Mel Blanc is the featured hiccuper. Del Porter, the tall man who leads the singing at the beginning, is a fellow musician who came to LA from Portland at the same time as Blanc.
The Soundie machine is used in this soundie as a frame to display the lyrics for the audience to sing along. In real life, this frame is where you would see the soundie itself.
![YouTube Preview Image](http://img.youtube.com/vi/ijnfdLFhn2o/0.jpg)
This soundie contains two rare visual referents – a Soundie machine and Mel Blanc himself. Soundies were short music films shown on a machine like a jukebox. Soundie machines were equipped with a screen, so when you put in your quarter, you both heard a song and saw it. You couldn’t make selections – you just took whatever was up next in line. The films were just that, actual 16mm films, each one spooled on its own reel. The image was projected onto a mirror inside, and reverse projected onto the screen.
Mel Blanc worked offscreen as Hollywood’s most prolific voice artist, so footage of him performing is not easy to find.
0 responses so far ↓
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
Leave a Comment