Dance Hall

Despite what is written in the trivia section, this film was not post dubbed. Picture and sound were recorded at the same time. Here is my theory on the reason for the out of sync sound and picture.

It was made at RKO which used the photophone system. Sync should not ordinarily be a problem. It probably was released in two versions: sound on film, and sound on disk. It was common practice at this time to do that because not every theater had sound on film projectors. The first system to be used was sound on disc. All of the Warner Bros releases until about 1930 to 1931 were made available to theaters on sound on disc first and latter on sound on film. My guess is that the print used for this video transfer was one that had no sound recorded on the film. The sound was probably only available on disc. Somehow during the transfer the disc and picture got out of sync. Or a disc may have been made from the original sound on film print. That process could have been very tricky in the early days of sound.

The recorded sound track was recorded very badly anyway. It is almost completely unintelligible. THis was also common at the time. The sync problems can be corrected by anyone with some editing software on a computer, but it is such a terrible film that I can't imagine anyone wanting to do the job!