Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes
It has been estimated that Sherlock Holmes is the most prolific screen character in the history of cinema. The first known film featuring Holmes is "Sherlock Holmes Baffled", a one-reel film running less than a minute, made by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in 1900. This was followed by a 1905 Vitagraph film "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; or, Held for Ransom", with H. Kyrle Bellew and J. Barney Sherry in unlisted roles. It was long believed that the film starred Maurice Costello as Sherlock Holmes, but Leslie S. Klinger has written that the identification of Costello in the role is flawed. Klinger states that the first identification of Costello with the role was in Michael Pointer's "Public Life of Sherlock Holmes" published in 1975 but Pointer later realized his error and wrote to Klinger stating
Sherlock Holmes (2014 TV series)
Following the broadcast of "The Three Musketeers" from 2009 to 2010, Kōki Mitani planned to adapt "The Brothers Karamazov" to a puppetry. Despite his love for the stories of Sherlock Holmes, Mitani was reluctant to adapt the series into puppetry due to the difficulty in describing the details of investigations through the operation of puppets. He also worried that it was too late to produce a Sherlock Holmes series as "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" gained popularity and the modern adaptation "Sherlock" had already received a reputation. Then he planned to make a puppet with the spitting image of Sherlock Holmes drawn by Sidney Paget but abandoned the idea as tall puppets are difficult for puppeteers to operate. Mitani then decided to make it a show set in a fictional boarding school called "Beeton School" with Sherlock Holmes as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. Though many incidents occur in the school, there are no murders and the same puppets appear many times. According to Mitani, as the story progresses it will be revealed to viewers the full picture of why the show is set in a school. All four novels of the canon – "A Study in Scarlet", "The Sign of the Four", "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and "The Valley of Fear" – are dramatised in the puppetry, which Mitani says may be the first case among screen adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle's work.