn, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.)

All this gives us a clear­er sense of why so many con­tem­po­rary observers expressed feel­ings of civ­i­liza­tion­al whiplash, espe­cial­ly if, as was becom­ing more and more com­mon, they’d emi­grat­ed from a less tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced soci­ety to a more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced one. For those liv­ing at the edge of progress, the shape of things to come (a phrase lat­er used as a book title by one such observ­er, the pro­lif­ic H. G. Wells) was any­one’s guess, and it’s hard­ly sur­pris­ing that so many for­ward-look­ing philoso­phies, ide­olo­gies, and art move­ments would arise from such a fer­ment. Still, it would have tak­en a pre­scient mind indeed to fore­see the ascen­dance of com­mu­nism, Nazism, the Amer­i­can empire, and mass broad­cast media just ahead, to say noth­ing of two world wars. William Gib­son had yet to be born, let alone to utter his now-famous quote, but as we can see, the future was already here in the nine­teen-tens — and uneven­ly dis­trib­uted.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Footage of Cities Around the World in the 1890s: Lon­don, Tokyo, New York, Venice, Moscow & More

Paris Had a Mov­ing Side­walk in 1900, and a Thomas Edi­son Film Cap­tured It in Action

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Berlin Street Scenes Beau­ti­ful­ly Caught on Film (1900–1914)

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Record­ed in 1913: Caught Between the Tra­di­tion­al and the Mod­ern

Watch 1920s “City Sym­phonies” Star­ring the Great Cities of the World: From New York to Berlin to São Paulo

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

The Wiz­ard of Oz is now show­ing at Las Vegas’ Sphere. Or a ver­sion of it is, at any rate, and not one that meets with the approval of all the pic­ture’s count­less fans. “The beloved 1939 film star­ring Judy Gar­land, wide­ly con­sid­ered one of the great­est Hol­ly­wood clas­sics, has been stretched and mor­phed and adapt­ed to fit the enor­mous dome-shaped venue,” writes the New York Times’ Alis­sa Wilkin­son. This entailed an exten­sion “upward and out­ward with the help of A.I. as well as visu­al effects artists. The cool tor­na­do cre­at­ed by Arnold Gille­spie for the orig­i­nal has been trad­ed for some­thing dig­i­tal, and even­tu­al­ly you can’t see it at all, because you’re inside the fun­nel. New per­for­mances and vis­tas have also been gen­er­at­ed,” which is “at best ques­tion­able” eth­i­cal­ly, to say noth­ing of the aes­thet­ics.

Yet even giv­en the con­sid­er­able mod­i­fi­ca­tions to — and exci­sions from — the orig­i­nal film, “most audi­ences will glad­ly over­look all of this, wowed by the sheer scale of the spec­ta­cle.” The Wiz­ard of Oz has, as has often been said, the kind of “mag­ic” that endures through even great defi­cien­cies in pre­sen­ta­tion.

That qual­i­ty first became appar­ent in 1956, sev­en­teen years after the movie’s release in cin­e­mas, when it first aired on tele­vi­sion. Though the dra­mat­ic tran­si­tion from black-and-white to col­or would have been lost on most home view­ers at the time, “45 mil­lion peo­ple tuned in, far more than those who had seen it in the­aters,” says the nar­ra­tor of the It Was A Sh*t Show video above. Anoth­er broad­cast, in 1959, did even bet­ter, and there­after The Wiz­ard of Oz became an “annu­al must-see event” on TV, which even­tu­al­ly made it “the most-watched film in his­to­ry.”

That sta­tus jus­ti­fies the movie’s infa­mous­ly trou­bled pro­duc­tion, which is the video’s cen­tral sub­ject. From its numer­ous rewrites all the way through to its fee­ble box office per­for­mance, The Wiz­ard of Oz encoun­tered severe dif­fi­cul­ties every step of the way, which gave rise to rumors that con­tin­ue to haunt it: that an actor died from poi­son make­up, for exam­ple, or that one of the munchkins com­mit­ted sui­cide in view of the cam­era. While the pro­duc­tion caused no fatal­i­ties — at least not direct­ly — it did come close more than once, to say noth­ing of the psy­cho­log­i­cal toll the com­bi­na­tion of high ambi­tion and per­sis­tent dys­func­tion must have tak­en on many, if not most, of its par­tic­i­pants. Even hear­ing enu­mer­at­ed only its clear­ly doc­u­ment­ed prob­lems is enough to make one won­der how the pic­ture was ever com­plet­ed in the first place. Yet now, 86 years lat­er, its Sphere rein­ter­pre­ta­tion is rak­ing in $2 mil­lion in tick­et sales per day: an act of wiz­ardry if ever there was one.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the Ear­li­est Sur­viv­ing Filmed Ver­sion of The Wiz­ard of Oz (1910)

