Incredible factual explanation with Western Electric getting top billing at the end. This was about their sound cartoon partnership with Max. I think they were the first. Western Electric was of course represented by the scientist, Mr. Western.A truly amazing piece of instruction! Thank you! This is historic!
This was MORE that the partnership with Max. It was about the application of the Western Electric System for the entire motion picture industry. Interestingly, the majority of the studios licensed with Western Electric. Take notice of the credits of the major movies from 1929 to 1955. The majority used Western Electric. RCA ran a second, used by RKO (the motion picture subsidiary of RCA), and independent producers such as Mack Sennet and Walt Disney after 1931. And Warners started using RCA in the 1940s.
As a lifelong fan of early animation, this film is a joy to behold. Max Fleisher's style is very evident.I've often wondered about the initial coupling of sound and film. This cartoon simplifies it so that even a non-tech like me can understand it. Wonderful posting!
Fleischer had been working with Dr. Lee deForest four years before this when he started releasing some of his Ko-Ko Song Car-Tunes with deForest Phonofilm soundtracks that were shown in the 36 theaters owned by the Red Seal Pictures, Corporation, which FIeischer was in partnership with deForest and Edwin Miles Fadiman.
I grew up in the 70s and Max's name was still on much of the stuff I watched after school and on Sat morning. Hanna-Barbera was still the new kid in the block. Max's stuff became permananently ingrained in my mind like nothing else back then. I barely remember the other stuff. I remember Max's stuff like yesterday. My soul still resonates with it, a total part of me that I'll take with me to my grave. All that character became part of me. I think like that and talk like that. (Why, you...! I oughtta....!) I also grew up with Scooby Doo and the Wacky Racers, but that stuff was truly dumbed down compared to Max Fleischer. Seriously, Max Fleischer's stuff came almost 50 years before the cartoons of the 70's...and continued to sink deeper in our psyches. The "hip" 70's just didnt sink as deep. One trick pony. By the late 80's cartoons were just this dime-a-dozen, far-from-classic group of chinese and japanese sponsored franchises. Fleischers work was ART, not just dumbed down entertainment for kids on Kool Aid and Cheese Doodles.
Now I realize how sound movies are made and shown. This early talkie cartoon really did a great job at demonstrating something we now take for granted, but was a major innovation back then.
This is not just a cartoon,but an instruction in how the then-new medium of sound film worked! ---ALL IN SCIENTIFIC DETAIL! Similar in a way to how the old analog-TV technology worked! INGENIUS!!!
Correct! It was made for the benefit of Projectionists, sound recording technicians, and theater operators. It was not made for general audience entertainment as some have assumed. This is just one example of an "Industrial Film."
Max Fleischer cartoons were those I grew up with when I was real little and seeing the old cartoons on a local show(hosted by a local,"Captain").In later years I remembered those old cartoons and wondered who did them. Now I know!:-)
In Detroit, Max Fleischer cartoons were shown on the ABC affiliate, WXYZ, affectionately known as "Wixie." They had a local elf character played by Marv Welch called "Wixie," and the cartoons were featured on the morning show, "Wixie's Wonderland."
The opening tune is Ever Since The Movies Learned To Talk. You can skip the first minute and 45 seconds of the version posted on RU-vid. A kind of cheeky and clever tune. Similar to the modern Video Killed the Radio Star.
The hum is due to a scanning of the soundtrack that is out of alignment. The term is "off asmith." There is a "buzz track" that is used to test volume levels and signal responses in playback. It was never supposed to be heard. This is sometime picked up if the film shrinks a little, too.
Is it just me, or does the voice of "Talkie" (aside from the "Love's Old Sweet Song" rendition) sound like Billy Murray? (Billy Murray was one of the early 20th century's most prolific recording artists, going from back in the wax-cylinder era into the electric recordings of the late 1920s) ...
There is an sadness that a film demonstrating the syncronization benefits of a sound track (over traditional phonograph disks) has fallen so out of sync through the ravages of time. If there is a short in the Fleitcher catalog that deserves remastering, it is this one. This technology likely wowed audiences in 1929 as much as the advent of technicolor and CGI did since then. It deserves to be seen/heard as it was intended.
It has been restored by UCLA and the sound re-recorded ironically using the rival RCA Variable Area system instead of the Variable Density system shown here.
Ironically, they weren't able to do lip-syncing in the cartoon...(I don't believe the Fleischers were ever quite able to lick that problem until much, much later, late '30s or so...)
The technique of pre-recording had not been developed, and they did not have a precise way of counting syllables for dialogue, HOWEVER.....you notice that the singing is in sync. That's because the lyrics were broken down by musical phrases. In the early sound cartoons, the synchronization was arrived the same way, by the Lead Musician who established the beats for the music. Based on that, the animators knew where the action had to hit their actions. So it was a musical structure. This is something that the Music Head at every studio realized.
This "demonstration film" was commissioned by Western Electric (subsidiary of American Telephone & Telegraph-"The Bell System"} in 1929 to introduce moviegoers to their "sound-on-film" system, which became one of the two leading SOF processes used in the motion picture industry {the "RCA Photophone" system was the other}. Max Fleischer used Western Electric "Microphonic Recording" because he was distributing his cartoons through Paramount at the time!
Not "Microphonic" nor Mirrorphonic, but Western Electric NOISELESS Recording. That was an improvement on the light valve that allowed it to close during moments of silence so that film grain would not be exposed, causing crackling and popping due to a lack of sound vibration.
You're right! I've seen trade ads of the period that feature the Western Electric "Mirrophonic" logo a lot bigger than the ones seen in screen credits.
This cartoon was made around 1929 and it was a propaganda for Western Electric where the sound should work in cartoons. This was at the time, Western Electric, RCA and Vitaphone rolled out their sound systems to theaters. WB had these cartoons recorded with the Vitaphone sound system. If you see the copyright on all of the WB cartoons from the 30's, 40's and 50's, it mentions Vitaphone on the bottom which was its sound system used in theaters as appeared in LT and MM cartoons.
Vitaphone was initiated in 1926 and Warners, working with Western Electric experimented with this sound-on-disc process that originated with Bell Labs Western Electric Division. THE JAZZ SINGER came out in the fall of 1927. There were no sound cartoons in distribution that year. However, Max Fleischer had released a number of the pioneering Song Car-tunes using the deForest Phonofilm process, which worked on the same principal as the Western Electric Variable Density system shown here. The Song Car-tunes were made with sound-on-film soundtracks starting in 1925 and continued to be released until the spring of 1927, just months before the release of THE JAZZ SINGER. These were limited in distribution since the small Red Seal Pictures Corporation only had 36 theaters and the sound equipment was not in the major theaters owned by the big studios. Sound cartoons really did not get their full start until 1928, and two were completed before Walt Disney recorded the soundtrack for STEAMBOAT WILLIE in the fall of that same year. With regards to Vitaphone, Western Electric passed title and ownership to Warners at this time, and the name, The Vitaphone Corporation became a division of Warner Brothers for its short subjects. This had NOTHING to do with their use of the sound-on-disc system which was phased out within three years in favor of sound-on- film. This explains what you see in the Copyright line referring to The Vitaphone Corporation. It was not a reference to sound-on-disc.
The "nasal" sound of early sound films is due to the quality of the microphones and the room the sound was record in, first. Second, it was a result of the signal response of the recording system. As for the quality of reproduction being, "worse," this is nonsense since Western Electric had the best amplifiers and reproduction equipment based on much of the foundation research work done by Dr. Lee deForest.
The bad sound can be a result of many things.. a hum in any recording is usually caused by electrical interference (such as poor grounding or lack of) also today's recorders use resistors and other schematic components to inhibit the contamination of electrical feedback.. Perhaps these humming sounds in early recordings is why they were created in the first place??
This film has been duped from a source several generations removed from the original source. The 16mm prints had the Variable Density soundtrack as demonstrated in this film. Because the track relies on a low contrast gray range, multiple copies have added contrast to the soundtrack image and in the process distortions and extra noise was added. The original soundtrack, (which I've heard restored) did not have these flaws. Many early sound films from 1929 are remarkably good when original sources are available.
It's the transfer or tape dupe several generations away from the source. It is not the fault of the print. A lousy print would be high in contrast and lack gray range.
Being "off azimuth" means that the track scan is not level, which causes a distortion in reproduction. This was less of a problem with the Variable Density track as in the Western Electric System compared to the RCA Variable Area System.
This is excellent! Love those enormous speaker "horns" behind the screen. The narrator seems really stilted and uncomfortable. Several times he hesitated as if he'd lost his place...or was that a problem in the sound track?
NO PROBLEM WITH THE TRACK. I'D ONCE HAD THE THRILL OF VIEWING A PROFESSIONAL VIDEO TRANSFER OF AN ORIGINAL 35MM VARIABLE DENSITY PRINT. IT HAD MUCH LESS DISTORTION & BETTER BANDWIDTH THAN THIS. I'D HEAVILY BET THAT THE VOICE TALENT WAS A WESTERN ELECTRIC ENGINEER, PRODUCT MANAGER, OR OF ANOTHER POSITION IN ITs ORG. IF YOU THINK THAT 'HIS' VOICE' IS LACKING, THEN CHECK OUT "VOICE FROM THE SCREEN", DONE 3 YEARS BEFORE, SHOWING THEIR SOUND - ON -DISK PROCESS. WELL, AT LEAST THAT GUY WAS WEARING A TUX BUT HIS BODY LANGUAGE WAS VERY, VERY UNCOMFORTABLE. DO YOU RECOGNIZE BILLY MURRAY'S VOICE?
Bikerpropaganda, No Vitaphone soundtrack was ever employed here. Vitaphone was a sound-on-disc system. This is a sound-on-film process as demonstrated which is what was used originally. THAT is the point of this demonstration.
E. R. P. I. licensed both the sound on Disc and variable density spend on film as "The Vitaphone". RCA licensed their variable area sound in film system as "Photophone". In the first few years of Vitaphone film the sound on disc system had distinct advantages as to both sound quality and noise level, but by 1929 sound on film had pretty well caught up. For several years films could be leased with either optical or Disc sound depending upon the equipment in an individual theater.
If you used the microphones and tubes of back then bundled with proper grounding, traps and resistors built in to the electrical system It would probably have eliminated the hum.. My guess is it's a result of the current passing through the tubes.. If you ever put a microphone next to a transformer like a ac to dc transformer you will pick up a hum that is similar found in old recordings.. It's just a guess.
