1938: Advice to Theatre Managers

[scotrace]

Last week I caught the final Twilight film at the second-run movie house nearby. It has been there since the thirties.

When I got up, my shoes were so stuck to the floor that my feet pulled right out of them! And my date's description of the ladies' room was less than savory. But worth it to see an OK movie for $3.50!

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think cartoons were, yes. From what I've seen (and I'm a big fan of vintage cartoons), is that the average cartoon short was about 7-10 minutes long. Long enough for opening credits, a short story, a few giggles and laughs, and then a pause before the movie starts.

Disney-Pixar is the only company that I can think of today, that still maintains this tradition. Before nearly all their animated movies, there's a comedy cartoon short of some description...

Cartoons were the longest-lived one-reel format, but there were also a variety of one-reel musical shorts. These were extremely popular at the dawn of the talkie era -- the "Vitaphone Varieties" and other such things were basically pickled vaudeville acts presented in a simple performance setting. The act would appear on the screen, do its turn, take a bow, the end. The descendent of these types of shorts were the dance-band one-reelers that remained popular, but less common, into the early forties. These types of shorts could also be slotted into the one-reeler slot on a program.

The end of the line for theatrical cartoon shorts as a regular part of the program came in 1972, when the Walter Lantz studio ended production. Universal continued to distribute older shorts from the Lantz backlog for several years into the late '70s, and Twentieth Century Fox occasionally re-released an old Terrytoon to go with a feature, but they disappeared before the '80s.

Warner Bros has tried several times to revive its short-cartoon department, most notably in the early '90s, when several new shorts were produced and released without generating much excitement or interest. Distributors today don't want to bother with short subjects on an individual basis, so the few shorts that do get released today are generally printed right onto the same film as the feature and are released as a single unit. That's the system Disney uses with the Pixar shorts, which at least guarantees they'll get a screening.

In the Era, shorts were booked as packages -- you'd buy a season of Warner cartoons, or a season of Lantz cartoons, or a season of MGM or Paramount cartoons. You had to buy a bunch of random Warner shorts, for example, to get the four or five Bugs Bunny pictures that would be released in a season. Each reel would be delivered individually, as it was released, ensuring that you only screened the specific cartoon the studio wanted you to show that week -- you weren't allowed to substitute or cherry-pick.