What Are They Dancing To?

Here’s a Scopitone of Brook Benton lip-syncing Mother Nature, Father Time while bikini girls apparently dance to something else.

If you’re unfamiliar with Scopitones, they were music video jukeboxes typically placed in lounges and similar adult-oriented locations.  It seems that most Scopitones, like the later music-video format, were more about the girls than the songs. (I remember child-oriented ones, but their format and machines had a different name).  The videos often had the hubba-hubba vibe of 50’s-60’s softcore men’s magazines (like here and here).  Although Procol Harum did one, most rock acts snubbed Scopitones. I imagine they’d started looking dated, like something their dads watched for cheap thrills, down there with carnival peep-shows.  One novelty was a live Billy Lee Riley one, unusual in that it’s not lip-synced.

For you film nerds: I can’t verify this, but I know I read somewhere that French (who invented them) Scopitones used Pathecolor, a very early film tinting process that used stenciling.  Wikipedia claims that the last use of Pathecolor was the 1954 Mexican surrealist classic, Robinson Crusoe, but it’s often stated that it was used in that august cinematic masterpiece, Dr. Goldfoot & The Bikini Machine.