Nicky Rides Again

This was made for Metropolitan Life Insurance in 1934, by New York based Audio Productions. Directed by F. Lyle Goldman.

Animated figure Talkie gets a visit from his friend Mutie in search for a job. Talkie takes him to the Western Electric sound lab...

An evil knight kidnaps the princess so a peasant boy with the help of Nicky Nome must rescue her.

This silent educational film from Bray Studios is all about that “marvellous sound producing instrument, the voice box”. Produced six years before the introduction of “talkies”, there's something pleasingly odd about a film dedicated to the mechanics of the human voice being entirely devoid of its subject matter — where the voiceover would soon boom we are treated to just the poignant silence of intertitles. Founded in 1912, Bray Productions was initially devoted to making animated series, including Max Fleischer's marvellous Out of the Inkwell series. The Human Voice utilises a range of animations, often combining them with filmed footage of a man's head to reveal the subdermal mechanisms at play, and at one point we take a slightly terrifying “trip down ‘Throat Lane’” to find an animated glottis in song behind an overlaid stave.