Vitaphone - Legacy

Legacy

Warner Bros. kept the "Vitaphone" trademark alive in the name of its short subjects division, The Vitaphone Corporation (officially dissolved at the end of 1959), most famous for releasing the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. In the 1950s the Warner Bros. record label boasted "Vitaphonic" high-fidelity recording. In the 1960s the end titles of Merrie Melodies cartoons (beginning with 1960's From Hare to Heir) carried the legend "A Vitaphone Release". Looney Tunes of the same period (beginning with that same year's Hopalong Casualty) were credited as "A Vitagraph Release", making further use of the name of the venerable Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn, which the Warners had bought in 1925 as a facility for working out practical sound film production techniques and filming the early musical shorts, and from which a name for the previously nameless Western Electric sound-on-disc system had been derived.

Vitaphone was among the first 25 inductees into the TECnology Hall of Fame at its establishment in 2004, an honor given to "products and innovations that have had an enduring impact on the development of audio technology." The award notes that Vitaphone, though short-lived, helped in popularizing theater sound and was critical in stimulating the development of the modern sound reinforcement system.

Though operating on principles so different as to make it unrecognizable to a Vitaphone engineer, Digital Theater Sound is a sound-on-disc system, the first to gain wide adoption since the abandonment of Vitaphone.