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When you watch the nine-chapter condensed version of The Perils of Pauline that has come down to us from almost a century ago, you’re told the villain’s name is “Koerner”–but that was not the villain’s name in the 20-chapter original serial that thrilled American audiences in 1914. The part was played by Paul Panzer (left, as “Koerner”).

I’m interested in early film, classic animation, early avant-garde cinema, exploitation film, black-and-white cinematography and photography, pulp movies, and the occasional post-1970 work. I’m especially interested in the way films (like most other documents) are altered over time, so that often the version that survives to be seen today is very different from the version that played to the original audience.

I’m on Facebook and Twitter, and most days I post a half-dozen links to the day’s most interesting news stories in my areas of interest. Thanks for dropping by.

In the original release version, the villain was named Owen. When the 28mm Pathéscope Library prints were released a few years later, Owen had been altered to read Koerner, a reflection of the World War I practice of identifying villains as Germans. The surviving prints available today are the 28mm reissues and as such have caused much confusion among historians and collectors. The original release prints contained no chapter titles, nor were they numbered in sequence. When Pathé executives made the decision to release 28mm prints, they selected certain chapters, arbitrarily assigning titles and sequential numbers. For example, the closing episode of the original release is available today bearing the chapter title of “The Floating Coffin” and carrying Chapter #9 on its main title frame. This misleads the uninitiated into believing that they actually have the 9th chapter, but in reality, it was the 20th episode of the original release.

–Kalton C. Lahue, on The Perils of Pauline, in Bound and Gagged: The Story of the Silent Serials (A.S. Barnes, 1968)

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