Vitaphone Varieties

Although independent producers like Lee de Forest's Phonofilm were successfully making sound film shorts as early as 1922, they were very limited in their distribution and their audio was generally not as loud and clear in theaters as Vitaphone's.

Initially thought lost, it was restored, in part by the Vitaphone Project's efforts, for a laser disc set in the 1990s and later released on DVD with the feature.

Among this later group, two 1945-46 titles, Story of a Dog and Smart as a Fox, were nominees for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in the one-reel category.

Three years later, MGM/UA issued the first group of them to laser disc, with Warner releasing the first significant number on DVD as part of a multi-disc edition of The Jazz Singer.

Warners Brothers and its Vitaphone and First National subsidiaries produced more features and shorts in two-strip Technicolor during the late twenties and early thirties than any other studio.

These included comedy acts, a series spotlighting famous songwriters and a number of sports, animal subjects and other human-interest documentary films.

In the mid-forties, the studio reverted to the old "Vitaphone Varieties" logo with a number of titles, although these black and white documentaries (all running 8–11 minutes in length) were very different than the twenties and thirties musical and comedy acts.

After a few years absence, they were revived as "Warner Novelties", consisting mostly of newsreel and earlier recycled footage stretching past the decades.

Excluded from the following list (for space reasons) are the first two Joe McDoakes comedies of 1942 that were issued under the Hollywood Novelty logo, those featuring archery expert Howard Hill and compilation director Robert Youngson.