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Research dossier · Arts & Letters

Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled

1918 short film by R.W. Phillips (as R.G. Phillips)

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 11, 2026
Entity authorityQ104867013 ↗
Source-derived summary

Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled is a 1918 short comedy film directed by Ralph J. Phillips and produced by the Ebony Film Corporation. A 35mm print is preserved in the Library of Congress film archive.

Plot

A young man hatches a plan to sell a fake mummy to a professor of Egyptology in order to have enough money to marry the professor's daughter.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled” is 1918 short film by R.W. Phillips (as R.G. Phillips). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mercy, Mummy and Mumbled, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful identification and reception guide that helps separate the work itself from editions, performances, ownership and later interpretation. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1918—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1918-06. For this dossier, Mercy, Mummy and Mumbled is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “1918 short film by R.W. Phillips (as R.G. Phillips)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q104867013. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1918.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled primary sources, Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled archive and Mercy research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled”?
  2. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
  3. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Mercy, the Mummy Mumbled” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.