" You Ought To Be in Pictures " Question

[Emmanuel Cruz]

In " You Ought To Be in Pictures " it looks like if Leon Schelesinger's voice is dubbed. What's the deal? I think it isn't along the lines of " Dubbed Version ". If it is then why Mike Maltese (the guard) didn't look like if he was dubbed even if Mel Blanc dubbed the voices?

Lots of dubbeds, ain't it?

[J Lee]

Well, the live action film in the cartoon was shot silent, so everyone's voice was dubbed, and then post-synched to the film and animation later.

Although it was originally said Blanc did all the voices in the cartoon, judging from some other sound-on-film recordings of Schlesinger that have turned up, Leon apparently did his own voice. The voice of the director on the studio lot also doesn't sound like Blanc, but I'm not sure whose voice that one might be.

[Paul Penna]

This tends to be a controversial question. First, you need to distinguish between "dubbing" and "looping" a voice. "Dubbing" generally means someone else is providing the voice for an on-screen performer, such as Marni Nixon singing for Deborah Kerr in "The King and I" and for Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Lady," as well as English-speaking actors voicing all those foreign actors in foreign-language films. "Looping" means the original performer later, in a sound studio, re-records the dialog he or she spoke before the camera. This is usually done because the original recording made at the time of filming proved unsuitable for some reason, such as being out of mic range, or a plane flying overhead in an outdoor shot.

My belief is that what you're hearing is indeed Leon's voice, but that he had to loop it in several sections. It's certainly not Mel Blanc.

[Paul Penna]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by J Lee
[B]Well, the live action film in the cartoon was shot silent, so everyone's voice was dubbed, and then post-synched to the film and animation later.

The fascinating sidelight to this is that the acoustic of the long-shots of Leon in his office sounds nothing like what you'd get from a regular sound booth or soundstage; the boxy, echoey sound is precisely what you'd expect of a recording made in a small, hard-walled room. That's the part I can't figure. I really doubt they'd have gone to any trouble to deliberately fake that kind of sound; that degree of verisimilitude would have been wasted on the less-sophisticated ears of the general audiences of the time.

[J Lee]

Either they doing non-optical wire recordings at the time or the segments in Leon's office may actually have been shot sound-on-film, unlike the rest of the cartoon (Leon may have gotten J.L. to give him a few hundred feet of spare SOF lying around the main lot).

The echo-y voice does sound different from the regular sound booth recordings, and I doubt that Friz was purposely going for "realistic" sound effects in the cartoon by adding in echo in the post-production. I also dout they'd have two cameras going at the same time, one recording just the image and the other recording the sound, the way Freleng and Avery said they used film stock to record Joe Daugherty's Porky Pig voice.

[Paul Penna]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by J Lee
[B]Either they doing non-optical wire recordings at the time or the segments in Leon's office may actually have been shot sound-on-film, unlike the rest of the cartoon (Leon may have gotten J.L. to give him a few hundred feet of spare SOF lying around the main lot).

But shooting sound-on-film was not the norm for studio filming, which was done with the action camera synched to a separate optical-sound film recorder. I imagine all that gear would be too bulky to cram into an office building. Maybe they ran a sound cable off-site to the sound recorder and shot with a non-synched silent camera in the office? This might be one explanation for the less-than-perfect lip-sync of those shots.

[J Lee]

I would guess for the scenes inside the studio, they could have rigged up whatever method was either the most practical, or the one Leon would put up with finacially, for SOF recording. I doubt any of the equipment came from off-site, and I'm not sure where the sound recorder would have been in relation to Schlesinger's office.

Off-site, silent film shooting would have obviouly been necessary because it was both less bulky (for the shots in the car going down Sunset Blvd.) and obtrusive (for the scenes shot on the main lot in Burbank) to other action going on at the studio.

[Sveven Dvorking]

Were the voices accidentally or purposely altered for the colorized version? I would assume not, but I would like to know if that occurred.

[lislebartman]

Aside from the obvious Mel Blanc-dubbed voices, I have one question re CN's prints of "You Ought To Be In Pictures":

How come the B & W print shown on LNB&W is time-compressed, while the computer-colored print is not? I also find it strange that the print on the "Porky Pig's Screwball Comedies" tape is also time-compressed. Why not broadcast the B & W print they used for colorizing? All these questions, yet no answers...:confused: