315 Messages
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7.2K Points
Films from before 1927 should not be allowed to be classified as musicals
Currently, there are 200+ films from before the advent of sound listed as "musicals" on IMDb.
(See for yourselves: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?release_date=,1927-10-05&genres=musical)
The Jazz Singer, generally considered the first 'talkie' and the first movie musical, was released on October 6, 1927. Now, I could understand it if I looked at IMDb and saw a few obscure experimental precursors to the musical being classified as such, but 206? I started trying to reclassify some of these as "music" (based on the plot), but stopped after realizing the sheer volume of them. Most of them have virtually no information online outside of IMDb, so it's virtually impossible to find out even basic plot details, much less view them and verify whether there's any sensical reason to call them "musicals".
IMDb has strict start and finish dates for the genre of film-noir (starting in 1927 and ending in 1958). Wouldn't it make sense to have a version of the same policy towards musicals? The idea that a silent film could be considered a musical is, to me, patently absurd. IMDb should make it a policy to automatically disallow any film released before The Jazz Singer to be classified as "musical".
P.S. The genres "music" and "musical" often get mixed up. While "musical" has a lot of genre conventions that depend on audiences being able to hear and listen to the music characters are directing at them, "music" is more based on theme. Thus, there's no reason that a silent film whose plot focuses on the life of a musician couldn't be classified as "music", considering that music would be a main theme. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how a silent film could contain "several scenes of characters bursting into song aimed at the viewer", which is what IMDb considers the essential requirement for a "musical".
bderoes
Champion
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5K Messages
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118.3K Points
3 years ago
There were short films released in the few years before The Jazz Singer, but a 1927 cutoff, imposing high scrutiny for titles before then, seems very reasonable.
Your post is an Idea, and you have not voted For it yet. (Perhaps it was converted to Idea after you created it.)
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Peter_pbn
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14.4K Messages
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329.9K Points
3 years ago
An example of musicals in silent film could be characters on screen being voiced by singers in the theatre. This is described in Brazil 1908-11.
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gromit82
Champion
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7.4K Messages
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276K Points
3 years ago
At the very least any pre-1927 title in the Musical genre should be strictly scrutinized by the staff for verification.
We have such titles listed in the Musical genre as The McDaniel Sisters Company (1914) (TV) which purports to be a 1914 TV movie starring and written by Hattie McDaniel. But nobody could have seen a TV movie in 1914, fourteen years before the first television station went on the air in 1928.
No company credits are provided to indicate who the distributor for this might have been. There is one External Review listed -- but it's not a review at all. As seen at the lower right of the page at https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84025887/1915-02-27/ed-1/seq-5/, it's an advertisement for a live stage performance by Hattie McDaniel and her troupe at Fern Hall, a ballroom in Denver.
In short, this entry seems to have nothing to do with anything eligible for listing in IMDb.
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