Susan Delson, a film critic for the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers, investigates “Soundies” in her new book, Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen: One Dime at a Time. Soundies were a type of 1940s wartime antecedent to MTV, though Delson dislikes the comparison to music videos. “Soundies were three-minute films made to be screened on movie jukeboxes known as Panorams—freestanding, closed-system projection cabinets” (3). These Panorams were placed in bars, cafés, and defense industry sites (3). Delson uses this brand name in reference to similar “musical shorts” made by Warner Brothers, Filmcraft, and a host of other companies, some of which were shown in movie houses before the main feature film.
Delson mostly ignores the early shorts that feature Black people, which makes the intent of her book, “the changing image of Black Americans on screen,” difficult to prove, since what the image...
University of California Press