Your Best Choice in 1929 Home Entertainment


Next time you fire up the home theatre with HD-DVD, or Blu-Ray, or whatever technical marvel you might have access to, think of those humble beginnings in movie collecting, as illustrated here. The 16mm projector and turntable unit above was introduced in 1929. It was a sort of crude Vitaphone set-up wherein you could synchronize your own record pictures on the living room screen. There were later experiments along these lines. A company called Americom offered 8mm subjects along with a record to be played on a turntable and (hopefully) in tandem with images on your wall. Take it from me, it seldom worked. You had to play the film at precisely 16 frames per second and set your needle down at exactly the right moment to have any hope of a properly synchronized show. One out of twenty times, it might work, and even then, the voices and images would drift away from each other as the 200-foot reel ran down. The competing Castle films, with their magnetic sound tracks, were much to be preferred. What frustrated lives we 8mm collectors led!




At least the content was good on the Americom offerings. They had things like Horror Of Dracula, Curse Of Frankenstein, Fox Laurel and Hardy highlights, and the Fu Manchu reel shown here. All you had to do was listen to the record first, then run the movie and transport your consciousness back to the experience of hearing the record, merging the two in a sort of out-of-body viewing experience. This kind of heightened Zen state achieved perfect synchronization every time, and no doubt prepared many young collectors for 70’s drug experiences to come. Parental warnings might well have been issued on those 8mm boxes, for I suspect there are consumers to this day still spinning in that alternate universe Americom introduced us to …