Outwitting Dad is a lost 1914 American silent comedy film produced by the Lubin Manufacturing Company and featuring Billy Bowers, Raymond McKee, and Oliver Hardy in his first known screen appearance.
[1][3] The film is remembered chiefly as the earliest recorded onscreen appearance of Oliver Hardy, then 22 years old.
According to his wife, Lucille, Hardy had been at the film lot, "just hanging around watching the Lubin Company work, when suddenly they needed a fat boy for a comedy sequence."
It is assumed that the negatives and original prints perished in the disastrous explosion and fire that destroyed the Lubin film vault in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on June 13, 1914.
The New York Dramatic Mirror described it as "overacted at times, and not especially funny", but it did single out Hardy's performance for special notice.