Warner Brothers to release DAMN YANKEES! on October 12th. (1 Viewer)

[Will Krupp]

WOW!! I've been out of town since Thursday and what GREAT news to come home to!! This has always been one of my favorites....I just SWOON when Gwen Verdon sings "A Little Brains...." sigh

About the alleged stereo tracks; I think, and someone can correct me if I'm wrong, that it was mentioned on another thread that special (big city) venues were supposed to have run magnetic stereo in a double system, as the flat 1.85:1 35mm prints had no room for magnetic stripes. I would assume that most areas ran the movie with a mono track.

I don't know if this has been verified, but any information would be supah dupah.

What about it Joe Caps?? You know your stuff when it comes to soundtracks....., any wisdom for us?

 

[William Miller]

I will have to add a footnote to my earlier post about the original ad saying that "Every song and every scene that made the show New York's greatest" was false advertising. I guess one could interpret that statement as meaning the movie has the most famous songs and scenes that made it the greatest but not every song and scene.

So, I will withdraw my accusation of "false advertising" and will now only accuse Warner Brothers of "tricky advertising" back then.

 

[Joe Caps]

I was partly raised in a small town in upstate New York. The great thing about it was the wonderful movie theaters we had here (all now closed) and all owned and run by the same genttlman, Tom Roberts. He loved showmanship in his theaters and he loved stereo films.
The Two biggest theaters he had were the Elmira theater which was enormous. It had one of those big Fox curved Miracle Mirror Screen and four chanel stereo.
His second biggest was the Capitol theater. This he reserved for second run double feature movies and all were in stereo whenever possible.
One such double feature he brought back constantly up till 1966 was Pajama Game and Damn Yankees. Why wouldn't a 1:85 film not be able to hold stereo tracks. Damn Yankees prints (the one with the collector in New York) is a three track print (three channels behind the screen, no surrounds) with no optical track on it.
Jack Warner hated using Cinemascope because it was a process he lost on acquiring by one day. He seemed to like stereo sound a lot because in the Warners production filesw at usc, there are many references to what should be done with stereo sound for many pictures.
However, The Pajama game and Damn Yankees production files are easily viewable at USC. In both, there are notes about stereo sound and there is the usual memos from steve Trilling to Jack Warner as to how many stereo prints should be made.
Also, in the production fiels for damn Yankees, there are many memos from music director Ray Heindorf to Warner about where to do stereo recording for Damn Yankees. Hollywood was in the middle of a musicians strike
so the vocals were recorded in Hollywood with piano backup and the tracks were sent to Italy and the orchestra ia an Italian Orchestra, NOT the Warners Orchestra.

 

[Will Krupp]

See Joe, I KNEW you'd have the answers (batting eyes)!! I wonder if the three track stereo is lost...

 

[Drew Salzan]

If you read the liner notes on the RCA soundtrack CD, the original album was never released in stereo. In 1958, stereo records were in their infancy. RCA CHOSE not to release a stereo version, even though they had multi-track masters. The CD is in fact the first time the score was made available to the public in stereo. So we know at least that the score was recorded stereophonically.