This is a mills panoram which shows the type of music that it played.
This was produced in 1939 by Mills novelty company of Chicago, Illinois. The fabulous wood cabinetry houses a 16mm projector that plays special continuous loop films (soundies) that typically show jazz and other musicians of the day.They featured most of the great musical stars of the period including Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Cab Calloway. It was a jukebox type machine which took coins, the price to watch a soundie was a dime (10c) while listening to a jukebox only cost a nickel. The film projection mechanism and amp built by the RCA. These panorams were the size of refrigirators and employed a series of mirrors to reflect the image from a projector onto a 27 inch rear projection, etched-glass screen in a tight, enclosed cabinet.The large endless reel holds around 8 nor 9 soundies so you can see multiple filsm without changing the reel. They are best known for vast library of short three minute music videos that were created for it. They were very popular within the US in the 1940's, and were often in countless soda shops, taverns, bus and train stations and other public places across the nation. However in the beginning of World War II, production of the soundies was drastically reduced and the Mills panoram's 1940 success quickly faded.
