Sing Like Stalling

People used to sing in movie theatres.

Why? Maybe it was an outgrowth of “community sings” in the earliest part of the 20th Century. Whatever the reason, animation fans will recall the clever and creative Song Cartoons with the bouncing ball put out by the Fleischer studio. They went back to the silent days, debuting in 1924, though some were made with the DeForest Phono-film system before sound became popular.

However there was an earlier attempt to get people to sing along with individual words on the screen. And a patent application for the process was filed from a logical but surprise source—Carl Stalling.

Before being immortalised in Warner Bros. cartoon credits, before scoring the first Disney sound cartoons, Stalling had been an organist at a number of theatres in Kansas City, Missouri. He developed a system entitled “Method of Recording and Depicting Motion Pictures” in 1923.

This is how his patent application put the purpose of his invention:

The object of the invention is to provide a method for making moving picture films bearing individual words of a song to be projected upon a screen, one at a time, and to appear thereon synchronously with the duration of the musical tone or note of the Song. A further object of the invention is to provide a method for making moving picture films bearing individual words to be projected upon a screen, one at a time, and to appear thereon synchronously with the musical tone or note and the volume of expression of the same, by means of differentiating degrees of light.

In other words, instead of one slide with all the lyrics, or a chorus, the words appeared individually in time with the music. It seems a little silly, to be honest. By the time someone reacts to the word appearing, the score may be on to the next word. Or if it’s an eighth-note long, it appears on the screen far too briefly.

However, Stalling was granted a 27-year patent on April 8, 1924. Whether the process was ever tried at one of his theatres, I don’t know.

If you’d like to read the full document, it can be found here.