Music: Soundies

In U. S. bars, taverns, roadhouses are about 600,000 coin phonographs, or jukeboxes (a word which their manufacturers hate). According to an estimate by Variety, the jukes take in $150,000,000 a year in nickels. Costing an average of $300 apiece, the jukes become obsolete, or outmoded, at the rate of 150,000 a year. This week one of the biggest makers, Mills Novelty Co. of Chicago, was ready to unveil—in Hollywood—a new kind of box which it calls the Panoram Soundies.

Drop a dime in a Soundies (the word apparently has no singular form) and you see a three-minute film, with musical accompaniment, projected on the box’s 24-by-18-inch plastic screen. The $695 box is designed to hold 1,000 ft. of 16-mm. film, made for Mills by James Roosevelt’s Globe Productions in Hollywood. There is no direct corporate connection between Mills and Globe. But the film will be leased to box owners, at $17.50 per reel for the first week, less later, by a projected Soundies Distributing Corp. of America Inc., in which Jimmy Roosevelt and Mills will be chief stockholders.

Soundies is less like the peep shows of the penny arcades than it is like the cinema’s onetime musical shorts—an illustrated recording, the first which commercially substitutes sound-on-film for discs.

Typical subjects among the eight in Globe’s first reel: a tepid arrangement of Hold That Tiger by Victor Young and his orchestra; Row, Row, Row sung with innuendoes by Joy Hodges; six girls and an orchestra doing Parade of the Wooden Soldiers. The customer cannot choose the subject he wishes to see and hear; he takes whatever comes next on the endless film.

Since, as one of Chicago’s Mills brothers says, “the idea is older than God,” the Mills-Roosevelt peep show is not basically patented, will have competition. Ten similar projects are under way, although the big coin-machine makers (Wurlitzer, Rock-Ola, Seeburg) have not declared their intentions.