Finding His Voice

Finding His Voice (1929)

Animated figure Talkie gets a visit from his friend Mutie in search for a job. Talkie takes him to the Western Electric sound lab...

Date of release
1929-06-21
TMDB
6.1 / 10 (8)
Runtime
11m
Genres
Documentary, Animation
Director
Max Fleischer, F. Lyle Goldman

Casting

Interesting facts

Finding His Voice is a short film created as an instructional film on how the Western Electric sound-on-film recording system worked. Recording stars Billy Murray and Walter Van Brunt, uncredited, provide the speaking and singing voices. Murray also provided the voice for the Fleischer Studios character Bimbo.

Production background

Late in 1926, AT&T and Western Electric created a licensing division, Electrical Research Products Inc. (ERPI), to handle the company's film-related audio technology rights. (In Finding His Voice, the credits give W. E. Erpi as the story's author.)

The Warner Brothers sound-on-disc system Vitaphone still had legal exclusivity, but having lapsed in its royalty payments, effective control of the rights was in ERPI's hands. On December 31, 1926—just four months after the premiere of the first Vitaphone feature Don Juan—Warners granted Fox-Case a sublicense for using the Western Electric system. In exchange for the sublicense, Warners and ERPI received a share of Fox's related revenues.

Although the film explained the Fox-Case sound-on-film system, when the film was initially released, the sound was provided by the Western Electric sound-on-disc system.

Co-director F. Lyle Goldman had done the animation for Wireless Telephony (1921) and The Mystery Box (1922) for the Bray Studios and released by Goldwyn Pictures, and The Ear (1920) for International Film Service and released by Paramount Pictures.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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