The Debut of Thomas Cat (1920)

Producer John Randolph Bray's (and Bray Picture Corporation's) The Debut of Thomas Cat was the first color (2-color process) cartoon, using the expensive Brewster Natural Color Process (a 2-emulsion color process), an unsuccessful precursor of Technicolor. This was the first animated short genuinely made in color using color film. However, some sources have claimed that the Natural Colour Kinematograph Company's In Gollywog Land (1912, UK) was the earliest, using Kinemacolor.

The Toll of the Sea (1922)

This five-reel film (approx. 54 minutes) debuted as the first general release (widely-distributed or commercial) Hollywood feature film to be projected in color and to use the improved two-tone Technicolor process. The leading lady in the film was Anna May Wong -- the first big-name Chinese-American actress - who played the role of Lotus Flower.

The Power of Love (1922)

This was the first 3-D feature film shown to a paying film audience (not Bwana Devil (1952)). It was projected dual-strip in the red/green anaglyph format, making it both the earliest known film that utilized dual strip projection and the earliest known film in which anaglyph glasses were used. The film utilized and may have been the only commercial film produced in the dual-camera, dual-projector system developed by Harry K. Fairhall and Robert F. Elder. The film is now considered lost.

The Ten Commandments (1923)

This early Cecil B. DeMille epic used primitive special effects techniques - the parting of the Red Sea was accomplished by filming water as it poured down two sides of a U-shaped tank, and then running the film backwards - to make the water appear to divide. The illusion of keeping the walls of water separated was accomplished by slicing a slab of jello in two and filming it in closeup - and then combining (or double-exposing) it with live-action footage of the Israelites walking into the distance and the Egyptian chariots in pursuit.

Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924, Ger.)

Director Fritz Lang's two-part fantasy epic film was based on German legends - it was noted for its special effects creation of a giant, 50-foot fire-breathing dragon named Fafnir. The slow-moving mechanical creature required seventeen technicians to operate.

Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes (1924-27)

The Fleischer Brothers made the first animated films (cartoons) that featured a soundtrack, a series of 36 films released in the mid-1920s that were the precursors to karaoke. The first sound cartoon was one of the Song Car-Tunes -- Mother Pin a Rose on Me. They were also the first audience participation films, with sing-along lyrics and a 'bouncing-ball' helper. They included Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly? (1926), When The Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves For Alabam' (1926), Comin' Tho' The Rye (1926), Margie (1926), My Old Kentucky Home (1926), Tramp, Tramp, Tramp-The Boys Are Marching (1927), By The Light Of The Silvery Moon (1927). In My Old Kentucky Home, Bimbo said to the audience: “Follow the ball and join in everybody." Twelve of the 36 Car-Tunes films were produced with the actual DeForest sound on film process.

The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

This classic Arabian nights tale by director Raoul Walsh used state of the art, revolutionary visual effects (for its smoke-belching dragon and underwater spider, to the flying horse, the famed flying carpet, and magic armies arising from the dust) and displayed legendary production design.

Battleship Potemkin (1925, USSR)

Sergei Eisenstein's Russian film was famous for its pioneering, revolutionary and innovative use of montage - a rhythmic juxtaposition of unrelated, cross-cut images that created associations in the audience's mind of a violent massacre - although mostly unseen. The famed Odessa Steps sequence contained 155 separate shots, using editing and cutting to convey heightened emotion and dramatic meaning, with close ups (some extreme), long shots, camera pans in every direction and subtle time shifts.

The Lost World (1925)

This was a notable, ground-breaking film in establishing its genre - 'live' and life-like giant monsters-dinosaurs, later replicated in Gojira (1954, Jp.), Jurassic Park (1993) and Godzilla (1998). It was the first feature-length dinosaur-oriented science-fiction film to be released. The 'creature feature' story was based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 adventure/romance fantasy.

Willis O'Brien, later famed for King Kong (1933), was responsible for this pioneering film's first major use (primitive) of stop-motion animation in a feature film - especially the sight of a brontosaurus running wild in the streets of London, and knocking down people with its tail. O'Brien used small-scale puppet models that were filmed frame-by-frame on miniature sets and landscapes. Live action and stop-motion animation would be combined by putting the two negatives together using split-screens.

This film also used the technique of a traveling matte (the process of adding a moving element to a frame so that it could be separated as an element and combined with a different background) - for example, in one sequence (top image), actress Bessie Love was matted into the frame as she cowered below the Tyrannosaurus.

The Black Pirate (1926)

Actor-producer-star Douglas Fairbanks' ultimate pirate film (silent) was historically significant - the adventure swashbuckler was the first full-length blockbuster color film. (The two-color process was first introduced in The Toll of the Sea (1922) - see above, and in some sequences of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1925) - also see above.) It boasted the use of an experimental early Technicolor (two-color) process, although it was also filmed in black and white.