''Spooney Melodies'' was a series of

live action Live action (or live-action) is a form of cinematography or videography that uses photography instead of animation. Some works combine live-action with animation to create a live-action animated film. Live-action is used to define film, video ...

musical shorts produced for

Warner Bros. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (commonly known as Warner Bros. or abbreviated as WB) is an American film and entertainment studio headquartered at the Warner Bros. Studios complex in Burbank, California, and a subsidiary of Warner Bros. D ...

aimed to showcase popular tunes of the day. Only the first entry in the series bore the title "Spooney Melodies." Subsequent releases, of which there were four, bore the series title "Song'nata." As noted above, only five were made in 1930 and 1931. According to The Vitaphone Project, which tracks the status of early Warner Bros. sound films, all five films survive; the four "Song'nata" entries were not produced in the sound-on-disk Vitaphone format, but all survive in

35mm 35 mm may refer to: * 135 film, a type of still photography format commonly referred to as 35 mm film * 35 mm movie film, a type of motion picture film stock * 35MM 35 mm may refer to: * 135 film, a type of still photography format ...

form. The first short, which is the one most widely available, is approximately six minutes long and features

art deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...

style animations combined with film of the live-action performer (in this case, organist Milton Charles). The music for the first short was arranged by Frank Marsales, who was also the composer of the music for the earliest Looney Tunes, produced at approximately the same time as "Cryin' for the Carolines." For its time those shorts are considered to be innovative and could be considered to be one of the earliest

music video A music video is a video of variable duration, that integrates a music song or a music album with imagery that is produced for promotional or musical artistic purposes. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a music marketing device ...

s. Production on this series ceased in 1931, and it was replaced with an animation-only series called '' Merrie Melodies'' in 1931, also produced by Leon Schlesinger.

Spooney Melodies/Song'nata — 5 titles

References

American film series Film series introduced in 1930 {{short-film-stub