He_who_lurks In my previous reviews on Dickson and Heise's shorts I have often emphasized that many of them featured a talented athlete or dancer performing one of their popular routines. Such is the case with "Annie Oakley" a film featuring (Who else?) Annie Oakley herself. Here, her routine is shooting with accuracy. We see Annie (the true Annie herself) shooting glass balls and shooting holes through coins. And she doesn't miss, either! Truly an amazing show of skill, but much more interesting for the fact it shows a real true historical figure long gone. It's interesting to think how the people at the time actually reacted to this. I'm sure that many actually seen Oakley before in person, but for those who hadn't, well, go on an' visit Edison's Kinetoscope parlor and watch her on film! Also, I suppose this could take its place among the few Edison movies to feature a performer that is still remembered nowadays; most of them aren't.If you're a film buff, watch it for historical significance; if you're a history buff, watch it for seeing the real Oakley in action.

SimonJack What an interesting little piece of very early film by Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope studio. From the start, even the inventors in the communications field had savvy for marketing. What better way to tout the new motion picture camera than to show a legendary person of the time, Annie Oakley, doing what made her famous? Another reviewer noted that Oakley appeared to miss all the glass balls tossed in the air. Indeed, this short shows most of them dropping back down and no splattering fragments from hits. I wonder if that wasn't intentional here. The guy who was tossing them was looking right at them and no more than a few feet from where they would be hit and shattered. He wasn't wearing any kind of eye protection and surely would have been pelted with glass splinters had Oakley hit any of the balls. This studio was a single room building that rotated on tracks to follow the sun. The "Black Maria," as it was called, was a very small space, which made it more dangerous for scenes of rifle shooting. In any event, this was a successful venture for Edison's company. And Annie Oakley continued to entertain the throngs with her dead-eye shooting skills. She performed for crowds that included royalty around the world. For many years, she was a leading draw for Buffalo Bill's Wild West show that performed from 1883 to 1913. Two very good movies have been made about her. "Annie Oakley" of 1935 stars Barbara Stanwyck with a fine cast and a good portrayal of what Buffalo Bill's show must have been like. A 1950 musical comedy biography, "Annie Get Your Gun," stars Betty Hutton and Howard Keel. For those interested in the technical development of the movies, here's how this little short film came about. Thomas Edison's phonograph, invented in 1877, became so popular that he wanted a way to put music with pictures. Of course, it would take more time to perfect that process (the late 1920s), but in 1988 Edison charged his assistant, William Dickson, with the task of creating a motion picture camera. Dickson pulled together the research and technology of British, French and American scientists and researchers, and used the new American technology of celluloid film to make the first motion picture camera.

Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) "Annie Oakley" is a very early silent short film and back in 1894 films became more and more popular, even if they were still black-and-white, still running only a few seconds and still silent obviously. Here we see a young woman who shows us how gifted she is with the gun. She has some pretty good precision and hits basically every non-moving target and later on even everything that her assistant throws up in the air. Good job from her. And one big exception for this short film is that the title character is actually still really famous today. Annie got her gun. The director of this film, which is over 120 years old, is William K. Dickson again, a film pioneer. This is not a great film by any means, but thanks to the title character actually a pretty interesting watch. Only for its time though.

cricket crockett After watching this 18.61-second film 9 times (twice in slow motion), Iv concluded that Annie hits 7 of 8 fixed targets with her first rifle, but NONE of her upwardly-thrown targets (including one lofted up TWICE by her male assistant; you can recycle targets ad infinitum when you always miss) with her second long gun. In defense of this Old West icon, she probably was not used to performing in a small black box, with the injunction to shoot BEFORE aiming in order to keep any possible "hits" within the view of a stationary camera. To meet the minimum review length requirement for this site, I might add that as a co-founder of B.A.N.G.S. (Broke Americans Need Gun Stamps), Annie's troubles in this flick prove that even the best markswoman sometimes needs an AK or Bushwhacker gun. If poor people deserve food just as much as rich people, they merit assault rifles even more so. Which means the government MUST give the indigent gun stamps to help them get the AKs and ample ammo which are now indispensable to survival in modern America. As they say, if you give a gal a fish, she will eat for a day. But if you give her an AK47, she can shoot all the fish in the barrel!