The News Parade

A staple feature of the movie experience for audiences in the era before television was the newsreel.  Performing much the same function as the television nightly news, these short-subject films presented a cavalcade of stories on national and world events, sport, and human interest, and themselves were a powerful draw for audiences and a guaranteed revenue stream for theater owners.  Cities even had dedicated newsreel theaters running all the informational shorts produced by Fox, Universal, Paramount, and Pathé, in a daily rotation for eager moviegoers trying to stay caught-up with events.  Most newsreels ran around ten to twelve minutes in length, and featured about six to twenty items per short.  But each story featured in the newsreel had around ten minutes or so of footage shot for it so as to provide editors with their choice of prime clips for each spot in the production, which means most of the material ended up on the cutting room floor.  Some companies archived the unused footage —which could be recycled for movie productions as stock filler— while others simply threw away the discards to save storage space in their vaults.

The reason for this particular blog entry however is not to go into a rambling history of the newsreel and its eventual demise as television steadily supplanted its function.  As I write, it is Mardi Gras back home in New Orleans.  By chance while doing a Google search, I stumbled upon a YouTube video of nine minutes of unused footage from British Pathé of the 1947 Rex parade which did not make the final cut for the short which went out about that time of year then.  Given the day, it is altogether appropriate to link the page so readers can enjoy a look into carnival past which was rescued from the cutting room floor and preserved for posterity, and is now available for online viewing thanks to the whole British Pathé library being made available to the worldwide web.  So draw up your chair, sit down with chips, popcorn, or if you have it —king cake, and enjoy: