Twenty-five years before 1939's Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum himself adapted his Oz novels for The Oz Film Manufacturing Company. In The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the wittiest of Baum's Oz productions (all three of which survive), a magician spills a little "Liquid of Petrifaction" during his animation of a patchwork rag doll, mistakenly turning several bystanders into stone. Their friends have little choice but to shrink them (for pocket carrying) and to set off in search of the ingredients of a restorative "Powder of Life"-a six-leaf clover, a tail-hair from a block-shaped "woozy," and other hard-to-locate items. The journey will lead them to characters familiar to us (the Tin Woodsman, the Scarecrow, the Wizard of Oz). The technical limitations of The Patchwork Girl of Oz are more than compensated for by its astonishing imaginative freedom. Scott Simmon