With the coming of talking motion pictures, the musical film genre emerged from its roots: stage musicals and operettas, revues, music halls and vaudeville. They were the last of the major film genres, because they were dependent on sound captured on film. (How could a movie be "all-singing, all-dancing" without sound?) Musicals are often described as Broadway on film, although many other forms of musicals have been made (e.g., rock 'n' roll movies and disco/dance films). Recently, animated films (with musical soundtracks, such as Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), and Tarzan (1999)) have emerged as one of the major musical forms, and many of them have won Best Original Song Oscars.
The Earliest Examples of Sound/Dance Films: One of the earliest films with a famous dance sequence was The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), noted for Latin lover Rudolph Valentino's sensuous tango performed in a smoky cantina while dressed in an Argentine gaucho costume. In 1926, Warner Bros. had produced Don Juan (1926), the first full-length silent film released with a complete musical score on a Vitaphone soundtrack. The groundbreaking film cleverly synchronized canned sound effects and dubbed music to the action.
Source: www.filmsite.org = Musical/Dance Films
Ballet: For the purpose of this website ballet movies are listed in the Dance rather than the Classical Category
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