Great post, Pils!!! That is something I have often wondered about (the looping) of Curly's sounds. I wondered how that was done before tape was used. I have seen the interview in question, and I thought they were like Edison cylinders. Ahh.....another mystery sol-ved! (my best Clousseau)
Thank you, M.J.! It's easy to spot the looping of Curly's woo-woos, because each group of them in a given scene sounds exactly the same (a hilarious effect, and I wonder who came up with the idea in the first place?). Another example is in "False Alarms," where the birthday cake falls out the window and Curly races down the stairs trying to save it, woo-wooing all the way.
Considering that sound film had only been in general use since 1929 (inventor Lee De Forest had come up with a workable movie sound system in the early 20's, but it didn't catch on), Columbia's and Hal Roach's technicians in partucular were quick to understand the creative possibilities of sound effects; the early Laurel & Hardy sound shorts had some very funny sound effects in them, too.
"The Jazz Singer" with Al Jolson (1927) is usually cited as the first sound film, but it's mostly silent except when Jolie sings, courtesy of the extremely primitive Vitaphone system... and as much as I like his singing, whether he was any kind of a "jazz" singer is debatable, at best!
The original Vitaphone sound projection setup looked like something designed by Rube Goldberg; I've seen a photo of it, but I don't have one to post here. The system used large phonograph records, which were synchronized— via a gear train— to the projector. Sound engineers weren't able to get more playful with sounds until the optical soundtrack, imprinted on the film itself, was invented in the early 30's. At that point, sound became much easier to handle, even though it still was all cut-and-paste work with glue, razor blades, and a splicing block.
As an aside, I was racking my brain all day today trying to remember the name of that Mercury Records 35mm LP series, until it finally came to me: it was called "Living Presence." The records featured such prominent classical musicians of the time as conductors Antal Dorati and Frederick Fennell, and organist Marcel Dupre. The microphones and the recording equipment were so sensitive that on a Dupre recording session made at St. Thomas's Church on Fifth Avenue in New York, Dupre had to stop playing every ten minutes or so because the sound of the subway trains running under the street outside was showing up as rumble on the masters!
I got most of the above information from my late Uncle Johnny, who was an audio engineer for the old Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J. (now known as Lucent Technologies). He worked on some of the early communications satellites like Echo and Telstar. Tip 'o the hat, there...
