Scope Gem was a marketing series title that Warner Brothers used for documentary film shorts produced in Warnercolor and the wide-screen CinemaScope format.
Carl Dudley, who contributed to several of these, also independently produced some in Vistarama (which used 16mm instead of 35mm size, perfected by cameraman Edwin Olsen) for Warner distribution just prior to the official inauguration of the Scope Gem series in 1954–1955.
[1][2] Narration was handled by longtime veterans Art Gilmore and Marvin Miller, accompanied by the full orchestra scores of Howard Jackson and William Lava.
Although seldom shown on TV on account of their frame format and never released on video, they were nonetheless successfully re-released to theaters through 1967, prompting a young Leonard Maltin to write in similar vocabulary in his The Great Movie Shorts (1972) "These are among the most breathtaking travelogues of all time".
The top cameraman of the series, André de la Varre, left Warner to rejoin the Burton Holmes company that same year, but did supply an occasional travelogue for the studio in the 1960s under its World Wide Adventures logo.