Mascot Pictures

Mascot Pictures Corporation was an American minor film company of the 1920s and 1930s best known for producing and distributing film serials and B-westerns. Mascot's serial The King of the Kongo (1929) was the first serial to include sound, beating Universal Studios by several months.

Mascot was formed in 1927 by film producer Nat Levine. In 1935 it merged with several other companies to form Republic Pictures.

The company's logo featured a roaring tiger resting on top of a model of the planet Earth.

Early years

Mascot was created by Nat Levine, a former personal secretary to Marcus Loew, in 1927 after the success of his independent serial The Silent Flyer (1926).

In the beginning the company operated out of the upstairs offices of a contractor's business on Santa Monica Boulevard. It rented all of its equipment and facilities.

In 1929 the studio made serial history with the production of The King of the Kongo. This was the first serial, from any production company, to be made with sound. Mascot's first all-talking production was The Phantom of the West (1931)

Sennett Studios

It was from small Mascot Pictures, but Ladies Crave Excitement (1935) still packed "Bursting Action, Deep Drama...And Up To Date Romance" into its 73 minutes. Supervising editor Joseph H. Lewis would soon become a prolific director of B westerns. His later film noirs, including the independently produced Gun Crazy (1949), would become renowned.

By 1933 Mascot was successful enough to rent, and later buy, Sennett Studios after the original owner, silent-film comedy producer-director Mack Sennett, went bankrupt because of the Great Depression. This made the company a true film studio. That studio lot is now CBS Studio Center.

Mascot was responsible for the popularity of the concept of the "singing cowboy" and the "musical western". In 1935 the studio produced The Phantom Empire with the then untried Gene Autry as the lead.

Republic Pictures

Mascot's film developer was Consolidated Film Industries, known as CFI. In 1935, under pressure from that company's owner, Herbert Yates, Mascot merged with CFI and Monogram Pictures, Liberty Pictures, Chesterfield Pictures and Invincible Pictures to form the larger Republic Pictures. Mascot became the serial and B-Western arm of the company, along with its studio. Along with other things, Monogram provided its distribution network, and technical and financial elements came from CFI.

Legacy

Several careers began at Mascot Pictures.

Actors

• Gene Autry
• Smiley Burnette
• John Wayne

Production crew

• Ford Beebe
• B. Reeves Eason
• Joseph Kane
• The Lydecker brothers
• William Witney

Filmography

Additionally,

• The Silent Flyer (1926) was created by Nat Levine but was not in the strict sense of the word a Mascot production.

See also

• List of film serials by studio includes a list of serials produced by Mascot.

Further reading

• The Vanishing Legion: A History of Mascot Pictures 1927–1935; Tuska, Jon; 1999 (McFarland Classics); ISBN 978-0-7864-0749-1

External links

• Mascot Pictures at the Internet Movie Database
• Mascot Pictures at (re)Search my Trash
• Nat Levine & Mascot Pictures at B-Westerns