Short Subjects
Today, short subjects. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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I finally broke down and saw some in-theater movies this year. Before each we watched roughly an hour of advertisements and previews. The form of the previews was curious. All were extracts of the noisiest and most violent moments in upcoming movies.
Short segments have preceded movies during most of their existence. But they were far different at my old Uptown Theater back in the nineteen-thirties and forties. There we’d invest fifteen cents in a ticket, and another nickel each for popcorn and a box of Milk Duds.
The Uptown Theatre
Then, in to watch actor Ronald Reagan shooting down Japanese Zeros. Joan Blondell singing and solving murder mysteries. Tarzan saving elephants from ivory hunters. (No CGI has ever managed to engage me the way they did.)
But we also had all the old short subjects: Sure, we too saw previews. But they used to tell us what the coming movie was about. The most important short subjects were newsreels. This was what we could see in motion before we had even TV. Mussolini invading Ethiopia, Japan ravaging China, the Hindenburg Zeppelin burning. Of course we also saw the latest golf tournament or Miss America contest.
Newsreel lead for Orson Wells Martian invasion story
And those shorts included episodes of serialized adventure movies ... Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, The Lone Ranger ... We also saw travelogues, short comedies, music, humor, and more.
We had a popular model for these movie short subjects in the print world. You see, they were really movie versions of magazines. Outside of movies, we had three current mass media: Radio, newspapers, and magazines. Radio gave us the bare bones. Newspapers fleshed things out, but they were largely serious reading. (Except for their wildly popular comic strips.)
But magazines! They added all the dimensions of human interest. Current events, short stories, fine photographs, useful advertising, and insights into the texture of American life.
Now we took all that and let it both move and talk to us. Robert Benchley’s sardonic commentaries on the absurdity lurking in everyday life. Each of James FitzPatrick’s travelogues took us, for nine minutes, one at a time, to countless countries.
We never knew, from one week to the next, what delights would almost outweigh the featured movie we were there to see. Of course, all this magic content seems to lose its luster when we compare it with the vastly larger meal that our electronic media now feed us. But that comparison was not there to be made.
The old short subjects were grist for the mill of our brains. They gave us things to think about. Then, in the days that followed, we were at the mercy of our own hungry – and very active -- brains.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme music)
Uptown Theater memorabilia
Uptown Theatre in St. Paul, MN - Cinema Treasures
The Uptown - Saint Paul Almanac
Leonard Maltin, Selected Short Subjects. CreateSpace Publishing, 2015. Available online in these two links.
Full text of "Leonard Maltin - Selected Short Subjects - History of Hollywood"
The great movie shorts : Maltin, Leonard : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Robert Benchley's Hollywood Short Subjects
James A. FitzPatrick - Wikipedia
Click here for a great collection of Fitzpatricks travelogues
Uptown Theater image is courtesy of the St. Paul Almanac. Newsreel image and FitzPatrick image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
This Episode first aired August 31, 2026.