Chi Chi Castenango

Marilyn Hare sings and dances about this mythical tow where they don't care about money in this very late soundie.

They may not have cared about money in the town this song is named for, but they did at the soundie corporation. They had begun manufacturing their devices to play these short films in 1940, and kept up a steady stream of production, more than two thousand soundies. The problem was that the Second World War came along, The Mills Panaram was an expensive and complicated piece of equipment to build, and from 1942 through 1945, production was geared towards war material This meant they could expand their audience (it undoubtedly contracted a bit, given that machines fall out of repair), meaning they couldn't make money. By 1946, inflation was up, and the prospects of future profits was gone. So they stopped producing new soundies in 1946, released the last match of them in the spring of 1947, and went out of business.

But not before they had filmed those thousands of soundies, recording contemporary artists at work. Like this one.