There are two things about which we need to be more careful with regard to early films. Some 90% of silent films are believed to be lost and we only have a small acquaintance still even with those films we still possess. Every year films are restored and returned to circulation; every year films are newly rediscovered (two Méliès films, a Mary Pickford film and one of the earliest Sherlock Holmes films in the last year to my knowledge). One of the things it is very dangerous to do is ever claim that a film is a "first" in any respect or another. At best, one can say that it is "the first known" or "one of the earliest". This is not, for instance, the first series of films with the same character, although it is a very early one. It is not the first US series containing such a character; it is not even the first Edison series containing such a character. James H. White had already produced a series of films for Edison 1899-1900 containing the character "Jones" whom he played himself.
There had already been pseudo-series involving tramp-characters (who came in Edison;s practice to be identified as "Weary Willie", a name taken from a British comic strip and also countrymen (known simply as "Rube" or "Uncle Rube")as early as 1897. Mutoscope's "Uncle Rube" is really not very different from Edison's "Uncle Josh". What is more, "Uncle Josh" is no more an original creation for the cinema than Weary Willy or Happy Hooligan. He very much existed already in the form of "Uncle Josh" Weathersby of Punkin Center in the books and records produced by vaudevillian and monologuist Cal Stewart (1856-1919) who just happened to be one of the star recording artists for Edison's phonograph company 1897-1903. The "Uncle Josh" monologues have very similar titles to this group of films and the name is just a borrowing from Stewart to indicate a caricatural old yokel.
Nonetheless the beginnings of a tendency to identify comic characters by name, to make them characters rather than just stereotypes is important and the US was well ahead of the field in this respect. The French, who would later (1906-1914) become the most important makers of such comic series, barely ever identified characters by name before about 1905!
A second thing one needs to be careful about are ascriptions. All three of these films are frequently ascribed to Edwin S. Porter but in fact we only know with reasonable certainty about the third film, Uncle Josh at a Moving Picture Show, made a whole two years after the other two. We cannot be at all certain that they were originally conceived as a trilogy and, looking at the films, it seems a bit unlikely.
The first two (Uncle Josh's Nightmare and Uncle Josh in a Spooky Hotel)resemble each other but they also resemble several other films made by Edison in 1900 that were clearly intended as a response to the "trick films" of Frenchmen Georges Méliès and which have only very doubtfully been ascribed to Porter (see my earlier reviews of The Magician and An An Animated Luncheon). These two Uncle Josh are distinctly better than the other poor efforts, thanks to the performance of the main actor (we cannot even be absolutely certain that it is Manley who played in these two although he is definitely in the third) but the supernatural effects are still decidedly feeble compared to the films of Méliès.
The third film is quite a different matter. This is not a trick film. It is however a remake, this time of a British film, R. W. Paul's The Countryman's First Sight of the Animated Pictures (1901) and pretty much a frame-by-frame remake (even the examples of films are the same) but it is a good remake and the films are of an entirely original kind and on a theme that was at this point innovative (although it would later be worked to death by Sennett at Keystone) and that is of central concern to the early history of cinema. But that perhaps needs to be the subject of a separate review.....
Incidentally, I should not take too seriously the claim that Manley was an actor in the theatre at the time of Lincoln's death. A very large number of veteran actors made the same claim and a wit once pointed out that if all those who said they were there really had been, they would have filled the entire playhouse.
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