Bubbles (Warner Bros., Vitaphone Corporation, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, June 7) my husband Charles and I watched a 1930 Warner Bros. short called Bubbles that was filmed in two-strip Technicolor but now only exists in black-and-white. What makes this one interesting is it was one of three short films made featuring Judy Garland (though she was still using her birth name, Frances Gumm), and apparently the only one that survives with both picture and sound intact. The first one, The Big Revue of 1929, is totally lost, and for the second, Blue Butterfly, we have the Vitaphone soundtrack record but not the film itself. In Bubbles Judy sang a song called “The Land of Let’s Pretend,” and she’s not very good: her voice was still that of a little girl and her intonation was all over the place. I was amused that one of the other songs in the film contained the word “rainbow,” since even though Judy (or Frances) didn’t sing it here the word “rainbow” would become crucial to her later career. Not only did she sing “Over the Rainbow” in the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz, two years later MGM dredged up the 1920’s song “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” for her and also commissioned a song for her called “The End of the Rainbow” (you get the idea?). Somehow in the five years between 1930 and 1935, for which we have the next surviving recording of Judy’s voice – a broadcast aircheck of “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” from a show in which the announcer broke the news that Judy had just signed a seven-year contract with MGM – her voice developed into that of a fully mature woman and gained the artistry and precision that would ultimately make her a star, albeit a highly troubled one.