This unrefined but generally amusing short feature uses the Edison company's 'Uncle Josh' character to satirize the ways that some of the earliest movie audiences responded to motion pictures. Even at the time, it was not a new idea, and it almost certainly owes a debt to the previous year's "The Countryman and the Cinematograph", which was shorter and somewhat simpler, but also more carefully-crafted.
The story in "Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show" starts out with the Uncle Josh character giving his humorous over-reactions to what he sees on the screen. It becomes quite exaggerated as it goes on, and it is interesting that this kind of audience parody was such a popular idea in the early days of cinema. While viewers in the earliest years of cinema probably took a while to get used to the idea that the moving pictures on a screen were not real, movie-goers today seem to have a harder time in looking at the actual content from a critical viewpoint.
As a movie, this version of the idea would have been better if it had been more carefully made, but it contains some amusing ideas that provide some humorous moments.
The story in "Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show" starts out with the Uncle Josh character giving his humorous over-reactions to what he sees on the screen. It becomes quite exaggerated as it goes on, and it is interesting that this kind of audience parody was such a popular idea in the early days of cinema. While viewers in the earliest years of cinema probably took a while to get used to the idea that the moving pictures on a screen were not real, movie-goers today seem to have a harder time in looking at the actual content from a critical viewpoint.
As a movie, this version of the idea would have been better if it had been more carefully made, but it contains some amusing ideas that provide some humorous moments.