The Wiz­ard of Oz Bro­ken Apart and Put Back Togeth­er in Alpha­bet­i­cal Order

The Com­plete Wiz­ard of Oz Series, Avail­able as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books

Hear Wait­ing for Godot, the Acclaimed 1956 Pro­duc­tion Star­ring The Wiz­ard of Oz’s Bert Lahr

Watch the Sesame Street Episode Banned for Being Too Scary, Fea­tur­ing The Wiz­ard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West (1976)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Buster Keaton’s pen­chant and skill for comedic stunts made him one of the biggest stars of the silent-film era.  Nobody at the time imag­ined that he would still be engag­ing in dan­ger­ous-look­ing prat­falls 40 years lat­er in his sev­en­ties, espe­cial­ly since his career seemed to have come to an end in 1926. That was the year of his Civ­il War-set film The Gen­er­al, which, though now crit­i­cal­ly respect­ed, left con­tem­po­rary audi­ences cold. Flops are, per­haps, inevitable, but this one hap­pened to incor­po­rate into the pic­ture the most expen­sive shot in cin­e­ma his­to­ry to date. As a result, says the Ming video above, “Keaton was nev­er giv­en con­trol over his films again.”

Iron­i­cal­ly, unlike the cin­e­mat­ic images that had made him famous, the $42,000 shot in The Gen­er­al did not put its direc­tor-star in appar­ent mor­tal per­il, depict­ing only a rail­road bridge col­laps­ing while a train cross­es it. Though undoubt­ed­ly impres­sive, it would­n’t have been what peo­ple went to a Buster Keaton movie to see.

Here was a man will­ing, after all, to fly from the back of a mov­ing street­car, dan­gle off the edge of a water­fall, risk being crushed by an entire wall of a house, and even break his neck — though he did­n’t dis­cov­er that he’d done so until eleven years lat­er. Mak­ing these and all of Keaton’s oth­er famous stunts involved con­sid­er­able amounts of both cal­cu­lat­ed dan­ger and movie mag­ic.

Some of that movie mag­ic was con­ceived by Keaton him­self, the first film­mak­er, in Quentin Taran­ti­no’s words, to “use cin­e­ma itself to be the joke.” Few per­form­ers could have adapt­ed so well to the medi­um of silent film, with its realms of silent com­e­dy just wait­ing to be opened. And after sound had been around for a few decades, long­time movie­go­ers start­ed to feel like cin­e­ma had lost some of the visu­al exu­ber­ance that it once pos­sessed. By that time, luck­i­ly, Keaton had emerged from his long post-Gen­er­al peri­od of hard-drink­ing malaise, ready to appear not just in the movies again, but also on tele­vi­sion, delight­ing the gen­er­a­tions who remem­bered his ear­li­er work and fas­ci­nat­ing those too young to rec­og­nize him. Even today, when we find our­selves laugh­ing at a scene of elab­o­rate­ly orches­trat­ed phys­i­cal dan­ger, we are, in some sense, wit­ness­ing Keaton’s lega­cy.

Relat­ed con­tent:

30 Buster Keaton Films: “The Great­est of All Com­ic Actors,” “One of the Great­est Film­mak­ers of All Time”

Watch the Only Time Char­lie Chap­lin & Buster Keaton Per­formed Togeth­er On-Screen (1952)

Char­lie Chap­lin & Buster Keaton Go Toe to Toe (Almost) in a Hilar­i­ous Box­ing Scene Mash Up from Their Clas­sic Silent Films

A Super­cut of Buster Keaton’s Most Amaz­ing Stunts

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics

The Gen­er­al, “Per­haps the Great­est Film Ever Made,” and 20 Oth­er Buster Keaton Clas­sics Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.