{"id":64537,"date":"2021-04-20T00:01:22","date_gmt":"2021-04-20T07:01:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/?p=64537"},"modified":"2021-04-18T18:12:16","modified_gmt":"2021-04-19T01:12:16","slug":"max-and-dave-still-trying-to-find-his-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/max-and-dave-still-trying-to-find-his-voice\/","title":{"rendered":"Max and Dave: Still Trying To Find His Voice"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Illustration from “Theater Organ Bombarde” October 1969<\/p><\/div>\n

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1926 was a good year for research and development into sound pictures. Warner Brothers put on their first program of such films, with their sound-on-disc Vitaphone system. Features such as Don Juan<\/em> and The Better \u2018Ole<\/em>, as well as the short films that accompanied them, impressed many in the industry. Around the same time, William Fox was working with Messrs. Case and Sponable on a sound-on-film system, which eventually became Fox Movietone. Things would come to a head in 1927, with the release of The Jazz Singer<\/em>. Amidst all this, Fleischer was still working to develop sound cartoons, which didn\u2019t need to depend on dialogue, but to rely upon music and sound effects. However, partway through this year, and into the 1926-27 season, Fleischer abandoned the use of soundtracks with the DeForest Phonofilms system. Perhaps he was seeing the writing on the wall that other companies were developing the talking picture in ways that would eventually eclipse the DeForest process, and may have decided to bide his time and see which of the rival systems would become the victor and the standard. Having no distribution ties to any of the majors involved in the experimentation, he was also likely waiting for the right break to obtain access to more readily available avenues for having his sound efforts publically seen, and so would put his experiments on the back burner until the time for new success was ripe. <\/p>\n

Tramp Tramp Tramp<\/strong> (May, 1926, sound) – Again, no real plot material – just the Ko-Ko Glee Club and a band setting itself up on stage (some of the same footage seems to reappear in the later \u201cSweet Adeline\u201d). The song goes back to the civil war era. Byron G Harlan and Frank Stanley recorded it for Victor around 1906. Clarence Whitehill, a concert singer, covered it on Victor red seal about 1915. Charles Harrison and the Columbia Stellar Quartette recorded it for Columbia about 1917 (when it was getting some reassociation with the troops now marching in World War I). <\/p>\n