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THE WERE TIGER was one of six movies in the '2-reel jungle pictures series' starring Hedda Nova and issued by the Chesterfield Motion Picture Corp. in 1925; the others were A JUNGLE HEROINE, THE LAST MAN, THE LION'S MATE (this one was released at the same time as THE WERE TIGER), A JUNGLE TRAGEDY and BEASTS OF THE VELDT. The series had actually been produced at the ailing Selig Studios in 1923/24, having been announced in the trade press in July 1923 and with rights subsequently offered for the 'completed' series in March 1924.

It's VERY unclear whether all the material in these six two-reelers was newly shot; the animal footage was surely new (with THE WERE TIGER featuring the Selig Zoo's animal trainer George Carrossella) and Selig had announced taking on a 'second unit' in order to finish production of the series 'on time'. Some of the Hedda Nova scenes appear to have been new, while others may have been footage taken from her older pictures. Thus, THE WERE TIGER may contain some footage from the Vitagraph serial THE WOMAN IN THE WEB (1918), but then again, it may not. Likewise, its companion release in 1925, THE LION'S MATE, seems to have been partly a cut-down of the earlier Selig feature THE MASK (1921), but... it may have comprised entirely new footage.

In 1926, the entire series of six films were offered for rental in the Kodascope Catalog, which may help explain their disproportionately high survival rate.

THE WERE TIGER was submitted to the New York censor [link] and reviewed in The Film Daily of June 21st, 1925:



When William K. Everson screened the last of the six two-reelers in the series, BEASTS OF THE VELDT, in 1962, he was of the opinion that all the Hedda Nova footage was newly-shot [link to his original program notes]. Amusingly, Everson had already screened THE WERE TIGER in 1955 [link to his original program notes], commenting: "we're at a bit of a loss with this one, and hope that some of the historians in our midst can identify it! It was loaned to us with the remark that it was a Selig jungle film, but it seems much too late for that."

Here's the write-up of THE WERE TIGER from the 1926 Kodascope Catalogue, which is also available for download from archive.org [link] and contains similar synopses of the other five two-reelers in the series too:



I guess the only real 'mystery' which remains about this series is... just how much of its footage was new and how much was recycled? It's entirely conceivable that some instalments may have been 100% new, or even that ALL of them were genuinely new productions.

Proof that it actually played somewhere - ad for the Lubbock Lyric in Texas, October 29th & 30th, 1926: