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United Artists is one of Hollywood's leading film companies from 1919 through its merging with MGM in 1981 and having a hit-and-miss life since (as United Artists Media Group, disappearing and then reappearing). The James Bond series is its most famous contribution to world cinema, in addition to a great many Best Picture Oscar winners. Yet its short subject program was never very consistent. Animated cartoons were the most popular and, like all of their shorts, released in spurts: most famously, Walt Disney distributed his Mickey Mouse & Silly Symphonies through them between 1932 and 1937, then Walter Lantz briefly had them handle his Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda during a separation period with his primary distributor Universal. Most popular of all were DePatie-Freleng Enterprises' Pink Panther, Inspector, Ant & Aardvark, Tijuana Toads & other creations from a mostly ex-Warner Bros. Crew, spanning the years 1964-1978. UA also distributed a few one-shot cartoons like Icarus Montgolfier Wright, Jules Engel's 1962 Oscar nominee. In terms of both animation and live-action, it handled several independent productions imported from Canada's National Film Board. Focus here is on live-action, starting with... Feature Production Musicals Produced by Joseph Schenck, these were pretty ambitious for their time and are still highly entertaining today once you get past the aging soundtracks. All were in black and white, but a few were tinted in color. William Cameron Menzies was primary director in charge, collaborating with Hugo Riesenfeld. Alpha Video put a couple of these on a DVD called The Fantastic World Of William Cameron Menzies http://shop.tcm.com/fantastic-world-of-william-cameron-menzies/089218591395 All run roughly 10 minutes unless noted. Impressions Of Tschaikowksky's Overture 1812 / October 5, 1929 Napoleon is profiled in his glory here Tannhauser / October 1929 Musical Marionettes / November 1929 A Night In Madrid / November 1929 Tintypes / December 1929 Irish Rhapsody (Irish Fantasy) (co-director: Orville O. Dull) / December 14, 1929 Features Donald Novis, Helen Foster & Nick Cogley The Fall Of The Bastille / December 1929 Glorious Vamps (supervisor: Orville O. Dull) / 2 reels / © January 15, 1930 (filmed '29) Starring Bobby Watson In A Russian Cabaret / January 1930 The Birth Of Jazz / February 1930 Starring Harry Richmond The Huskin' Bee / February 1930 The Love Cup (music: Rudolph Friml) / February 1930 The Wizard's Apprentice (supervisor: Sidney Levee) / April 1, 1930 Starring in a live-action version of Mickey Mouse's famous Fantasia performance, broomsticjs are cleverly manipulated as puppets. Impressive color tinting here. The Hungarian Rhapsody (supervisor: Eugene Ford) / © May 15, 1930 Romance found, almost lost and regain in rural Hungary. Quite the little mellerdrama here. The Americans Came / July 26, 1930 Starring Otto Matieson & Arthur Lang Zampa (supervisor: Eugene Ford) / September 1, 1930 Featuring Wallace MacDonald Musicolor Shorts David Loew produced these with Werner Janssen credted as key director. These interesting little musical shorts were shot economically in Cinecolor Tocatta And Fugue / 10+m / October 15, 1946 Engulfed Cathedral / 9+m / June 1, 1947 Moonlight / 9+m / September 19, 1947 Enchanted Lake / 7+m / December 10, 1947 Fingal's Cave / 10+m / March 26, 1948 (filmed '47) Liebestraum / 7+m / May 7, 1948 Swan Of Tuonela / 9+m / September 1, 1948 Bolero / 9+m / January 7, 1949 (filmed '48) Songs Of America These mini musical documentaries were produced by W. Lee Wilder for Attwood Productions and featured Jester Hairston. All in black and white, running 8-9 minutes each. Most were filmed in 1949, but some were held over through the 1950-51 season. Treasured Ballads / July 4, 1949 Melodic Spirituals / August 19, 1949 Visions And Voices / September 9, 1949 Melodious Sketches / October 7, 1949 Symphonic Shades / November 4, 1949 Melodies Reborn / December 2, 1949 Cherished Melodies / December 31, 1949 Southern Acapella / January 17, 1950 The Tradition / February 25, 1950 Memorable Gems / March 15, 1950 Tunes That Live / April 14, 1950 Glory Filled Spirituals / May 12, 1950 Highlights Of Long Ago / June 6, 1950 Long Remembrances / July 14, 1950 Folk Lore / August 11, 1950 The Moods / September 15, 1950 Design In Melody / October 21, 1950 Treasured Melodies / November 17, 1950 Melodious Patterns / December 22, 1950 War Activities Committee Wartime shorts, all documentaries Mister Gardenia Jones (Office Of War Information; George B. Seitz; narrator: Carey Wilson) / bw-13+m / May 29, 1942 Documentary short film depicting the work of the United Service Organizations (USO) in providing recreational and morale-boosting services for American troops. Ronald Reagan stars. Produced at MGM but distributed by United Artists. It's Your War Too (US Army Signal Corps) / bw-10+m / April 20, 1944 Profile of the WACs. Reward Unlimited (US Office Of War; Mary C. McCall Jr.) / bw-10+m / May 25, 1944 Starring Dorothy McGuire & James Brown Brought To Action (US Navy) / bw-20+m / January 11, 1945 To The Shores Of Iwo Jima (US Marine Corps; Milton Sperling) / Kodachrome 16mm (Technicolor 35mm)-19m / June 7, 1945 (Academy Award Nominee) Documentary short film depicting the American assault on the Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima and the massive battle that raged on that key island in the Allied advance on Japan. The World In Action (Canada Carries On) Imported from the National Film Board of Canada. All black & white. Directors/producers listed in () Churchill's Island (Stuart Legg) / 22m / June 27, 1941 (co-distributed by Columbia) Letter From Home / 15m / October 14, 1941 Warclouds In The Pacific (Stuart Legg) / 21m / November 1941 Food, Weapon Of Conquest (Stuart Legg) / 22m / 1941 (Canada) & June 5, 1942 (US) Battle For Oil / 20m / January 17, 1942 Ferry Boat (Stuart Legg, producer; Ross McLean) / 19m / 1942 This Is Blitz (Stuart Legg) / 22m / January 1942 (Canada) & February 21, 1942 (US) New Soldiers Are Tough / 18m / June 14, 1942 Inside Fighting Russia (Our Russian Ally) (Stuart Legg) / 22m / April 1942 (Canada) & August 1, 1942 (US) Geopolitik - Hitler's Plan For Empire (Hitler's Plan) (Stuart Legg) / 20m / August 15, 1942 Inside Fighting China (Stuart Legg) / 22m / September 13, 1942 The Mask Of Nippon (Behind The Nipponese Mask) (Stuart Legg, producer; Margaret Palmer) / 21m / October 24, 1942 Freighters Under Fire (Fighting Freighters) / 26m / December 12, 1942 Invasion Of North Africa / 21m / 1942 (Canada) & February 4, 1943 (US) Road To Tokyo (Raymond Spottiswoode) / 18m / 1942 (Canada) & April 24, 1943 (US release) Battle Is Their Birthright (Stuart Legg) / 24m / 1943 Corvette Port Arthur (Joris Ivens) / 22m / 1943 Fighting Dutch (Raymond Spottiswoode) / 15m / 1943 The Gates Of Italy (Stuart Legg & Tom Daly) / 21m / 1943 Paratroops (Stanley Hawes) / 10m / February 12, 1943 Invasion Of Europe / 21m / May 7, 1943 War Birds / 15m / 1943 The War For Men's Minds (Stuart Legg) / 21m / June 1943 (Canada) & August 28, 1943 (US) The Labour Front / 21m / October 1943 (Canada) & November 19, 1943 (US) Letter From Overseas / 15m / 1943 Wings On Her Shoulder (Jane Marsh) / 9m / 1943 Balkan Powder Keg (Stuart Legg) / 19m / 1944 Russia's Foreign Policy / 21m / March 18, 1944 Global Air Routes (Stuart Legg) / 15m / April 1944 (Canada) & June 23, 1944 (US) Battle of Europe (Stuart Legg & Tom Daly) / 15m / May 5, 1944 When Asia Speaks (Stuart Legg, producer; Gordon Weisenborn) / 19m / June 1944 (Canada) & December 16, 1944 (US) Zero Hour (Stuart Legg) / 22m / June 1944 (Canada) & October 21, 1944 (US) Fortress Japan (Stuart Legg) / 16m / August 10, 1944 Inside France (Stuart Legg & Tom Daly) / 21m / November 4, 1944 Our Northern Neighbour (Stuart Legg & Tom Daly) / 21m / 1944 Ships And Men (Ernest Borneman, producer; Leslie McFarlane) / 18m / 1944 Food: Secret Of The Peace (Stuart Legg) / 11m / 1945 Guilty Men (Tom Daly) / 11m / 1945 John Bull's Own Island (Stuart Legg) / 20m / 1945 Maps In Action (Stuart Legg) / 20m / 1945 Now – The Peace (Stuart Legg) / 21m / May 18, 1945 Spotlight On The Balkans (Stuart Legg) / 11m / 1945 Headline Hunters / 10m / June 1945 World Windows Produced in the UK by E. S. Keller & F. W. Keller for World Window Productions, these absolutely gorgeous Technicolor travelogues featured camera work by Jack Cardiff, later famous for his feature films (Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, The African Queen, etc.). Directors/editors are listed in () No. 1- The Eternal Fire (Pietro Francesci & Hans Nieter; music: Ezo Masetti ) / 10+m / filmed 1937; released October 1, 1938 Covers Vesuvius and Pompeii No. 2- Fox Hunting In The Roman Campagna (Alassandro Blasetti; music: Ezo Masetti ) / 8+m / filmed 1937; released October 1938 Sometimes listed as #3 No. 3- Rome Symphony (Giacomo Gentilomo; music: Ezo Masetti ) / 10+m / filmed 1937; released October 1938 Sometimes listed as #2 No. 4- Jerusalem (Hans Nieter & John Hanau; music: Ludig Brav ) / 8+m / November 1, 1938 No. 5- Wanderers Of The Desert (Hans Nieter & John Hanau; music: Ludig Brav ) / 10+m / November 1, 1938 No. 6- Petra The Lost City (Hans Nieter & John Hanau; music: Ludig Brav ) / 8+m / November 1, 1938 No. 7- Arabian Bazaar (Hans Nieter & John Hanau; music: Ezra Masetti ) / 9+m / November 1, 1938 No. 8- Ruins Of Palmyra And Baalbek (Hans Nieter & John Hanau; music: Ludig Brav ) / 10+m / November 1, 1938 Series two was distributed by United Artists in the UK, but not in the United States. Instead Paramount handled them in 1940-42 under the umbrella title “Fascinating Journeys”. This was two years after their initial release overseas. No. 1- A Road In India (Hans Nieter; music: Giovanni Fusco; narrator: Frank Gallop ) / 10m / February 1939 (UK release) & October 24, 1941 (US release) No. 2- Temples Of India (Hans Nieter; music: Ludwig Brav & Menaka India Ballet “Shiva’s Dance of Destruction”; narrator: Frank Gallop ) / 10m / February 1939 (UK release) & September 4, 1942 (US release) No. 3- Sacred Ganges (Hans Nieter; narrator: Frank Gallop ) / 10m / April 20, 1939 (UK release) & December 27, 1940 (US release) No. 4- A Village In India (John Hanau & Hans Nieter [also ed]; narrator: Frank Gallop ) / 9m / May 29, 1939 (UK release) & January 31, 1941 (US release) No. 5- India Durbar (John Hanau & Hans Nieter [also ed]; narrator: Frank Gallop ) / 10m / May 29, 1939 (UK release) & May 15, 1941 (US release) No. 6- Delhi (Hans Nieter; music: Ludwig Brav; narrator: Frank Gallop ) / 10m / June 1939 (UK release) & March 21 1941 (US release) No. 7- Jungle (Hans Nieter; narrator: Frank Gallop ) / 10m / June 1939 (UK) & July 25, 1941 (US release) No. 8- River Thames Yesterday (Hans Nieter; music: Ludwig Brav; narrator: Frank Gallop ) / 10m / November 8, 1940 (US release) Another title, London On Parade, was released in the UK in January 1939 and probably uses similar footage as the last entry. And a selection of others... All in Technicolor unless noted Royal Symphony (Castleton Knight/Rank; Malcolm Sargent) / 26+m / March 2, 1954 Jacqueline Kennedy's Asian Journey (Motion Picture Service of United States Information) / 30m / December 21, 1962 In Eastmancolor This Is Jordan (Harold Baim Film- Paul Weld Dixon; narrator: Ed Bishop) / 24m / October 15, 1963 The Beatles Come To Town (British Pathé) / Techniscope-6m / December 26, 1963 (US release June 1964) Dave Clark Five (British Pathé) / 6m / February 4, 1964 Chagall (Auerbach Film Enterprises & Albert Skira- Simon Schiffrin; script: Leonard Neubauer; narrator: Vincent Price) / 26m / October 1964 Completed in 1963, a profile of the painter Marc Chagall Skaterdater (Byway Prod.- Marshall Backlar & Noel Black) / 17+m / December 1, 1965 (Academy Award Nominee) Profiling the skateboard craze with music by Mike Curb and Nick Venet Reflections On Love (Clarendon, Barry J. Kulick, producer; Joe Massot) / 14+m / May 1966 Features shots of The Beatles, Jenny Boyd, Jane Lumb & Michael Morris in a romantic scene set in swinging London Behind The Veil (Clarendon; Jean Oser) / 21m / July 1966 Profiles an Indian wedding ceremony Tender Touch Of Love (Clarendon, Stanley Darer, producer; Robin Cantelon) / 20m / July 1966 Looking at teens in Hong Kong The Lovers' Knot (How Thais Fall In Love) (Clarendon; Jean Oser) / 19m / July 1966 Profiles romance in Thailand Shark Hunt (Plaza Pictures-Ry Associates) / 10m / November 9, 1967 Filmed off Cornwall Wet And Wild (Grant Rohloff & Fred Hudson) / 14m / January 1968 Surfing in Hawaii and California. Co-distributed by Pyramid Films People Of Provence / 9m / April 24, 1968 Beyond Wakiki / 19m / December 18, 1968 Blaze Glory (FilmFair Communications; Len Janson & Chuck Menville) / 11+m / December 19, 1968 Part animated pixilation spoof on westerns. Co-distributed by Pyramid Films. Das Apartment (1501 ½) (Paul B. Price) / 20+m / June 1971 Drama with Paul B. Price & Madge West The Last Of The Wild Mustangs (FilmFair Communications & Philip Morris Inc.) / 9m / March 9, 1972 Solo (Four Star Productions-Pyramid Films; David Adams & Phil Tucker, producers; Mike Hoover) / 9+m / December 1972 (Academy Award Nominee) Poetic views of a mountain climber. Co-distributed by Pyramid Films.

This set of posts feature an alphabetical list of the Paramount short films. I know… I know. Those of you reading will ask “Are you nuts?!” Yes I am. I will even start with a little itty bitty introduction. On the other now-defunct forum (CMU), I had been making chronological “lists” of each studio’s live-action “shorties” since 2010. These lengthy blogs have… sometimes… received up to 8000 “views”. (I guess I am not the only shorties “geek” online?) This past year or two, I have been adding some of this material to the Wikipedia site and previously to the imdb.com site, but have only covered the bulk of Warner’s shorts so far. These are listed alphabetically. When you line up the titles chronologically, Paramount’s live action shorts intriguingly had three distinct “periods”. Burton Holmes was their most prolific producer; his travelogues following a previous “Paramount Travel Pictures” series of 1915. Arriving two years later was the mighty Mack Sennett whose enormously popular 2-reel comedies of the period brought a huge boost to the corporation’s income. His top star, Fatty Arbuckle, was made head of his own short comedy unit before graduating to features (and some… um… scandal as well), all co-starring newcomer Buster Keaton.Then, rather abruptly, Paramount decided to stop making shorties all together early in 1922. With rare exceptions, the company merely distributed others’ product. (The mid-twenties was a golden age for Pathé, Educational and smaller distributors keeping theaters well stocked.) For several years, Paramount a.k.a. Famous Players-Lasky focused just on their features. When MGM announced in 1926 that they were entering the shortie business by distributing for UFA and (a year later) Hal Roach, Paramount hopped on the bandwagon again by starting up a newsreel and acquiring Al Christie’s comedies from Educational. With some of their features also being done at the Astoria facilities (NYC) in addition to Hollywood, the 1928-32 era was a particularly rich period for testing new talent emerging on Broadway in the 6-20 minute format. This second period of Paramount shorts production spanned exactly 30 years, parallel to the Paramount Newsreel shown in theaters twice weekly. Once the newsreel ended in February 1957, so did the live-action shorts, although animated cartoons with Popeye and Casper continued uninterrupted. Then, in 1960, Leslie Winik’s A Sport Is Born became an unexpected hit and Oscar nominee; thus awakening interest in a THIRD unbroken boom in live-action shorties, mostly of the sport or travelogue kind, that lasted through the 1968-69 season… and there have been a few occasional “one shots” since like The Absent-minded Waiter. Again, these listed titles are all live-action and do not include animated cartoons, even though the “Speaking of Animals” series do feature cell-animated mouths implanted on live animal footage frame by frame. (Remember the talking camels in Bob Hope and Bing Crosby’s Road to Morocco?) Of course, Paramount has been making plenty of ‘toons ever since John R. Bray’s studio began adding “inserts” to the “Paramount Pictograph” series. Most famous of its animation producers was Max Fleischer, who has a building named after him on the Paramount lot in Hollywood despite his cartoons being made in NYC and later Miami. Apart from his early work under John Bray, he started releasing through Paramount in 1927 (after operating independently with Red Seal distribution) and, by the time he and his brother Dave left their animation studio in early 1942, Paramount’s cartoon line-up succeeded very well indeed as the Number Two cartoon factory just behind Walt Disney… with Ko-Ko, Betty Boop, Popeye and Superman, along with the features Gulliver’s Travels and Mr. Bug Goes To Town. After taking charge of the Fleischer studio and moving the animators back to NYC, Paramount renamed it Famous Studios (later Paramount Cartoons) and kept chugging away through November 1967 with more Popeye, as well as Little Lulu, Little Audrey, Casper, “Noveltoons”, “Modern Madcaps”, etc. (Jerry Beck profiles at cartoonresearch.com the season-by-season saga of the animation studio that all animation buffs publically loathe but secretly love, since many later catoons are an acquired taste. Never allow an impressionable young mind watch Herman and Katnip in Mice Meeting You without proper supervision.) Among the later (cell-animated) independent releases distributed were Gene Dietch’s Munro (Oscar winner, 1960) and “Nudnick” series (1964-67) and a trio of John & Faith Hubley productions (1966-69), including another Oscar winner and two nominees. Later for its 16mm branch of Paramount Communications in 1978, there was Baseball Basics And Blunders and a trio of Mathematics For Primary instructionals supervised by Lawrence Levy and Anne Keating. Meanwhile, during 1940-47, George Pal made his stop-motion Technicolor “Puppetoons” in Hollywood (previously running a factory of full color puppetoons in Holland since 1934). He eventually graduated to special effects live-action features. (Ray Harryhausen got his start working with Jasper, another character of “acquired taste” although I find Jasper And The Watermelons more oddly charming than insulting.) Although Pal was Paramount’s primary stop-motion producer, two earlier releases also had frame-by-frame figurines in motion: Lulu In Love was a 1936 re-edit of a Wladyslaw Starewicz production made in France, and Wild Oysters (February 14, 1941 release), made by longtime cartoon veteran Charles Bowers. Paramount sold their pre-1950 titles to the U.M. & M. TV Corporation in 1957, which altered many of the titles with their own logos, using the original prints. However, only we eagle-eyed movie fans can detect the difference. Harvey Comics apparently received (according to Jerry Beck) both the ’50-59 cartoons AND the live-action Sportlights, Pacemakers and Toppers as well. I am assuming that Paramount kept their VistaVision travelogues and anything kept after 1960, some of it made available to schools on 16mm. After being taken over by Viacom, much of the pre-1950 product was re-acquired (excluding Popeye and Superman which Time-Warner eventually got). Kino Lorber released on DVD a sampling of late ‘20s through Robert Benchley ‘40s materal. Shield Pictures currently owns the rights to the Jerry Fairbanks productions and did air many of these on AMC in the 1990s when that network resembled TCM: http://www.shieldspictures.com/ I need to acknowledge my references for these lists and you folks can let me know of my many boo-boos that need corrected… preferable on another thread. (Also I am not sure how many edits I can make here.) BoxOffice Magazine (scans available online for a while, but a bit harder to access in recent years), Film Daily and Motion Picture Herald Magazine back issues (both found on the Internet Archive), with the IMDb.com site have all been a great help. (I had added many Warner shorties to that latter site.) Equally important are the Library of Congress copyright listings Motion Pictures 1912-1939 (1951), Motion Pictures 1940-1949 (1953), Motion Pictures 1950-1959 (1960) and Motion Pictures 1960-1969 (1971). Also Edwin M. Bradley’s The First Hollywood Sound Shorts, 1926-1931 (McFarland & Company, 2005). Unfortunately the later Paramount shorties are poorly documented, even in the periodicals of the period. So it is good that many Treasure Searchers have been digging up missing prints and additional information (and a few even pop up on youtube if you hunt well enough) in the years since I began posting these silly posts as a naïve Treasure Searcher myself. Anyhoo… this is the basic set up for each film listed: Title of film (producer and/or director) If you see (---), it means I don’t have director information… yet. black & white (bw) or color “approximate” running time in minutes (m) or running time in reels (1 reel is under 11 minutes, 2 reels under 25 minutes) since I couldn’t find an exact time frame here Series Title in () with a key star (a.k.a. name above the title) listed in [] release date or copyright © date and sometimes a filming date in () (any awards) brief description… and I do keep it brief. Additional cast members are also listed here. And now... a salute to the most prolific short film producer for this company:

On the other forum (CMU, now “deceased”), I had been making chronological “lists” of each Hollywood studio’s live-action “shorties” in lengthy blogs and, just in this past year or two, I have been adding some of this material to the Wikipedia site: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_short_subjects_by_Hollywood_studio#Warner_Brothers This series of posts (which I am putting online “backwards” so that they will stay in order) can be used as a “checklist” with a bit more information. I also decided to alphabetize for “easy” reference… and I put “easy” in quotes because NOTHING is ever easy. Should Dream Café be listed under “D” or under “J” as Jimmy Clemons In “Dream Café” instead? The way the title cards were seen on screen and the way these titles were listed in periodicals of the period differed. Ah… yes… Warner Brothers! They cranked out a TON of shorties at their Brooklyn Vitaphone facilities, as well as Hollywood and Burbank. Not only was that studio prolific, but they also were pretty good with their batting average, quality-wise. It is surprising just how many of these 6 to 30 minute extravaganzas are still fun to watch today after many decades. We are also VERY fortunate that TCM is owned by the Warner conglomerate and many lost treasures from their vaults have made it to TV and on DVD (and I have tried my best to indicate which titles made it there). So many other entertainment corporations are absolutely clueless of what they may have rotting away in their vaults. Of course, I need to acknowledge my references for these lists and you folks can let me know of my many boo-boos that need corrected… hopefully on a different thread I am creating. BoxOffice Magazine (scans available online for a while, but a bit harder to access in recent years), Film Daily and Motion Picture Herald Magazine back issues (both found on the Internet Archive), with the IMDb.com site have all been a great help. (I had added many Warner shorties to that latter site.) Equally important are the Library of Congress copyright listings Motion Pictures 1912-1939 (1951), Motion Pictures 1940-1949 (1953), Motion Pictures 1950-1959 (1960) and Motion Pictures 1960-1969 (1971). I have a few of these, but they are also scanned online on the Internet Archive and probably feature the ONLY online information of ssssssooooo many forgotten shorties. Then… there is Roy Liebman’s Vitaphone Films – A Catalogue of the Features and Shorts. (McFarland & Company, 2003), sort of a “bible” for this material. It is not totally complete with release dates, plot summaries and technical details; I still had to rustle 60% of my material elsewhere. Yet it is probably one of the very few books apart from Leonard Maltin’s 1972 Selected Shorts that even bothers covering our beloved shorties. Also it features all of the Vitaphone numbers listed here (and I will allow “eagle eye” observers to catch my boo-boos here), as well as “approximate” production times by month (although quite a bit is covered in the above mentioned magazine back issues as well). This list is strictly “live-action”, but we ALL know that Warner Brothers ALSO cranked out the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies (Bugs Bunny included) between 1930 and 1969, in addition to TV specials from the mid seventies onward. Of course, they need their own list… and there is quite a bit online already. Yet… did you know that Warner also distributed some independent cartoons as well? None of these are listed below, but I will mention them here: Dolly Daisy was a puppetoon character created by Howard Moss and Charles Bennes, appearing in two “Vitaphone Variety” shorts: Dizzy Doings (previewed in August 1930) and Hearts And Flowers (December release and one that can be found online if you search). Another independent picked up for January 1931 distribution was John McCrory's Buster Bear; a follow-up featuring the same Mickey Mouse-ish teddy character was released on April 14, 1931 as Spring Carnival. The future Dr. Seuss (Ted Geisel), who would also contribute to Leon Schlesinger's Private Snafu series, had his popular “Flint” ads brought to the screen via Audio Cinema’s unit with future Looney Tune animators Tom and Robert McKimson supposedly contributing. Unfortunately ‘Neath The Bababa Tree and Put On The Spout (both released June 1, 1931) may be lost films today. Another vintage cartoon “commercial” was Graduation Day In Bugland, reviewed by Film Daily on March 1, 1931. This one promoted Listerine with a little girl dreaming of cartoon “germs”. In July 1934, another “Vitaphone Variety” was a stop-motion puppetoon released in France a year earlier as Fétiche Mascotte (The Mascot) with Vladislav Starewicz. The Americanized version was titled Stuffy's Errand Of Mercy. A puppetoon pooch seeks an orange for a sick child, but winds up at the Devil’s Ball with all kinds of weirdos that somebody like Tim Burton would, no doubt, love to meet in person. But… enough with my babbling. Starting with Abe Lyman Band and ending with Zero Girl… This is the basic set up for each film listed: Title of film producer and/or director listed in (), also an indication if the film was either shot or edited (if a travelogue) at Brooklyn’s Vitaphone studio instead of California. If you see (---), it means I don’t have director information… yet. black & white (bw) or color “approximate” running time in minutes (m) or running time in reels (1 reel is under 11 minutes, 2 reels under 25 minutes) since I couldn’t find an exact time frame here Series Title with key star listed in () and a top billed star in [] release date or copyright © date and sometimes a filming date in () (any awards) or *DVD* availability brief description… and I do keep it brief. Additional cast members are also listed here. I know… I have a strange way of doing these. Trying to save space. ****************** Abe Lyman Band (Abe Lyman And His Band) (Vitaphone Studio [NYC]) bw-10m-(Melody Master)-January 20, 1933 (Film Daily review; filmed October '32) Set in an auditorium with the holiday "Auld Lang Syne" included // Vitaphone #1485 Abe Lyman Orchestra "Maestro Of Syncopated Symphony" (---) bw- (Vitaphone Variety)-© February 18, 1928 (filmed November '27) Vitaphone Varieties Vol. 2 (Warner Archive) *DVD* Highlight is a boppy rendition of "Varsity Rag". This is Vitaphone #2338. A very similiar jazz reel titled "Syncopated Symphony" is listed Vitaphone #2474. // Vitaphone #2338 Abe Lyman Orchestra "Syncopated Symphony" (---) bw- (Vitaphone Variety)-© February 18, 1928 (filmed November '27) With Jimmy Ray and such '20s standards as "12th Street Rag", "Varsity Drag" and "Among My Souvenirs" // Vitaphone #2274 Absent Minded (Vitaphone Studio [NYC]: Arthur Hurley) bw-10m-(Vitaphone Variety: Wallace Ford)-April 30, 1930 He's so forgetful that he tries a memory course to no avail. // Vitaphone #973 Absent Minded Abner (Vitaphone Studio [NYC]: Alfred J. Goulding) bw-18m-(Broadway Brevity: Jack Haley, Olive Shea & Hugh Cameron)-May 15, 1932 (Film Daily review; filmed February) One very serious… and hilarious… case of amnesia. // Vitaphone #1372-1373 Absorbing Junior (Vitaphone Studio [NYC]: Lloyd French) bw-21m-(Big V Comedy: Shemp Howard & Johnny Berkes)-April 25, 1936 Vitaphone Comedy Collection Vo. 2 *DVD* The need to gamble at a horse race prompts a burgalry of Junior's piggy bank. (With Gertrude Madge, Gerie Worthing, Arthur & Morton Havel & Kenneth Lundy) // Vitaphone #1978-1979 The Accordion Man And Girl Imitator (Bryan Foy) bw- (Vitaphone Variety: Dorothy Murray & Earl La Vere)-June 1927 Accompanied by De Sues, Furney & Johnson // Vitaphone #2108 Ace Of Clubs (George Marshall; music: William Lava) bw-20m-(Classics of the Screen)-January 27, 1951 (Completed September '50) Comprised of Bobby Jones reels from 1931 and '33. // Vitaphone #1980A Across The Border (---) bw-20m-(Vitaphone Variety: Sarah Padden, Frank Campeau & Roy Stewart)-© August 27, 1928 (filmed June) A rancher leaves his Texas wife but the neighbors come to her aid and she wants her son’s name protected from his infidelity. // Vitaphone #2664-2665 Action In Sports (Gordon Hollingshead, producer; Charles Tedford; music: Howard Jackson; narrator: Truman Bradley) Technicolor-9m-(Sports Parade)-December 13, 1947 (edited April) Filmed in Peru. // Vitaphone #1672A

Doing things a little differently this time. This one will be arranged by SERIES. Might save some space and reading here. If you struggle finding a title, you could try a “find” search with the “Ctrl” and “F” keys together... maybe? Huh? Maybe? Depends on your keyboard. Also I am combining three film companies for the price of one. In (), I have listed how the company was showcased on the title cards. RKO Radio, a studio that needs no introduction to a classic movie fan Film Booking Offices of America or FBO, a short-lived company that was absorbed by RKO in 1929 Pathé Exchange, which merged with RKO in 1931. Series initially started by these rival distributors continued uninterrupted as RKO-Pathé productions. Although RKO sold the Pathé newsreel to Warner Brothers in 1947, RKO-Pathé short-subjects continued on through the fifties. Pathé Frères, perhaps the biggest name in French (and world) cinema in the silent era (and still a distributor mostly in Europe today, although it co-owned MGM in the 1990s for a while), dabbled a bit as a distributor for US-made series like Richard L. Ditmars' animal reels and then launch an American production company at Fort Lee, New Jersey to film Perils of Pauline (1914). This was a very popular multi-chapter movie serial, a genre that... ooooh.... sorry, I am not covering here. Soon, reorganized as the Pathé Exchange, the company was distributing Hal Roach's comedies made in California with Harold Lloyd as the star and, later, would be Mack Sennett's top distributor in the 1920s... in addition to blockbuster features like Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North and Cecil B. De Mille's The King of Kings. Joseph P. Kennedy, daddy to a future president, invested in this company in 1927 along with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theaters. Gradually they merged with a new power-studio called RKO Radio Pictures, started in 1928. RKO-Pathé officially completed their merge in the spring of 1931, with the former company focusing on entertainment shorts and the latter on documentaries, sports-reels and travelogues. When most movie historians actually bother to “think about” RKO shorties, it is usually the Clark & McCullough, Edgar Kennedy and Leon Errol Comedies that enjoyed considerable TV exposure in the 1950s and '60s, along with the “March of Time” and Walt Disney films distributed by them. Of course, there was so much more to their shorties program, but many of their films have been forgotten in more recent decades because many of the Pathé co-productions, in particular, have been scattered all over the place in various vaults, sometimes with copyright issues and other legal “red tape”. McGraw-Hill distributed much of the “This Is America” series and assorted “Sportscopes” to schools on 16mm for a period, but color was always favored in classroom instruction by the 1960s and these became harder to view in later years. One other factor that may have kept many of RKO's non-Disney films out of circulation is that very few were, in fact, made in color in comparison to rival studios (particularly Warner Bros. and MGM which made many more shorts than features in the process during the thirties and forties), despite earning an Oscar for the pioneering La Cucaracha (see RKO Specials below). Today TCM mostly airs the 1955-57 post-General Tire & Rubber Company shorts that are part of their library. A vast variety of shorties are covered here, but I only list the LIVE-ACTION material (as in the other Checklists posted on this forum). Yet these companies backed animated cartoons of importance as well. Before being absorbed by RKO, FBO handled distribution of the “Dinky Doodles” series produced by John R. Bray and directed by Walter Lantz of future Woody Woodpecker fame, along side some “Krazy Kat” made by William Nolan. These were done mostly in the middle '20s, about the same time the company also aided a young Walt Disney and his distributor Margaret Winkler with some “Alice in Wonderland” part-animated/part live-action comedies. A bit earlier, in early 1921, Paul Terry launched his “Aesop's Fables” for Pathé, starring Farmer Al Falfa and an assortment of mice, cats, dogs, fowl, etc.. Co-producer on these was Amadee J. Van Beuren, who handled many documentaries and occasional live-action comedies for Pathé as well and would take full control of the animated cartoons by the time Paul Terry decided to leave and form his Terrytoons for Educational Pictures (later distributing for 20thCentury Fox). These incorporated sound by 1928 with the title Dinner Time, released just before Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie... and Disney apparently wasn't impressed at a screening and made sure his Mickey Mouse scored a much bigger impact. Before merging with Pathé, RKO set up its own animation studio in 1930, featuring a character named Toby the Pup and animators Sid Marcus, Art Davis and Dick Huemer. Charles Mintz, who also handled Columbia's Krazy Kat (post-FBO), served as producer. However poor Toby suffered early retirement when RKO decided to make Van Beuren its official animation studio. Van Beuran continued on in the thirties with a human (pre-cat & mouse) version of Tom & Jerry, Amos & Andy in cartoon form, Little King, Cubby Bear, and Felix the Cat (revived in glorious color) as part of a “Rainbow Parade” series. Then... like Toby the Pup... all of Van Buren's cartoon characters suffered their own untimely fate in 1936 when RKO announced it had signed on the animation king himself, Walt Disney. Curiously, RKO had no cartoons to release during the fall 1936 through summer '37 season on account of Disney being required to complete his contract with United Artists first and RKO's previous factory having shut down a bit early. Yet RKO made up for lost time when it gained Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Pluto, the Silly Symphonies and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Disney distributed most of his product through RKO until the 1955-56 season, even after he established his own Buena Vista company for 1953's The Living Desert. Included in these lists are his True-Life Adventures and People & Places series done in live-action. On occasion, RKO-Pathé would distribute an independently produced cartoon. The one notable stand-out was a stop-motion 3-D color film initially shown at the New York World's Fair in 1940 in which an automobile literally “puts itself together”. This was reissued at the height of the 3-D craze (1953) as Motor Rhythm, interchanging with Walt Disney's Adventures In Music: Melody as a supplement to RKO's feature 3-D programs. Pathé by itself was a distributor of 3-D films back in 1925 (see Stereoscopiks). Key references used are the same as with the other lists: BoxOffice, Film Daily and Motion Picture Herald Magazine back issues (latter two found on the Internet Archive), the IMDb.com site, Motion Pictures 1912-1939 (1951), Motion Pictures 1940-1949 (1953) and Motion Pictures 1950-1959 (1960). Then there’s Leonard Maltin’s The Great Movie Shorts (a.k.a. Selected Short Subjects, Crown, 1972) which has a particular focus on RKO's Edgar Kennedy and Leon Errol. Now... with the Mack Sennett and Hal Roach comedies, I am keeping credits and plots VERY simple. Seek out the following for more detailed work: Mack Sennett's Fun Factory (2 Volume Set) by Brent E. Walker and http://www.theluckycorner.com/ This is FAR from a complete “information guide”, but hopefully it will perk some interest among my fellow movie geeks to “dig for more”. I particularly dedicate this series of posts to the long-running Pathé Review, which provided the movie screens of 1919-1930 with the best alternative to the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, the Nat Geo Channel and every other cable “educational” network of today... and trying to gather enough (but still incomplete) information on THAT series was a labor of love. Believe me.

Once again, I am providing two movie shorties companies for the price of one. Last time I gave you three: http://forums.tcm.com/index.php?/topic/96727-a-shortie-checklist-rko-and-path%C3%A9-and-fbo/ Like that forum thread, I will list these by SERIES, then chronologically. The ONLY connection these two companies have is that one distributed the other company's product between January 1933 and September 1938. Everybody here is already familiar with Fox and 20thCentury Fox and, yes, I have an “intro” prepared below. Yet first... let us look at Educational Pictures, shall we? This is one of the great underrated, but highly prolific shorties producers (with quite a few features as well) of the 1920s and '30s. Educational Pictures, as its name implies, started out making or distributing documentaries. Today it is more famous for its NON-educational stuff, namely its one and two reeled comedy shorts. Launched in 1915 and supervised by Earle W. Hammons, the company billed itself later, with the familiar Aladdin's lamp logo, as "the Spice of the Program". When you compare their product with some of the competition, which was often time-filler material, they pretty much lived up to that. However, it is also fair to say that their product, especially their sound films which survived a notorious 1937 vault fire, was wildly inconsistent. When they were good, they rocked the house down. When they were bad, they could be quite painful to sit through. 1920 was a key year for the company. The market for documentaries was unstable, but comedy shorts were booming in popularity. One producer distributing for them, C.L. Chester, launched a series with a chimp named Snooky. In June, they began distributing the 2-reelers of Al Christie, who (at that time) rivaled Hal Roach for the coveted #2 spot under Mack Sennett as top comedy shorts producer. Christie had successfully been distributing his product independently since leaving Universal (at their Nestor and L-KO Kompany facilities) in 1916, but their joining with Educational proved beneficial to both. Christie's pre-Educational comedies need their own separate list, so I left them out of this one for the time being. In 1927, Paramount persuaded Christie to join them for an even better deal (and that is covered on my list for that studio). Christie would return to Educational by heading their New York comedy facilities in the thirties. With Al Christie as its "backbone" and top bread-earner, the in house Educational comedy was officially launched with Lloyd Hamilton (coming from Fox) as their first star. The Hamilton comedies gradually refined their style to a peak of perfection in the mid to late twenties; surviving titles can hold their own against the best of Roach and Sennett even if he's hardly a household name today. Of course, much of a comedy's success depended upon the star involved: Al St. John, Lupino Lane, Monty (Monte) Collins, Lige Conley, Jimmie Adams and Johnny Arthur all did some of their very best (and not so best) work for top producer Jack White and others releasing through Hammons & company. The studio even backed the great Mack Sennett himself between his contracts with Pathé (ending 1928) and Paramount (beginning 1932) and, later still, utilized his services as a director at their California facilities. It was partly due to Sennett's success with sound in 1928 that the other Educational producers had little trouble tackling the new technology. During the thirties, the bulk of studio-oriented short subjects made in the United States were split between California and New York City. Educational made good use of Long Island's Astoria (also used and previously controlled by Paramount), with Al Christie returning as a top producer. With plenty of product coming from both sides, E. W. Hammons kept his new distributor Fox (later 20th Century Fox) well stocked. It is often easy to distinguish between filmed-in-Los Angeles and NYC titles. One type had more outdoor scenes and stronger visual appeal, while the other was claustrophobic (indoors mostly) and more dialogue-driven. Even when the NYC product looked cheap, it did not have cheap talent: Joe Cook, Tom Howard, Bert Lahr, Danny Kaye, June Allyson, the Ritz Brothers and many others (with Bob Hope and Milton Berle also doing one each). It has often been said they got their stars either “on their way up” or “on their way down”. Buster Keaton fell into the latter bracket, but his 2-reelers for the company were among its very best, if a letdown to his silent masterpieces. Educational films of the educational sort continued to flourish along side the comedies and new mini-musicals. In the twenties, these included the many "scenics" backed by Robert C. Bruce (famous later for his Technicolor work for Paramount) and Walter F utter's "Curiosities". Later they were given a most appropriate umbrella title of "Treasure Chests". There is little question that this company boasted the best docu-product in the business, garnishing a few Oscar nominations and encouraging British producers like Alexander Korda (who backed The Private Life of Gannets) to utilize their services on this side of the Atlantic. Two particular specialties were the color travelogue (predating FitzPatrick's Traveltalks at MGM by a few years if done in the more primitive 2-color system Multicolor) and the nature-reel, with the brothers Stacey & Howard Woodard documenting a variety of insects, mammals and sea critters in their popular "Battle for Life". The focus here is on live action shorts, but I did include the full run of "Hodge Podge" one reelers from the Lyman H. Howe Films Company, the name being posthumous. These had both live-action footage stretching back some years and animated title sequences. Some like The Wandering Toy (1928) were even 70% animated, but after adapting to sound, they had less animation and more live-action even though the clay animation work was particularly impressive in the early '30s entries. E.W. Hammon's interest in fully animated cartoons began in 1917 with a Helena Smith Dayton project for the SS Film Company, which is sadly lost today but is famous as another pioneering piece of claymation. The following two years saw a cluster of "Katzenjammer Kids" and "Happy Hooligan" produced by John Terry (initially for Hearst's company) and animated by future feature director Gregory La Cava. Subsequent cartoon series include Julian Ollendorf's "Sketchografs" (1922), Herbert Dawley's "Tony Sarg Almanac" (also '22), Earl Hurd's "Pen & Ink Vaudeville" and "Bobby Bumps" (1924-25), John Coleman Terry's Judge's "Crossword Puzzles" (1924-25), Sherwood-Wadsworth "Life Cartoon Comedies" (1926-27) and, by 1927, some part live-action and stop-motion comedies made by Charles Bowers. Without a doubt, Educational's most famous acquisitions were the 1925-28 run of Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer's "Felix the Cat" and Paul Terry's "Terrytoons", launched in 1930 and later taken over to 20th Century Fox. When 20th Century Fox did not renew their contract with Educational in 1938, the company merged with Grand National, a company James Cagney used during his bitter time away from Warner Brothers. Despite big ambitions, this move proved a disaster; the few features did not overcome their costs. A backlog of surviving titles were eventually auctioned off, with Astor Pictures reissuing the Mack Sennett/Bing Crosby 2-reelers quite successfully in the forties. Many surviving films are currently in public domain and some DVD companies like Kino have tried restoring the product for modern viewers. Now... a quick overview of Fox's live action "shorties" During the teens and twenties, William Fox's company maintained a pretty consistent run of one and two-reelers running less than 25 minutes, all supporting its features with Theda Bara, William Farnum and Tom Mix (who also did a few shorts) up through Janet Gaynor in Sunrise and the early talkies. Fox produced his first hour-long feature, Life's Shop Window, in 1914 and also distributed the 1918-23 animated cartoons of Mutt & Jeff (credited to Budd Fisher but animated by the Raoul Barré and Charles Bowers' studio). Sadly, a vault fire in 1937 (a bad year for film preservation) took its toll and, today, probably only one in ten silent shorts survive. What makes the situation even more distressing is that the overall quality of those that do is quite high. Ex-Mack Sennett director Henry Lehrman worked on many of the earliest comedy 2-reelers of the teens and, thanks to his notorious masochistic streak, helped inaugurate Fox's unique style: a combination of glossy production values and sadistic violence that sometimes made the later Three Stooges appear tranquilized by comparison. Sometimes the sets were even more impressive than the features they supported; a simple comedy starring chimps, Grief In Bagdad, almost "apes" the picture it parodies, Douglas Fairbank's The Thief Of Bagdad. Apart from chimps and some top human stars like Lloyd Hamilton and Ford Sterling, a bunch of furry stars populated quite a few of these, including lions and kangaroos. Meanwhile, a steady stream of "Fox Varieties" featuring travelogue and human interest material supplemented the program. In 1929, Fox set his sights on merging with Loews/MGM, a company that already had a wealth of "shorties" on its program thanks partly to Hal Roach. This did not pan out as he had planned and ultimately his financial ambitions (combined with an auto accident and the stock market crash) doomed him. (He left his company in April 1930.) At this time, the company dropped its shorts apart from its newsreel. Two years previously, Fox became the second bigwig (following the Warner Brothers) to hop onto the Talkie bandwagon with the sound-on-film Theodore Case and Earl Sponable process. Some of the Fox Movietone Newsreels (which began as Fox News in October 1919) started using the new process to document Charles Lindbergh's flight in 1927. Also using the “Movietone” process were a batch of mini-musicals and mini-comedies to compete with the vast Warner Brothers-Vitaphone catalog. Among them were the first Robert Benchley and Clark & McCullough comedies, which still hold up quite well today, entertainment-wise. Unfortunately, Fox's big move into all talking and all singing one-reelers didn't last very long. Hardly any new shorties were released between mid 1929 to early '31. Predating the cinéma vérité movement of the sixties were the thirties Movietone's "Magic Carpet" travelogues, which differed from the contemporary MGM "Traveltalks", RKO "Vagabond Adventures" and Warner-Vitaphone E.M. Newman shorts in their rather limited use of narration and strong emphasis on “you are there” sound bytes. They remained a staple of the Fox program through the war years, by which time many were also in color. They also set the stage for a basically all-educational program which later included the delightful omnibus "Adventures Of The Newsreel Cameraman", followed by the mostly Technicolor "Movietone Adventures". For comedy there was Lew Lehr’s "Dribble Puss Parade", another spin-off from the newsreel (his various humorous segments there began in 1933). It vaguely resembled the Pete Smith Specialties at MGM but without as much polish. Cartoon fans will recognize his "monkeys is za qwaziest peoples" line... parodied often in Warners' Looney Tunes. By January 1933, the company was also distributing the short comedies and docu-reel "Treasure Chests" from Educational Pictures. For the next five years (through Fox's merge with 20th Century), two reelers featuring Bert Lahr, Buster Keaton and others augmented the Shirley Temple, Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda spectaculars. Speaking of Shirley, she made her cinematic debut in Educational comedies; those infamously awful and rather questionable "Baby Burlesques". The quality of Educational's product was wildly hit and miss, boasting both the very best and all-time worst in short subject "extras". Co-produced by Educational were Paul Terry's "Terrytoons" (even though they won't get discussed here since I'm focused on the "live action shorts"). When Fox dumped Educational in 1938, they kept the New York (New Rochelle) based animation studio and forced the grade-B producer Terry (who dubbed Walt Disney as "the paté of the business" and himself "the chicken s**t") to start producing some of his 'toons (rather belatedly) in Technicolor. With the arrival of Mighty (Super) Mouse in 1942, followed by Heckle & Jeckle, 20th Century Fox promptly stop complaining about the sometimes poor production values and catered to theater owner demand to keep-them-coming. Fox continued releasing the cartoons very successfully even after the animation shop closed in 1968, with Sad Cat and Possible Possum featured in the later years. 1942 was the year Fox took over the "March of Time" series from RKO. Unfortunately, the studio couldn't figure out what to do with this prize possession, since Fox Movietone already was churning out docu-reels left and right. While RKO placed these two-reel featurettes in all the first run theaters, Fox was a bit more chaotic and less enthusiastic in its distribution. When the market for these types of films shrunk after television, it officially ended in 1951. The initial producer Louis de Rochemont first made his name with Movietone shorts like the "Magic Carpets"; within a year after rejoining Fox, he began pioneering the "on location" style with Fox's feature films such as The House on 92nd Street. The early fifties marked a dry spell for Fox shorts production; an exception being an Oscar winning, but short-lived, color series featuring famous paintings on display. Then CinemaScope arrive to give a big boost. After trying out the wide-screen format on some Alfred Newman orchestra performances (trotting stereophonic sound), it was off to the four corners of the world to document all of the sights in glorious 'scope. Although other studios like Warner frequently put more oomph into their wide-screen travelogues, Fox still made great use of their technology and cranked out more than anybody else, even as late as 1964. A few “specials” straggled along with the continuing Fox features in more recent years. ******** My resources are all covered on my previous blogs: BoxOffice Magazine (scans available online for a while, but a bit harder to access in recent years), Film Daily and Motion Picture Herald Magazine back issues (both found on the Internet Archive), with the IMDb.com site have all been a great help. (I had added many Warner shorties to that latter site.) Equally important are the Library of Congress copyright listings Motion Pictures 1912-1939 (1951), Motion Pictures 1940-1949 (1953), Motion Pictures 1950-1959 (1960) and Motion Pictures 1960-1969 (1971). Also Edwin M. Bradley’s The First Hollywood Sound Shorts, 1926-1931 (McFarland & Company, 2005).

Doing things alphabetically this time and restricting to releases dating after September 1928 (start of the 1928-29 season when sound was incorporated... gradually). I could tackled the pre-'28 films on a future date with a special thread all their own... but I wanted to keep this thread not too-too long. After all... Universal has either produced or distributed more short films than any other company during Hollywood's golden age. The numbers for the silent era are staggering, figuring about 4280-4300 released between 1912 and 1928. Fortunately, I do NOT need to blog these thanks to the dedicated contributors on the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com). The silent Universal is well documented title by title (thanks in part to Richard E. Braff for McFarland Publishing), even if only a fraction are accessible today. A popular rumor that is probably not true but certainly sounds true suggests that some studio employees simply dumped countless rolls of film into the Pacific, assuming nothing without a soundtrack would ever be marketable. Nonetheless, it is the later product that is under-represented online and, hopefully, these posts will partly remedy the situation. When Michael G. Fitzgerald published his popular Universal Pictures: A Panoramic History In Words, Pictures and Filmographies in 1977, only the thirties and forties shorts were accounted for, with limited detail. Universal's product is undoubtedly the least recognized in print and very rarely shown today... unless it features Woody Woodpecker. It is a toss up as to who gets the title of longest surviving film major, not counting the ol' Biograph facilities sometimes used for TV. Either Universal or Paramount is game for this, since both were more-or-less "launched" in the spring of 1912... depending on how you would interpret that. That is, Paramount's history books insist that "it all began" with Adolf Zukor's backing of Queen Elizabeth and his Famous Players Company, even though the name "Paramount" (and its mountain of stars logo) wasn't adopted until 1914 as the name of W.W. Hodkinson's distribution company (handling both Famous Players and Lasky feature films). Universal tends to start its birthday with the birth of Universal Manufacturing distribution in May 1912, even though it could easily use Paramount's logic and "start" with Carl Laemle's IMP company in 1909... or... even make itself younger by using the 1914 construction of its Burbank, California facilities and the release of its fourth feature film Damon and Pythias. (This was the first made AT the Universal we know today.) Movie studios, like actors and actresses, have no trouble fibbing about their age. In any case, the first multi-reel feature film released under the Universal logo was Rainy's African Hunt. Yet, the company was slower at backing five-reel "epics" than its rivals, despite the fact that its second, Traffic In Souls, was a runaway smash in 1913. It took about three years before they reached Paramount's level of 40-60 per year. All the while, a huge mass of shorts accompanied the bill, at a rate of five or more titles per week. Obviously, these were not all made at one place, but by many mini studios operating under the Universal fold. A basic rundown of the companies and series were updated here on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_short_subjects_by_Hollywood_studio#Silent_Films_.28pre-1928.29 There were also two silent newsreels full of human interest and travelogue footage: Screen Magazine (105 shorts from November 18, 1916-February 5, 1919) and New Screen Magazine (100 shorts from February 13, 1919 through January 5, 1921) before the official sound Universal Newspaper Newsreel began July 21, 1929, running through December 26, 1967. (http://www.archive.org/details/universal_newsreels) The sound era: The "Universal Movietone" series, launched in 1928, marked the studio's first foray into talkies. By mid-1929, they started moving towards an all-sound program, but some of the western shorts like "The Pioneer Kid" were still filmed silent and available in both sound effects and silent versions. It took a while for some of the rural theaters to wire up and Universal frequently catered to those that the big-wig monopolists ignored in favor of the urban market. Universal had a limited number of theaters it owned and this was reflected in the character of its product. Other studios aimed for sophistication, while this company provided entertainment for Middle America. This was a top company for multi-chapter serials and the Saturday matinee market we now associate with childhood pre-television. For his 21st birthday in April 1929, Carl Laemmle Jr. was put in charge by daddy and made good with All Quiet On the Western Front and the first wave of great horror features. He also made sure the sound shorts got a dramatic make-over. Western 2-reelers were definitely o-u-t, despite being a staple for two decades and always an annual cash-cow. The new aim, again, was to attract more urban audiences. Augmenting the always reliable Slim Summerville, a new crop of comedy stars were conned away from giants Sennett, Roach and Educational. Lloyd Hamilton, Bert Roach, Daphne Pollard and Franklin Pangborn were all part of the two reel lineup for 1931. Warren Doane was put in charge of the more expensive productions after 1932 and Harry Edwards, Gus Meins, James W. Horne, Sam Newfield and even George Stevens added as directors. Unfortunately, critics and audiences made unfavorable comparisons to the Sennetts and Roaches; the Pollard and Hamilton comedies in particular get chewed out for being "unoriginal" in contemporary reviews. Looking attractive in production values was not the same as being "funny". They did better with some multi-star vehicles and a later batch featuring Sterling Holloway (future voice-artist in many Disney cartoons) was more favorably viewed than the other star-vehicles, but only a few were reissued and shown on TV later. Surprisingly, the company threw in the towel after completing the 1934-35 season. What's more, they stayed clear from short comedies all together, using their B features instead as a springboard for future talent like Abbott & Costello. Their serials were better liked at the time and Flash Gordon was shown in many first run theaters, so most of the energy was focused here (that is, until International merged a decade later and changed things again). Also, there were animated cartoons providing enough of the laughs. Once again, I'm pushing "live action" here, but Walter Lantz does deserve special mention since his cartoons are the primary Universal shorts seen today. Two very gorgeous DVD box sets of Woody Woodpecker & Friends were issued a few years back, competing very well indeed against the Looney Tune Golden Collections and Disney Treasures. They even included extensive liner notes and stellar restoration (including original United Artists title cards for the late '40s releases made when Lantz and Universal had a brief "separation"). The animation bearing his name was not quite in the same league as Walt Disney and wasn't even Hanna-Barbera TV standard during the lackluster later years, but he could back some grade A-material from time to time. Directorial talents included Alex Lovy, Shamus Culhane, Dick Lundy, Don Patterson, Tex Avery, Paul J. Smith, Jack Hannah and Sid Marcus... adapting quite well to their boss' genial nature after working for more controlling animation rivals. Lantz had started animating for Hearst's studio back in 1916 as a struggling teenager and first hit his stride with the Fleischer Inkwell inspired "Dinky Doodles" for producer John Bray in the mid-twenties. After working in live-action comedies, he impressed Carl Laemmle enough to be put in charge of the newly formed Universal Cartoons in 1929, taking over Oswald the Rabbit (formerly a Walt Disney and Charles Mintz character). At the start of 1930, his staff produced a delightful 2-color Technicolor "crowning of Paul Whiteman" insert for The King of Jazz. The Oswalds of the thirties are not all that bad (for their time) as were his color "Cartunes" starting 1934. When Universal suffered financial troubles mid-decade, he persuaded the front office to allow him to independently co- produce, allowing greater freedom, but also forcing him to keep everything on a budget. (At least twice he had to shut-down temporarily to get enough funding, briefly in 1940 and for a year and a half in 1948-50.) Andy Panda arrived in 1939, followed the next year by Lantz's biggest star Woody Woodpecker. New 'toons were released as late as 1972, with Chilly Willy arriving in 1953 and the Beary Family in '62. (Less famous than Walter Lantz was Dave Fleischer's short-lived “Cartoon Melodies” series that succeeded the mostly live-action, but with animated inserts, “Sing & Be Happy” series and filled in a void during Lantz' two year separation from Universal. In 1965-66, two independent cartoons produced by Ed Graham Jr. were also added to the program: The Shooting Of Dan McGrew and Funny Is Funny.) Universal was distributing sound cartoons before Burbank neighbor Warner Brothers took on Leon Schlesinger and the Harman-Ising team. It is interesting to compare the two companies' line-up in the early thirties, even though the other was a lot more prolific and got all of the praise thanks to its Brooklyn-based Vitaphone. Clearly, there was some friendly rivalry going on. In 1930, Universal responded to Warner-Vitaphone's signing Robert Ripley's "Believe It or Not" with John Hix's "Strange As It Seems", the first being shot in Multicolor. Like Paramount's "Pictorials", they were "screen magazines" with up to eight different segments... in this case, covering the eccentric and unusual, strange animals, interesting locales and peculiar hobbies and occupations. When Warner signed golf champ Bobby Jones for some comic sports-reels, Universal took on Babe Ruth. Inspector Carr was also one-upped by a short-lived adaptation of radio's popular The Shadow. During the years 1932-39, first the team of William Rowland and Monte Brice, then Milton Schwarzwald's Mentone and Nu-Atlas companies provided a variety of comedy vaudeville acts and mostly plotless musicals to both Universal and RKO's programs. All of these were shot in New York City. When Universal's comedy unit in California was halted, it leaned on this eastern product for a couple years. At their best, these showcased a number of interesting performers mostly forgotten today, but occasionally including some familiar faces like Smith & Dale and Bob Hope. All film companies relied on travelogues and human interest docu-shorts to fill up their programs because these could be made at half the cost of a studio-made musical or comedy. Much of the footage could be shot on location silent and given voice-over and music later. When a company like Universal had to economize, this became the preference for pre-feature filler. They closely followed Fox Movietone's model by using their newsreel staff (and sometimes recycling their news footage) to provide a certain quota of one-reelers. When Jerry Fairbanks left for Paramount (starting their "Popular Science"), his series "Strange As It Seams" was taken over by the Universal newsreel staff with Thomas Mead and Joseph O'Brien in charge and renamed for the '34 season "Stranger Than Fiction". It was accompanied by a mostly one-subject in-depth series "Going Places", narrated first by Fox commentator Lowell Thomas and later by Graham McNamee. Charles E. Ford was the key director-editor on many of these. A colorful character unafraid to get first-dibs on the Japanese invasion of China for the newsreel or assisting an expedition through the Amazon (for an independent feature Jacare), Ford maintained a unique, aggressive and often offbeat style with the company's docu-reels. The Oscar nominated Camera Thrills was his. Ironically, shortly before his passing in 1942, the two series titles changed to "Person-oddities" and "Variety Views". The latter title was maintained through the fifties. After Milton Schwarzwald stopped providing New York product, entertainment shorts were re-started at Burbank with just one key genre: the big band short... or, as later billed, "Name Band Musicals". Direction was done over the years by Ralph Staub, Larry Ceballos, Reginald Le Borg, Josef Berne, Jean Yarbrough, Lewis D. Collins and Will Cowan. A few, like the late forties musical westerns featuring country star Tex Williams, incorporated a storyline, but the majority were just straightforward musical performances skillfully edited together with as little "lull" between numbers as possible. For the modern viewer, these are a treasure trove of jazz personalities and singers: Count Basie, Nat "King" Cole, the Ink Spots, Les Brown, Lawrence Welk, Woody Herman and Spade Cooley, just to name a few. There was even an attempt to tap a younger market in the fifties with a little R&B and two even had the novelty of 3-D. The bare bones approach of just filming the performance with limited improvising was different than the contemporaries like Warner's "Melody Masters", which incorporated arty camera angles and special effects. Positively, these kept the performances "pure" for the fan, but negatively could make for some mighty tedious viewing when seen as in mass. These lasted through 1957 and were the solo entertainment shorts on the program apart from a rare "special". Everything else was sugar-coated education. Thomas Mead operated as the primary producer for both the newsreel and the one-reelers after co-producer O'Brien's death in '45 for more than two decades, with Edward Bartsch as editor from the mid-forties through the sixties and Arthur Cohen (a.k.a. Michael Feldman and Phil Foster and a future Laverne & Shirley star) being the most prolific of several director-writers. In short, stability was the name of the game. The "Variety Views" continued a consistent, if predictable, run which covered mostly travelogues (the most engaging being the "Brooklyn Goes To" series), sports outings with a special eye for young viewers and an annual quota of critter subjects. During the declining years of short subjects, a number of producer-directors provided material for more than one studio. Universal-International shared John A. Haeseler and his bear cub and chimp reels with Paramount, while Hamilton Wright also contributed European and South American scenics for Warner and RKO. All of this made many shorts of the 1950s hard to distinguish by studio and U-I unfortunately lacked the Three Stooges, Joe McDoakes, Pete Smith or any specific "in-house specialty" apart from its Name Bands. Ever economical, you can practically count the entire number of pre-fifties full-color shorts with just two hands, but once the studio started its own "Color Parade", it certainly made up for lost time. By 1954, they were partnering with Carl Dudley and other producers on wide-screen travelogues in Vistarama and CinemaScope, mostly the former (cheaper and grainier) process. Eastmancolor was used more than Technicolor and the pictorial quality varied considerably from title to title. Regardless, these later shorts were generally well received by the trade papers. Meanwhile, Thomas Mead continued producing black and white newsreels through 1967, by which time his staff had been reduced to only ten and much material came from outside sources. Color television officially killed the newsreel completely, but it took a bit longer for it to destroy the full-color theatrical. Norman Gluck, who worked on and off with Universal, took charge of managing the 1960s product, which were primarily travelogues, but with occasional jazz performance 2-reelers as well. The simple fact that the company continued releasing up to ten shorts (often high quality by this stage) long after its rivals ceased to is quite remarkable. In fact, it was probably the only studio besides Disney who was still producing most of its own rather than just distributing for the independents. By the late sixties, another key producer-director, William Burch, headed the non-theatrical branch Universal maintained; even though the company stopped releasing shorts theatrically by 1972, they continued making plenty of instructional material for businesses and schools. (Added a few later shorts to this list, but it is far from complete... along with some of their United World Films stretching backward to the forties, initially released on 16mm and sometimes later in 35mm for theatrical distribution.) Although the studio seldom received Oscar nominations, there was still a certain consistency in quality over the decades and most that do make it online on YouTube and elsewhere are quite entertaining regardless of the economics of their production. It is sad that the company isn't tapping into what they have sitting in their vaults. Hardly any have been reissued for VHS and DVD, probably on the assumption that today's consumers would have zero interest. Some of us movie buffs would prefer to judge that for ourselves.

Like RKO, Pathé, Fox & Education, this list is done by SERIES... unlike my lists for Universal, MGM, Warner and Paramount that are done alphabetical. Columbia Pictures is one of the better documented studios in terms of its short subjects. Granted, once you pass the realm of the two reel comedy short featuring The Three Stooges, there isn't a whole lot being discussed. Yet progress is being made... and there has been a nifty website dedicated to Columbia's shorties for a while (and getting updated periodically) and this is something we do not have with the other studios. You can see it here: http://columbiashortsdept.weebly.com/ The listings below are not to be taken as any kind of improvement or replacement for that great site. You will find no pictures here and I only give the most basic credit information. Columbia is, of course, most famous for its comedies, but it also made many nifty documentaries, travelogues, sports reels, jazz shorts and... of course, multi-chapter serials (as late as 1955!) and animated cartoons that I am not including here (since I am sticking strictly to the “live-action” non-serial material). Nonetheless I will give a nod to Columbia's toons... Charles Mintz (married to Margaret Winkler, who handled Walt Disney's cartoons of the twenties and famous for getting into a three-way battle with him regarding Oswald the Lucky Rabbit that also involved Universal) headed a Krazy Kat cartoon series that Columbia began distributing in 1929, followed by Scrappy, “Color Rhapsodies” and... after Mintz's passing in 1940 and more changes in management... the Fox & the Crow. The company, known as Screen Gems during its second decade, closed shop in early 1947 with enough 6 to 8 minute shorts “on the shelf” for Columbia to release on a reduced scale during the next two seasons. Walt Disney distributed his Mickey Mouse and “Silly Symphonies” tentatively in 1929 (The Skeleton Dance was booked in some Columbia “block booking” programs) before the studio became his official distributor at the start of 1930. Disney (who apparently wasn't fond of Harry Cohn) left and joined United Artists in the summer of 1932 just before he started releasing his “Silly Symphonies” in Technicolor. (In 1934, Mintz-Screen Gems began their “Rhapsodies” in a two color system before Disney's monopoly on the three color system was lifted.) UPA... United Productions of America... revolutionized American animation in the forties with a more modern “anything goes” style of graphics that contrasted from the Disney “chocolate box illustration” style (as critic and historian Leslie Halliwell humorously called it). Columbia started distributing their “Jolly Frolics” with a revamped Fox & Crow in 1948, then scored big with Mister Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing. UPA later branched into television production and was always making commercials and industrial films early on, but Columbia handled their theaters-only contract through the release of the feature 1001 Arabian Nights in 1959. When UPA didn't renew their Columbia theatrical contract in order to focus on features and TV, William Hanna and Joe Barbara decided to get “back into” the theatrical business after two years of TV work (and still continuing their empire created there) with a series of Loopy De Loop. 48 titles were released from 1959 through 1965. The National Film Board of Canada distributed a couple of their 'toons through Columbia in the late sixties... and there was the occasional independent production also picked up that decade. One title of importance was Sam Weiss' Little Boy Bad (1964). Columbia took great pride in its short subjects, which often boasted better production values than the even higher-up-on-the-totem-pole studios which forked over the big bucks on their features. Although few Columbia feature films were in color prior to the forties, their shorties were dabbling with the process in the “Color Sensations” as early as 1929. More important... and this accounts for the company's enduring reputation... was its commitment to the 2-reel comedy long after Mack Sennett and Hal Roach stopped making them in the thirties. Columbia kept the Three Stooges employed as late as 1958, even if the later titles economized with a higher ratio of “lifted” material from earlier ones. Other studios like RKO (with Edgar Kennedy and Leon Errol) and Warner Brothers (with the decade and a half run of “Joe McDoakes” one-reelers) may have (arguably) boasted a more consistent high standard of quality, BUT they were never as prolific as Columbia... and Columbia certainly was capable of knocking 'em out of the park with all of their creative personnel. In the travelogue and documentary arena, there were still “extras” released with the features as late as the seventies with one covering Norman Rockwell earning a shortie Oscar in a decade when the major studios were seldom nominated for anything not feature length. One reason the studio maintained plenty of shorts for possible theatrical release as late as it did was due to its involvement in the 16mm educational market with the Learning Corporation of America, which I also included here (just their Columbia-backed shorts). Again... Key references used are the same as with the other lists: BoxOffice, Film Daily and Motion Picture Herald Magazine back issues (latter two found on the Internet Archive), the IMDb.com site, Motion Pictures 1912-1939 (1951), Motion Pictures 1940-1949 (1953), Motion Pictures 1950-1959 (1960) and Motion Pictures 1960-1969 (1971). Then there’s Leonard Maltin’s The Great Movie Shorts (a.k.a. Selected Short Subjects, Crown, 1972), The First Hollywood Sound Shorts, 1926-1931 by Edwin M. Bradley (McFarland) and other books worth searching out such as Ted Okuda's The Columbia Comedy Shorts (McFarland), first published in 1986 at a time when The Three Stooges were dominating the wonderful world of VHS as they were on television. ************ The way these are structured are as follows... -Title first -Producers, directors and only the most important credits for space reasons are listed in (). If a series was consistent with its credits, I just list them once up top. -“bw” obviously means black and white, although it could have been colorized for home video (i.e. Three Stooges). Also the approximate... very approximate... running time in minutes or “m”. A 1 reel film ranges from 6 to 112 minutes (and I am not certain if you see this listed) and 2 reels run under 24 minutes. -Release date or copyright date ©, which is close enough... and occasionally both if I happened to be in the mood. If I have a filming date that is significantly earlier than release time, I have added that () -If a plot is available, along with supporting cast members performing, I have included it after the date in italics. ************ All Star Comedies (Broadway Comedies) This is just my personal "assortment" featuring stars who only “headlined” one or two shorts each. When Do We Eat? (Alfred J. Goulding) / bw-20m / March 19, 1934 Starring Lou Holtz. Lou's theatrical troupe must make money as a nudist restaurant. Supporting cast includes Bud Jamison, Luis Alberni, Adrian Rosley, Benny Baker, Arthur Treacher, Julia Griffith & others. His Old Flame (James Horne) / bw-18m / January 25, 1935 (filmed '34) A local citizen (Charles Murray) decides to run for town mayor, on a "family values", but an old girlfriend has some steamy love letters. With Geneva Mitchell, Billy Gilbert & others The Captain Hits The Ceiling (Charles Lamont) / bw-19m / July 6, 1935 Franklin Pangborn argues with his sea captain, not realizing he's a potential father-in-law. With Bud Jamison, Geneva Mitchell, Arthur Houseman, James C. Morton, Arthur Rankin, Phyllis Crane, William O'Neal & Stanley Blystone. Unrelated Relations (Del Lord) / bw-18m / January 9, 1936 (filmed '35) Monte (Monty) Collins and his new wife are moving into their new home. All is going well until her family decides to drop in for a visit. With Louise Caver, Tommy Bond, Mary Foy, Ken Hollis & others The Champ's A Chump (Sam White) / bw-19m / June 20, 1936 Big Boy Williams joins a college in order to get a boxer's contract. With Louis Prima, Fred Kohler, Shirley Chambers & James C. Morton Oh Duchess! (Charles Lamont) / bw-16m / October 9, 1936 Starring Polly Moran. A fish marketer poses as "royal" for her daughter's beau. With Jack Lipson, Mary Blake, Symonia Boniface, Vernon Dent, Eva & Robert McKenzie & Al Thompson Sailor Maid (Charles Lamont) / bw-19m / February 12, 1937 Starring Polly Moran. An immigrant seeks an American husband. With Eddie Laughton, Theodore Lorch, Frank Mills, Cy Schindell, Al Thompson & Black-ie Whiteford Oh, What A Knight! (Charley Chase) / bw-18m / November 22, 1937 Starring Herman Bing. A barber is mistaken for a rich woman's new servant. With Louise Stanley & Claud Allister Cuckoorancho (Ben K. Blake) / bw-17m / March 20, 1938 Starring Joe Besser. Two wanderers are mistaken for rich tycoons by a Mexican rancher. With Lee Royce, Charles Master, Lolita Cordoba,Willis Clare & Ned McGunn's Dancers Half-way To Hollywood (Charley Chase) / bw-18m / July 1, 1938 Starring Tom Kennedy & Johnny Arthur. A struggling screenwriter and his buddy make a movie in their backyard about his boss, which causes trouble with him as an unsuspecting visitor to the set. With Ann Doran, Harry Holman, Cy Schindell, Beatrice Blinn, Bobby Burns, Doodles Weaver, Al Thompson, Beatrice Curtis, Victor Travers A Star Is Shorn (Del Lord) / bw-17m / April 21, 1939 Starring Danny Webb. A Hollywood agent tries to hook up “Miss Maple Syrup” with an astrology obsessed producer. With Mary Treen, Raymond Brown & Ethelreda Leopold Black Eyes And Blues (Jules White) / bw-17m / April 18, 1941 Starring Roscoe Karns. Once again Roscoe's wife is seeking a divorce in Reno. With Dorothy Appleby, Elsie Ames, Don Beddoe, Lynton Brent, Richard Fiske & others French Fried Patootie (Wee Wee Fifi) (Jules White) / bw-18m / June 27, 1941 Starring Alan Mowbray. Two ex-soldiers attend a war convention with their wives and one must hide an old flame he meets. With Lorin Raker, Mae Busch, Greta Granstedt, Johnny Kascier & Kitty McHugh Love In Gloom (Jules White) / bw-19m / August 15, 1941 Starring Henny Youngman, running a "Meet A Mate" agency. With Al Shean and the Radio Rogues. Half Shot At Sunrise (Del Lord) / bw-17m / September 4, 1941 Starring Roscoe Karns. Roscoe's wife leaves him on account of his practical joke making. While away, he gets involved with a pretty refugee clothes gatherer. With Ann Doran, Bobby Larson, Symona Boniface, Marjorie Kane, Marion Martin & others Three Blonde Mice (Jules White) / bw-16m / January 22, 1942 (filmed '41) Starring Alan Mowbray. When a cop stops him for speeding, Alan tries to get out of it by claiming that he is rushing home to his expectant wife. When the cop decides to follow him home to check up on his story, Alan has to come up with a wife and child. With Dorothy Appleby, Monte (Monty) Collins, Bud Jamison & others Groom And Bored (Del Lord) / bw-16m / April 9, 1942 Johnny Downs has to find a way to keep his marriage a secret from his boss, who feels that marriage is not good for business. With Arthur Q. Bryan, Marjorie Deanne, Helen Lynd, Bud Jamison, Walter Soderling, Fred Toones & others Kiss And Wake Up (Jules White) / bw-18m / October 2, 1942 Johnny Downs breaks up with his angry fiance before their marriage and tries to make up by making her “jealous” with his buddy in drag. With Adele Mara, Frank Sully, Etta McDaniel & Betty Blythe Two Saplings (Harry Edwards) / bw-19m / March 5, 1943 Starring George Givot & Cliff Nazarro. Two Greek restaurant owners foil a bank robbery. With Gwen Kenyon, Ann Evers, Vernon Dent, Mabel Forest & Monte (Monty) Collins Shot In The Escape (Jules White) / bw-19m) / August 6, 1943 Starring Billy Gilbert & Cliff Nazarro. The boys make the error of aiding a lady on a muddy street, only to cleaned off at her place when the jealous husband arrives. With Grace Leonard, Kathryn Keys & Barbra Slater Quack Service (Harry Edwards) / bw-18m / September 3, 1943 Starring Una Merkel & Gwen Kenyon. The duo get jobs as process servers, and are assigned to serve papers on a prominent local doctor (Stanley Brown). With Monte (Monty) Collins, Vernon Dent, Dudley Dickerson, Bud Jamison, Blanche Payson, Snub Pollard & Al Thompson Garden Of Eatin' (Harry Edwards) / bw-19m / October 22, 1943 Slim Summerville is in the pokey after being mistaken for a kidnapper and must deal with an angry mob. With Bobby Larson, Chester Conklin & Christine McIntyre Bachelor Daze (Jules White) / bw-17m / February 17, 1944 (filmed '43) Starring Slim Summerville. Two buddies battle over a town widow. With Emmett Lynn, Minerva Urecal, Vernon Dent, Frank Sully, Victor Travers, Al Thompson & Charles Dorety Crazy Like A Fox (Jules White) / bw-19m / May 1, 1944 Billy Gilbert starring in a remake of Andy Clyde's AM I HAVING FUN? With Billy as a taxi driver. With Jack Norton, Black-ie Whiteford, Esther Howard, Dan Seymour, Heinie Conklin, Judy Malcolm & Christine McIntyre Wedded Bliss (Harry Edwards) / bw-17m / August 18, 1944 Starring Billy Gilbert & Vernon Dent. Billy tries to fix a friend's marriage. With Frank Lackteen & Christine McIntyre Silly Billy (Jules White) / bw-18m / January 29, 1948 (filmed '47) Starring Billie Burke. Billie invites the father of her daughter's fiance to her home, under the mistaken impression that he is her daughter's fiance. With Virginia Hunter, Myron Healy, Tim Ryan, Ruby Dandridge, Emil Sitka, Black-ie Whiteford, Cy Schindell. Billie Gets Her Man (Edward Bernds) / bw-17m / September 9, 1948 Starring Billie Burke. Billie thinks her daughter is pregnant and must decide if she should remarry an old chum, now a millionaire. With Patsy Moran, Dick Wessel, Emil Sitka, Gay Nelson, Jimmy Lloyd, Andre Pola, Symona Boniface, Stanley Ince, Cy Schindell, Harold Brauer, Johnny Kascier, Wanda Perry, Teddy Mangean, Virginia Ellsworth, Dee Green, Maudie Prickett, Charles Heine Conklin. French Fried Frolic (Jules White) / bw-18m / December 8, 1949 (filmed Oct) Starring Wally Brown & Tim Ryan. The boys get tangled with French girls (Christine McIntyre and Nanette Bordeaux) who need husbands to fool a rich uncle (Emil Sitka). Also Grace Lenard & Kathleen O'Malley Innocently Guilty (Bert Wheeler) / bw-15m / August 21, 1950 Starring Bert Wheeler. Through a series of misunderstandings, Bert becomes innocently involved with his boss' wife. With Christine McIntyre, Margie Liszt, Nanette Bordeaux, vernon Dent, Joe Palma, Heinie Conklin, Kathleen O'Malley The Awful Sleuth (Richard Quine) / bw-18m / April 15, 1951 (filmed '50) A soda jerk (Bert Wheeler) is a detective tale buff who doesn't recognize gangster “Memphis Mike” as a customer and confident until he is held captive later. With Ben Welden, Tom Kennedy, Minerva Urecal, Jean Wiles, Vernon Dent & Ralph Volkie Down The Hatch (Jules White) / bw-17m / November 26, 1953 Harry Mimmo is employed by a couple of jewel thieves getting him to carry a stolen ruby out of Italy by ship. With Rita Conde, Maxine gates, Johnny Kascier, Joe Palma, Emil Sitka & Philip Van Zandt Kids Will Be Kids (Jules White) / bw-16m / December 9, 1954 “The Mischief Makers” with Sally Jane Bruce & Emil Sitka. Junior & Highpockets enter their dog Daisy in a pet contest, and she wins doing a dance until a kitty interfers. Tricky Chicks (Jules White) / bw-16m / October 24, 1957 “Girlie Whirls Comedy” featuring Mureil Landers. Two girls at a night club are romantic with investigating agents and try to fool them with fake evidence on some criminals they are seeking. With Dick Wessel, Bek Nelson & Benny Rubin

Charles Urban was a giant in early cinema and a most fascinating character, an ambitious and forward thinking American tycoon who enjoyed his biggest success on the other side of the Atlantic. Then he returned to his home country during the last year of The Great War, but competition with Hollywood was too great and his fortunes collapsed in a few years. Sadly, so many of his films have been lost over time even though material that he financed got recycled in films made by other companies. Fortunately his stock has been on the rise in recent years, with one researcher working more devotedly than others since the 1990s in bringing the attention he deserves. Luke McKernan published a biography on him in 2013: Charles Urban, Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897 – 1925. According to his website at http://www.charlesurban.com/, we are told the following: “No complete list of all the films that he produced exists, and it would be an almost impossible task to construct one, as he re-edited and re-used his film material so frequently.” Not that I won't try with a small... small “starter” sampling. No, these lists won't be complete. Further more, I am focusing exclusively on the post-1903 period instead of his years with the Warwick Trading Company (which operated with and without him between 1898 and 1915), although I might tackle them on a future date. You folks know that I can't resist the temptation. Born April 14, 1867 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Charles Urban got started in the movie business when marketing Thomas Edison's Kinetoscopes in Detroit, Michigan in 1895. He moved to the United Kingdom while working with Maguire & Baucus, agents of Edison, before becoming a part of the Warwick Trading Company three years later where he held a top position until February 1903. When he left to start up his own company, he ignited a lawsuit with Warwick by taking some top personnel with him, including Alfred Darling, Thomas Grant, George Albert Smith, John “Jack” Avery as a key co-executive and camera operator and Alice Rosenthal, sister of one of Urban's top cameramen Joseph, as a top salesperson. It didn't take long for the Charles Urban Trading Company to ape his former company as a leader of scenic “factuals” shot as far from the British Isles as one could get. These Urban-Bioscope Expeditions traipsed through Borneo, the Swiss Alps, the major destinations of Europe and “darkest” Africa. In addition to all of the pretty scenery, there was no shying away from the human thirst for violence and warfare, even having cameramen Joe Rosenthal and George Rogers tackle the Russo-Japanese War from both sides. The official 1903 and '06 film catalogs are quite a feast for the eyes, offering more for British movie goers than even National Geographic offered American magazine subscribers in its early years: https://archive.org/details/weputworldbefore00unse http://www.cinematheque.ch/fileadmin/user_upload/Expo/Gustave_Doret/Catalogue_Urban_1906.pdf Nickelodeon attendees were also introduced to worlds that weren't so much far away but hard to see with their limited eye sight. F. Martin Duncan made several series featuring amoeba, hydras, bacteria, close-ups of insects, circulation of blood and anything else of interest that required special microscopic lens. By 1908, F. Percy Smith was added to the fold, along with a new sub-company Kineto, with his landmark frame-by-frame time lapse photography of flowers blooming and close-ups of spiders and insects in action. Smith later would work with British Instructional (which I profiled on a separate thread here) and was among the first to document Mother Nature in color as well... Ah, yes, color... or shall I spell it colour? Urban certainly deserves credit as one of the great financial backers in this arena. While still with the Warwick Trading Company, he supported Edward Raymond Turner. He patented a system with Frederick Marshall Lee that involved three filters (red, yellow and blue) attached to a camera that exposed different images on consecutive frames of one black and white film roll. A few film clips survive today that were taken before Turner's untimely death in 1903, resurrected from obscurity by the National Media Museum in 2012: Because this first system was rather cumbersome, Urban had George Albert Smith (famous for such landmark novelties as The Haunted Castle and Grandma's Reading Glass) simplify the process to just two filters, making the results less “colorful” but more practical. (Leon Gaumont, however, would return to Turner's three filter concept with his excellent, but still troublesome, Chronochrome system a full decade later.) The black & white film was exposed with a disc of rotating filters, then shown with a specialized projector with matching filters to present it for the screen. In July 1906, his first experiments were made of Smith's children in Southwick, Brighton. By early 1909, a new name was established for this process, Kinemacolor, along with a new Urban-controlled company, Natural Color Kinematograph. Because each second frame was exposed differently than the frame proceeding it, fast movement of people jumping and horses galloping sometimes created a double-image effect. Over time, the cameramen got around some of this by having much action coming towards the camera and decreasing the amount of side viewed action. The film also had to be projected faster than most other films at 1/32 a second. Some of these issues were fixed later in the U.S. by the competing Prizmacolor and Technicolor companies, which followed the “bi-pack” route of exposing two rolls of film at once, thanks to a special glassware involving two filters, then having the rolls combined as one with special dyes on each side so they can be used in standard 24 frames per second projectors without filters. Urban himself also kept tinkering in later years, even after Kinemacolor ran its course, with his top engineer Henry Joy on another system called “Kinekrom” that almost, but not quite, solved the problems. Like Cinerama in the fifties and IMAX decades later, early Kinemacolor often involved special theaters and special ticket prices, with its biggest showcase being the glamorous Scala Theatre on Charlotte Street, London. Like the later widescreen spectaculars, these films held the same appeal of presenting far away places in a format unlike any other travelogue at the time; top cameraman John Mackenzie even published a book in 1910 called Rambles In Many Lands. Aside from England and France, major countries presented for the first time in color without tints or stenciling included Belgium, Holland, Germany, the United States, Canada, Italy, Algeria, the Balkans, Egypt, India, Spain, Canary Islands, Greece, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Japan. Essentially the Urban team was achieving the same goal in motion pictures that Albert Kahn's team did with Lumière Autochrome still photography in Les Archives de la Planète, a collection that survives more complete today. A few separate Kinemacolor companies were established outside of England such as Kinemacolor de France, Luca Comerio operating in Italy and Kinemacolor of America (profiled later on this thread), but the Japanese probably enjoyed the most success with it: Toyo Shokai, renamed Tennenshaku Katsudoshashin Kabushiki Kaisha, maintained a steady output of kabuki play adaptations and scenics through 1917. King Edward VII was the first royal to be filmed both alive and in funeral procession by the Kinemacolor cameras. Then Smith and Urban's team went all out documenting the coronation of George V, followed by his visit to India in 1911-12 titled With Our King And Queen Through India (a.k.a. The Dunbar At Delhi). This and the Kinemacolor of America's Making Of The Panama Canal are sometimes listed as the world's first feature length films in color, but were viewed at the time as presentations of individual short subjects. Not to be outdone, France's President Poincaré became a subject more than once and Kinemacolor of America made sure two presidents in office, Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, were also documented in color. Both the U.S. and U.K. companies covered ex-president Teddy Roosevelt. While educational films garnished Urban much of his critical prestige, it was obvious that the business of movies had to bring in the cash with plenty of fictionalized comedy, drama and adventure. These were done both in black & white and Kinemacolor, probably half of the latter productions being shot in Nice, France which boasted better sunshine than the British Isles. In addition, Urban also set up Société Générale des Cinématographes Éclipse in Paris to increase his entertainment output. Eventually this company broke off as its own independent operation, becoming the fourth largest film company in France before long. Among the more interesting films done in England were directed by Walter R. Booth as part of a then popular “trick” fantasy genre, similar to what George Méliès had been doing earlier. His 1912 part live-action / part stop-motion collaboration with F. Martin Thornton and Edgar Rogers, In Gollywog Land, boasts what may be the earliest animation in color, unless one counts Winsor McCay's hand-tinted Little Nemo of the previous year. (I do include cartoons in this thread for a change.) Another leading director, filming in both countries, was Rotterdam-born Theo Bouwmeester (sometimes listed as Frenkel, his original name, or Bouwmeester-Frenkel, the name I use here). He played Napoleon in Kinemacolor's first fictional production, Checkmated (1910), and later supervised the first western in the process, Fate, set in Texas but filmed in Sussex. The first official color feature (or the first not to be a documentary at least) was F. Martin Thorton's The World, The Flesh And The Devil, a rather torrid melodrama that the critics weren't kind to when it opened at the Holborn Empire on April 9, 1914. There was just one more follow-up feature that summer, Little Lord Fauntleroy. Urban's ambitious move into all-color features was halted due to some court battles involving the competing Biocolour headed by William Friese-Greene, who accused Urban for being monopolistic over color processes. Although Biocolour ultimately was a failure financially (and Gaumont's more competitive system stayed mostly in France), Urban still had to liquidize the Natural Color Kinematograph and re-organize as a new company, Colorfilms Ltd., dropping the key word “natural” on account of all of the bad press Kinemacolor received for its hardly natural two-spectrum system. Adding to the decline in Kinemacolor was a souring relationship between Urban and George Smith, who hardly spoke to each other until the 1930s. The war soon took up a huge chunk of Urban's activities, along with providing much needed subject matter for movie screens. He was appointed to chairman of the British Topical Committee for War Films in 1915, but ran into some controversy the following year when he negotiated with William Randolph Hearst for a U.S. distribution deal; Hearst being sympathetic to Germany while his country was still neutral did not go well with the British press at the time. Two key features Britain Prepared (How Britain Prepared) (December 1915) and The Battle Of The Somme (August 1916) nonetheless did well on both sides of the Atlantic. The former featured some rare Kinemacolor sequences of battle, another Urban first. The second strictly black and white film still holds up as an outstanding documentation with stellar camerawork by J.B. McDowell and Geoffrey Malins that has been recycled in many movies, TV shows and YouTube since. His gradual move of operations to the United States began with his take over of David Horseley's Centaur Film Corporation in Bayonne, New Jersey in March 1917, followed eight months later by the formation of Kineto Company of America at 71 West 23rd Street in New York City to produce a newsreel series called the “Official War Review”. By the autumn of 1918, he had pretty much phased out his British operations and stayed put in America, settling by 1920 with a Stanford White designed building in Irvington, New York and consolidating his companies under Urban Motion Picture Industries, Inc. Unfortunately many of his big ambitions for the American market didn't pan out well, perhaps because he was too ahead of his time. Among his most interesting novelties involving co-engineer Harry Joy (co-developed with Theodore Brown) was the Spirograph, a disc-formatted projector aimed at bringing movies into homes and schools for personal use, a fore-runner to the “home entertainment” explosion of later decades, first with 16mm and 8mm and then VHS and laserdisc by the '80s. Yet it all seemed way too early for 1920. Had his Kinekrom system been successful, many of his Kinemacolor films would have enjoyed a longer shelf life as reissues in later years, but there were still technical issues involved. On the plus side, he boasted a spectacular library of material that, along with some newly filmed footage done in America, got used extensively in several series: “Urban Movie Chats”, “Wonders of the World”, “Kineto Reviews”, “Urban Popular Classics” and “Great American Authors”, the last edited by future Traveltalks guru James FitzPatrick. All of these shorts were part of an ambitious program called “The Encyclopedia of Knowledge”, a “thousand-reel” attempt to provide a motion picture counterpart to every library's reference book section. (He also had some involvement in George McLeod Baynes' earliest “Kinograms”, a newsreel that outlasted all of Urban's own series.) Two somewhat successful features were added in 1921: The Four Seasons, supervised by leading New York zoological celebrity Raymond Ditmars and previewed February 18th, and Permanent Peace, released in November to coincide with the Washington Naval Peace Conference. One later Urban production was a real curio that is likely impossible to view today, if not lost. Evolution: From The Birth Of The Planets To The Age Of Man was supervised by Ditmars with plenty of his own personal animal footage along with some stop-motion dinosaurs by Willis O'Brien (likely lifted from his earlier short The Ghost Of Slumber Mountain). It was first shown at All Angels Episcopal Church in Manhattan, December 1922, despite Ditmars' blatant preference for Darwin over Genesis. Of course, the national publicity over the Scopes' “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee prompted a re-edit and reissue involving Edward J. Foyles of the American Museum of Natural History and the animation team of Max and David Fleischer, whose co-owned Red Seal also handled distribution. By the time this second version was released in July 1925, Urban was forced to close shop. According to July 1924 reports in Film Daily, his “$10, 500, 000 corporation” had been petitioned for bankruptcy. There was a second, but short-lived, rebooting of the company later by investor C.M. Bortman. Max Fleischer's team once again got recruited to edit material for a new and short-lived “Urban Searchlights” series (one of which is posted on this thread). By 1929, Urban was mostly retired and back in England. He lost his second wife, Ada, in 1937; she herself had contributed both financially and as a key supervisor for the company since they married in 1910. Charles passed away on August 29, 1942 while still writing his memoirs. Meanwhile, a large chunk of the Urban library fell through the cracks of court-battled ownership and much valuable source material was either recycled for its chemical components or lost/discarded by accident. This is sad when one considers Urban's motto for many years as “Putting the world before you”, which he pretty much did long before we had cable TV and the internet. What we have today to remember him by are crumbs of a once spectacular film empire. **** Urban backed many critter reels. The BFI site labels this one The Porcupine- A Prickly Subject, but it could be Animal Drolleries (Kineto 1915, minus the parrot), one of the Animal World Series (1916) or just a hodgepodge of several titles. What is nice about these compilation reels is that they preserve so much valuable footage lost in their original state. The bunny and girl shot may go back a good dozen years or so. The otter, badger and jerboa all appeared in their own longer starring roles in previous years, the otter's 1912 performance is also uploaded on this thread.

It is, perhaps, the most neglected genre of cinema. The sponsored promotional film never gets its proper respect, any more than your average TV commercial. To be fair, it is hard to analyze films that often lack story-lines or feature major stars, although some of the animated cartoons get modest attention in small circles. Not surprisingly, they were ignored at Oscar time (with one exception listed far below) because Hollywood's bigwigs didn't view them as particularly “worthy”. Nonetheless they existed and some of those spared from the death of nitrate decomposition are quite cinematic and innovative. The two companies I am profiling here were focused in the Detroit and Chicago areas, but with multiple branch offices across the U.S. and in foreign countries as well: Jam Handy Organization and Wilding Picture Productions a.k.a. Wilding, Inc. Because so many films produced by these two were rarely documented even in their own time, outside of select periodicals like Business Screen (1938-1973), it is quite a chore gathering information about them. Hopefully this thread can encourage others to provide a much better listing than mine. This is a history that should not be ignored. Rick Prelinger, a key archivist, has helped spare Jam Handy's name from the ravages of time, providing a mini-history in Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (edited by Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, Amsterdam University Press, 2009) and uploading a log book for that company, ending abruptly in the '60s, to the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/JHOProdLog3/page/n0 As a film producer, Handy was enormously prolific. For a time, more film stock was being processed in Detroit, Michigan than by several major studios in California combined. Henry Jameson “Jam” Handy was very energetic and dedicated-to-healthy-living, being once part of the Illinois Athletic Club water polo team in the 1924 Olympics and an active swimmer well into his nineties. He started making movies sometime in the 1910s with his first company started during World War I with Herbert Kaufman assisting (as stated in Anthony Slide's The New Dictionary of the American Film Industry, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998). Much of his early work was in the field of animated cartoons, particularly diagram films for the armed services. While he never became the next Walt Disney, he did maintained his own animation department for a rather long time and even employed the great Max Fleischer at one point. The first official “Jam Handy” productions began circulation around 1922 (with this list's earliest title date) and his settling in Detroit the following year. His first sound productions arrived around 1930 and, by 1932, he was expanding with a new facility at 2900 East Grand Boulevard. At its peak, JHO (Jam Handy Organization) employed 600. In addition to the above mentioned animation department, there were two full orchestras that rivaled any out west, a processing lab and mobile projection vans that provided a newsreel you-are-there quality on screen almost equal to Fox Movietone. Technicolor was being utilized by 1936, three years after his arch rival Wilding Picture Productions (as discussed farther below). Initially the process was used for animated cartoons and select Alka Seltzer and Norge live-action ads, but one special two-reeler made for the New York World's Fair of '39 and CocaCola, Refreshment Through The Years, became so popular that many historians have incorrectly labeled it as the first all-color “sales film”. Because Technicolor was still an expensive luxury, Cinecolor and AnscoColor were tested as alternatives until 16mm Kodachrome (and later Ektachrome) became the favored choice for most industrial films. Eastmancolor arrived in 1952, alternating with Technicolor in the 35mm format. Three films utilized SuperScope in the fifties, all absolutely gorgeous productions that still maintain interest today: American Engineer, American Look and American Maker. Almost half of the JOH product was bankrolled by General Motors which, at the time, was the most profitable manufacturing company in America. The vast majority promoted the Chevrolet division, but some involved Pontiac, Buick and Oldsmobile divisions while, curiously, ignoring Cadillac for the most part. The relationship between film producer Handy and GM was mutually beneficial with the former keeping production costs down and only demanding the smallest take on any profits while the latter received all of the much needed advertising on both big theatrical and smaller household screens. GM's competitors like Chrysler, Ford, American Motors and Packard also utilized Jam Handy's services on occasion, but Chrysler and Ford's auto divisions had a more exclusive deal with Wilding. GM remained Jam Handy's chief supporter through the summer of 1971 when he helped one of his top assistants, William H. Sandy, branch out on his own by transferring over to him the lofty $5 million account, as covered by a New York Times article on September 7th of that year. Earlier, in the autumn of 1969, JHO became a part of Reeves Teletape and began decreasing the number of actual motion pictures but still maintaining a prolific output of 16mm filmstrips, a staple of the business since the thirties (but not covered on this thread). The company was still quite large at that time with additional sales branches in Chicago, New York City, Hollywood and Toronto. Yet after Sandy branched off with his own company, very few actual movies were made and most often these were done by other production companies with Handy merely providing some financial backing and expertise. By 1979, video cassettes had completely replaced filmstrips and these included some rather interesting car maintenance “how to” guides. By the time of his passing at age 97, his company was down to just two key employees but it still stayed afloat for a few more years mostly in video production. The Grand Boulevard studio was taken over for a period by Faith for Miracles for a series of religious TV shows. The building still stands today almost by default. In recent years, it has hosted a few film retrospectives and have preserved some of the Handy legacy. Although little effort was made to save the Jam Handy films for preservation, a surprising number survive because they are literally everywhere in private collections and thanks to Prelinger and others considering them worthy of rediscovery. Their aim was to sell and educate first and entertain secondly; sugar coated education is one way to describe them. A few even featured familiar faces like comedian Edgar Kennedy in the delightful The Other Fellow and soon to be famous Karl Malden in Joe's Kid. Others can best be described as “retro” entertainment, particularly those made in the shallow consumerist fifties with an emphasis on happy housewives fussing over the latest appliances from Westinghouse and Frigidaire. Yet thought provoking documentaries like Both Sides Of The Equation, directed by John MacDonald as late as 1970, are certainly worth a second look. Two personal favorites of mine: This one from 1936 starts with a solarized image of the workers appearing as if they are reliefs formed in some imaginary metal plate. Many of the Handy films of this period invite comparison to the contemporary British documentary “school”, highlighted by the GPO Film Unit and John Grierson, in that they emphasize how The Common Man is both the brains and muscle behind every machine. The narration on this next 1958 production was done by the mighty Marvin Miller of CBS radio's The Whistler, UPA cartoons and Warner Brothers travelogues. He also voiced Aquaman on Saturday morning TV. This exposé on mid-century design is a delightful overkill for the wide screen... perhaps it suggests that 1950s society was as trapped in the same geometric patterns as the trendy furnishings and wallpaper designs showcased? It then progresses towards a “soft sell” of Chevrolet's latest model ready to roll off the assembly line for '59. Jam Handy Organization Checklist Below is the far from complete list of the short films that is hopefully easier to read than past Shortie Checklist posts. If “one reel” is mention, it can run anywhere from a minute to eleven minutes and I will have to provide actual minutes (m) and seconds (s) later when/if that information becomes available. Two reels is roughly twenty minutes, three thirty and so on. Obviously black and white is indicated as “bw”. First up, a brief list of Jam Handy's feature films: General Motors: Around The World (General Motors Export) / bw & silent-49m / January 1928 / video: https://archive.org/details/GeneralM1927 / video: https://archive.org/details/GeneralM1927_2 / video: https://archive.org/details/GeneralM1927_3 / video: https://archive.org/details/GeneralM1927_4 Every Third Wheel (Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.- John A. Freese) / bw-8 reels / February 27, 1931 (listed in production by Film Daily) Keep 'Em Holding (Thermoid Co.) / bw-60m / January 15, 1941 Doctor In Industry: The Story Of Kenneth W. Randall (General Motors Corp.- Harford Kerbawy) bw-55m / February 22, 1946 / video: https://archive.org/details/0217_Doctor_in_Industry Strange Interview (General Motors Corp.- Herbert Kerbawy) / bw-60m / © March 6, 1947 On Guard For Complete Engine Protection (Fram Corp.) / color (16mm)-59m / April 27, 1949 The Safest Thing On Wheels (Thermoid Co.) / bw-52m / June 20, 1949 All That I Have (Church of God) / bw-57m / July 17, 1953 Handy's first TV show was done on June 11, 1946 for the Dumont and ABC Networks just before the former's official launch. As expected, Chevrolet promoted this untitled production. I don't get into live TV productions here, but do list (again, in a very generalized way) some of the 35mm shot TV commercials.