Nursery Favorites

Film buffs and theater historians alike will marvel at the virtually prehistoric talkie Nursery Favorites, an experiment produced by the Edison Studios. This nine-minute "Kinetophone" reel preserves a brief stage performance by ten actors and one dog, filmed and recorded -- amazingly -- in 1913, some fifteen years before commercial production of talkies began in earnest. Several of these films were made by Edison during 1912-3, and the director of most of them, including Nursery Favorites, was a man named Allen Ramsey. Other Kinetophone subjects made at the time included scenes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and the opera La Boheme, as well as a minstrel show, and a variety of dramatic and comic sketches. Documentation about the production of the films is sketchy.

The performance is akin to what the English call a "panto," a traditional holiday show geared for children that features skits, songs, and dancing. The actors appear to be seasoned professionals. Whether they are on a stage or working in a specially constructed set is hard to tell, but I would guess it's the latter; at any rate, the set is fairly spare, consisting mainly of a mantle piece and a couple of stools. There is no camera movement, and no evidence of an audience present.

Nursery Favorites opens with three men dressed like musketeers, later identified as the Fiddlers Three, who enter holding tankards of ale. They sing for a few moments, then drink and hurl their mugs to the floor with a crash. They sing of an evil giant, who then lumbers in chanting Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum, etc. The Queen of the Fairies dances on, saying that she'll cast a spell over the giant to make him peaceful, and she does so. They are joined by King Cole, Mother Goose, a sailor and Miss Muffett (as the set starts getting a little crowded), and more vignettes are enacted. Mother Goose has a shrill singing voice that doesn't record well, but the gent playing King Cole sings in a middle range that sounds considerably better. He also performs a charming little song and dance reminiscent of Gilbert & Sullivan, in which he confesses that he's not really a merry old soul, actually "detests a jest," etc. This performer is quite good, and his dance is the highlight of the film. At the finale the troupe is joined by a trained dog, who dances in on his hind legs, but I'm not sure who or what he's supposed to represent. Dancing dogs, I suppose.

The sound quality is about what you'd find on the gramophone records of the period: rather tinny and hollow. Some portions are difficult to decipher, but when the actors sing still-familiar passages about Little Miss Muffett, Mistress Mary Quite Contrary, etc., or when the giant intones the ever-popular I-smell-the-blood-of-an-Englishman refrain, we can understand the lyrics plainly enough.

Nursery Favorites is a brief but intriguing antique. It's unfortunate that more of these experimental films have not survived, as they provide a fascinating look into a venerable theatrical tradition, but happily this short can still be seen -- and heard -- today.

P.S. I'm happy to add, as of 2018, that this film along with several other Edison Kinetophone shorts have been restored by the Library of Congress, and released on DVD from Undercrank Productions, in association with Greenbriar Picture Shows. And they're amazing!

The 5,5 minute version of this short film is represented on a wonderful double disc Les Premiers Pas du Cinema (The Firsts of the Cinema), dedicated to the earliest experiments in colour and sound. The oldest colour films and surviving soundies are well represented on these discs. Nursery Favourites is a marvel. Even though it's presented as a pre-recorded number (singers miming to a commercial record), I strongly disagree. Having watched this performance many times, it is quite clear that this is a live recording - we see the performers and hear them at the same time. The way the singers sing, breathe, bump against the objects, drop things on the ground and add bits of spoken dialog strongly suggests that somewhere is a hidden orchestra and everything is done live in front of a camera. Which probably makes this the first time ever a live performance is recorded on a sound stock. Which makes this marvel from 1913 one of the most fascinating film-sound documents of all times.

Thomas A Edison brings sound to the movies in 1913! What appears to be a single stage setting to show off the way sound could be used in movies, unfortunately this experiment while historic (and forgotten) wasn't practical to utilize at that time in Hollywood.

This all-sound short from Edison is one of a small number of early experimental films you can find on YouTube. While it's not among the very earliest sound films, it did come out 14 years before the ultra-famous film "The Jazz Singer", which is the first full-length talking film (though it was also partially silent).

The film suffers a lot from changing sensibilities and styles. While it must have wowed audiences of the day, today it seems incredibly dated. It consists of a few actors in nice costumes standing around singing songs about various nursery rhymes and fairy tales. It's done VERY fast (too fast if you ask me) and is pretty weird stuff...but it IS very important historically speaking...even if it probably would bore most folks today.

... and it gets a 9/10 from me just for its novelty. It was one of Edison's experiments in synchronizing speech in motion pictures, and it turns out Edison far underestimated the difficulty of the task.

I got interested in this one watching the 13 part "Silent Hollywood" documentary with Edna's sister, Viola Dana, talking about this short, with just a small section of the short being shown. It is available for viewing in its entirety on youtube - at least today it is. Edison's sound system would not amplify the sound to the point it could be heard in a theatre, and projected at the wrong speed female voices come out quite deep.

It really has no narrative. It's just a 6 minute musical with the queen of the fairies calling forth characters from nursery rhymes to sing and dance. Old King Cole is particularly entertaining with his nimble dancing. There are just a couple of questions I have. Who was in charge of the art design? The queen of the fairies apparently lives in a very oddly decorated chimney, and dances in and out of the fireplace to cast her spells. The fireplace is decorated with what appears to be a human skull, and the skeletal remains of two dinosaur heads, one on each side. That's pretty scary stuff for children's' fare. Also, why does the queen of the fairies live in a chimney in the first place?