 The entire film lasts only 45 seconds, but this simple bit of slapstick may be the forerunner of all subsequent film comedy.The 1896 film version replaces the boy with a teenager and the spanking action is substituted with a kick in the rump.In the earliest years of the history of film, the cinema was used by pioneers such as Thomas Edison and the Lumières to entertain by the sheer novelty of the invention, and most films were short recordings of mundane events, such as a sneeze, or the arrival of a train.