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Jukebox Manufacturing: A Visit To Wurlitzer
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Jukebox Manufacturing: A Visit To Wurlitzer

40 MIN · EN · STATUS: [ STREAMING ]
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The Wurlitzer Company's factory in North Tonawanda, New York, opens its doors for a tour of how a 1950s jukebox comes together. The footage opens in color, showing the plant grounds and surroundings, then switches to black and white for the factory floor itself, where workers assemble the coin-operated phonographs piece by piece. The camera follows the process from raw components through cabinet construction to the mechanisms that select and play records, with the emphasis on hands-on labor rather than narration or interviews. There's no host walking you through it and no talking-head explanation of the jukebox's cultural role; it's a straight industrial record of a production line at a company whose name was, at the time, nearly synonymous with the jukebox itself. As archival footage it works best as a look at mid-century manufacturing method and craftsmanship rather than as a history of the machines or the music they played.