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Sing Along With Mitch

J

JeffM

There are a number of You Tube clips available from that schlocky sixties songfest; it's pretty rough going to watch, but I had to admit I was intrigued by the way lyrics were displayed on screen. Always two lines at a time, and with a rapid "flip" action at each change. These shows were live-on-tape, so this was all done in real time, but exactly how? I have three good guesses...

a. A stack of individual art cards, each pulled away quickly to reveal the next.
b. The use of a "credit crawl" machine, masked down to two lines at a time, or...
c. A sort of tachistoscope filmstrip projector.

Are any of these right??
 
It struck me that a lot of readers of this forum might be unfamiliar with television B.C. (Before Computers) and have no idea what a "credit crawl machine" was. It took some searching, but I did find a picture of one. Here 'tis...

http://www.golden-agetv.co.uk/img/equipment/169b.jpg

The method was to prepare the titles on a long roll of black paper with white type or ink, and point a camera at this device. At the end of a show, the director would bring up that camera superimposed over the images from the others, and roll the credits in "real time."

Because the mechanisms were so similar, credit crawl machines could be (and sometimes were) converted into prompters.
 
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