As humor goes, blooper reels are set at a pretty low bar. Hearing actors screw up and punctuate things with a tasty expletive gets old fast. So why am I posting a 14 minute reel of Warner Brothers contract actors blowing their lines from films made in 1939? Because it’s still funny on some level to hear the period slang–‘nuts’ is used a lot of the time instead of ‘damn’– and its nice to hear the crew in the background laughing. I guess what I’m enjoying in this reel has more to do with the meta behind the whole thing. We are on different sets at the Warner lot in Burbank. The actors and crew were worked hard–it was a six-day week, schedules were tight, and many actors bounced back and forth between sound stages shooting two movies at a time. The atmosphere doesn’t feel too turgid or serious; they’re knocking out their lines for movies that many probably hadn’t read the full scripts of. I’m not precisely sure of the origin of this reel–I seem to recall hearing it had been assembled for a Warner Brothers Christmas party as a joke reel. But no info is given by the people who posted it. And I’m a bit perplexed by some of the YouTube commenter’s hostility concerning the restoration that was performed. Read for yourself and see if you grasp this any better than I do. I have a tendency to be less concerned or impressed with detailed restorations and technical matters in general. Indeed, the very nice restoration of The Marx Brothers 1929 debut film ‘The Cocoanuts’ is lovely to look at…but on some level robs the movie of its ghostly, scratchy, faded allure. At least it does to my peculiar eyes…