I ended up with a couple of Scopitone films recently. About all I know of Scopitone is they were like music videos (on 16mm film) made to play in an old-school video jukebox during the 1960's (?).
The three I have are on 100 foot reels with a leader which has oblong "slots" cut into them, presumably for threading/loading.
Each one also has a magnetic sound track--no optical track. It looks like there is a thin balance stripe as well.
Apparently some of these were made with IB Tech stock and since the color is still beautiful it might be. No stock markings of any type found.











I believe the first three pics are Vic Damone singing "Lost & Found". The other two I think are from a group called "Back Porch Majority", one is marked on the leader as "Mighty Mississippi", not sure about the train one though.

I would like to run these through the Kodak CT-1000 which is optical only. Even though I will get no sound I would like to view the film.
My question: If I run these mag films through an optical only projector, do I risk any damage to film or projector???

They look good, got any metal? ;-)

I have over 100 of these but mine are all optical only

Dave,

Do you have the original "video jukebox" machine to play them on? I think the optical 16mm films were for the very similar Italian-produced Cinebox/Colorama machine (based on quick web research).

Of course, the great thing about your optical films is you can play them on any normal 16mm sound projector---which is very nice!

Hi Greg,
These music shorts, which appear in reverse, go back to the 1940s; Fats Waller appeared in some, and another early one was Spike Jones and His City Slickers singing 'Der Feuhrer's Face'.
I was going to say that you might possibly damage the magnetic soundtrack, but then I remembered that I have one of those B&H lacing instruction films and that has both an optical and magnetic soundtrack. I posted a pic of the reel somewhere in the forum, but not sure if I included a pic of the soundtrack?

I can see no reason why you would damage the magnetic track in an optical only projector. After all, there are many opt/mag projectors which can run both without problems.

In the forties they were american productions named "Soundies", after their main producing company. There were also other smaller scale companies. The Scopitones are French,from the early sixties.