Production company Associated Screen Studios | ||
Movies Football Highlights, Fly Fishing, Diary of a Racing Pigeon Directors Gordon Hollingshead, Bob Edge, Teddy Stauffer Cast Donald Campbell, Art Gil, Knox Manning | ||
Soviet sports parade aka cultural parade in red square 1930 1939
The Sports Parade (a.k.a. “The Sport Parade”) was a short film series of Warner Brothers that was regularly shown before the main studio feature, along with another Warner-Vitaphone short, Joe McDoakes comedy and/or Looney Tune / Merrie Melodie cartoon. The average running time of each film was between nine and eleven minutes.
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Lucky teter hell driver stunt show airplane stunts castle film sports parade 72332b
Overview
Virtually all of these were filmed in Technicolor. (A few early ones used Cinecolor as it gradually replaced the Vitaphone Color Parade on Warner’s short subject program.) This gave them an advantage over rival series like Paramount Sportlights with Grantland Rice, Columbia World of Sports, RKO Sportscopes, Universal Variety Views and MGM Pete Smith “Football Thrills”, which used color sparingly for special entries. Warner’s most prolific competitor in Technicolor live-action shorts, 20th Century-Fox, produced only 20 out of 100+ Movietone Sports Reviews from the late thirties through early fifties in color. In the era before television, it was considered more economical to shoot in black and white like the newsreels.
Although Warner Bros. separated this series from its less sports-oriented series Technicolor Adventure (film series) during the later 1940s, many post-war Sports Parades resembled high quality color travelogues of the period, showcasing a variety of recreational pursuits in the Caribbean, South America, Europe, Egypt, India and Australia. André de la Varre supervised many of the best international productions, while Edwin E. Olsen and ski expert Dick Durrance were particularly skilled at using hand-held cameras for up-front action shots. Howard Hill specialized in archery and Van Campen Heilner handled many fishing and camping reels for both Warner and studio rival RKO. Despite lacking high profile sports news commentators, key radio veterans like Art Gilmore and Marvin Miller put a lot of energy and enthusiasm into their narration.
The series won three Academy Awards and was nominated three other times. Despite being phased out in 1956, they were successfully reissued throughout the sixties since many of the topics had a timeless appeal and were always popular at the box office.
List of titles
Below is a listing of titles by year of release, listed by title / major credits / release date / notes of interest. Only a few have made DVD release.