This Week in Universal News: New Cocktail Gadgets, 1935

This week in Universal News, fashionable ladies demonstrate the latest gadgets at the National Wine and Liquor Show in Chicago, including cocktail mittens and a portable keg tap that makes beach picnics a breeze. The soundtrack for this reel no longer exists, but you can read the script below to get a sense of how audiences of the time would have experienced it.

From the release sheet:

NEW BAR GADGETS EXHIBITED: Chicago, Illinois-Mechanical aids to new habits of drinking are demonstrated by pretty misses in costumes especially designed for the cocktail hour. The scene at the end of the clip shows a woman wearing a dress with the names of different liquors, or literally a cocktail dress.

From the production file:

Click through to read the narration script, a press release from the hotel that held the event, and a mounting order sheet for this week’s newsreel.

You may view the complete newsreel, including stories about an elephant race in Ohio, Austrian soldiers dragging artillery up a snowy mountain, war in Cuba, bad weather in the Midwest, and tryouts for the Seils-Sterling Circus,  here.

About the Universal Newsreel Collection at NARA:

The Universal Newsreel Collection is one of the most used motion picture collections at the National Archives and Records Administration. Universal Newsreels were shown in movie theaters twice a week, from 1929 until 1967, and covered a wide range of American life and history during that time period. Each release usually contained five to seven stories averaging two minutes in length.

In 1974, Universal deeded its edited newsreel and outtake collection to the United States through the National Archives (NARA), and did not place any copyright restrictions on its use (some stories may contain other underlying intellectual property or proprietary use rights).

While Universal disposed of many of the soundtracks, leaving the newsreels incomplete, supplementary material like scripts, shot lists, and event programs can be found in the production files, available for research at Archives II in College Park, Maryland.

Learn more about the Universal Newsreel Collection in this post and in this Prologue article. Watch other Universal Newsreels in our research room, in OPA, and on this playlist.

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