Here’s a nice little sampler reel of clips from some of the best Vitaphone Varieties shorts of the late 20s and very early 30s. For those of you not familiar with the world of Vitaphone, the shorts were ‘captures’ of vaudeville acts of the day–the advent of sound made it necessary to offer audiences as much product as possible and the way in which Warner Brothers fulfilled this mission was to shlep headliner Vaudeville entertainers across the bridge from Broadway to Queens where they set-up a couple of cameras and simply filmed the act as it appeared on stage. The films were quickly lost or thrown away since nobody thought the acts had any relevance a year or so after their having been filmed. But of course we know better now–in many ways they are of much more interest than the full length dramatic early talkies as they provide a perfect view of what the lost world of Vaudeville had to offer. The value of this particular reel to those new to the Vitaphone short is basically as a teaser to give you a notion of what these acts felt like. To those who already love this stuff, it’s a nice way to spend a little time with a lot of acts and not commit to hours of immersion into this dead civilization. Speaking for myself, once I get started watching old Vitaphones I tend to disappear into the Vaudeville rabbit hole and there goes the afternoon/evening/morning/whatever.