I reviewed Ida Lupino in Woman in Hiding recently. It being a Noir Alley showing, it was a ~90-minute movie plus Eddie Muller's extended intro and outro put into a two-hour slot. This gave TCM time to include a short, which was one I'd never heard of before: Duke Ellington in Hot Chocolate.
This is only a four-minute short, so there's not much to it. We see Duke Ellington, and Ellington introduces one of his band members, saxophonist Ben Webster. As the band plays a song, we see some fairly talented dancers doing the jitterbug. Then, after the song ends, we get another shot of Ellington and that's about it. After all, it's only four minutes.
I didn't recognize the production company, and as such I was wondering where TCM got the rights to show this. Then I did a little bit of research that explained it. It turns out that Hot Chocolate was one of a whole bunch of what were called "Soundies", shorts made in the 1940s and that you could view in a nickelodeon-like device.
And wouldn't you know it, but last year, Kino Lorber released a box set of a load of these Soundies. Kino Lorber seems to be one of the DVD companies that TCM is cooperating with, much like Criterion for foreign films, which would explain why TCM was able to show this one. I think I've seen a couple of other shorts that look like they would have been Soundies as well showing up in the space at the end of the recordings of various movies on my DVR.
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