The COMMPAK 16mm film/8-track Cartridge
Donated by Brian Monaco falstaff4ever@email.msn.com

This amazing item was sent to me by Brian Monaco. It's a cartridge that has a 16mm color film loop merged with an 8-track tape. "I don't know what is exactly on the film," sez Brian, "but they are American Motors Corporation Service films for technicians [This one is on Emissions Control].  I go to school at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale and I am a automotive tech major. An instructor and I were cleaning out some cabinets and I he was going to throw out those films, but I said 'Mr. Gilbert, I'll take em'. He gave me a weird look and said 'I wouldn't let anyone see you with that stuff.'. I scored a bunch of Film strips and Chrysler Service tapes, on Beta, too."

Mike Spangler, an avid AMC fan and collector of Jefferson, WI, has an almost
complete set of these cartriges (used throughout the early '70's by AMC) and TWO players! They were used by American Motors, but NOT ONLY FOR THE SERVICE DEPARTMENT! They had players on display in the showroom, and customers could pop in a cartridge highlighting the model they wanted and view it. Timothy_Hansen@wlc.edu

POSTSCRIPT:

 Ronald  rgreagan53@go.com

And here's the player!  Thanks to Dan Jobin DJobin@kicker.com for these images.

More info on this player from Rick Sedlak KRSEDLAK@aol.com:

"They were used locally by the McDonald's restaurants for training purpose. I have a test/alignment cartridge to repair the Labelle projectors. The test film consisted of frames that were numbered 1-100 and the tape would count  the pictures as they were shown (i.e.,  the voice would count 1-2-3-4-etc and the corresponding picture with the right frame number would be projected.) By the way, Fairchild also made a filmloop with audio track similar to the Technicolor loop cartridge."

And even more info from Tim Lank  Tim_Lank-P17955@email.mot.com

I've seen more of these than I care to think about. Truckloads. I even have a few kicking around. I used to work for a company that published AV materials in these cartridges. I was the audio engineer. Many people, companies & schools used these cartridges in the late 60's and 70's for training especially.

BTW, Labelle was out of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin (outside Milwaukee). The projectors you have pictured were not the most common. I think the main projector was called a Courier but I would have to look it up. In the late 60's, there was another company making similar projectors and cartridges (not compatible) named Audiscan out of Bellevue, Washington. These are very rare. Also, the tape technology was definitely Lear, but the format was only two track. One track was the mono narration (remember these were mostly used in training and education), the other track (not played thru a speaker) was the "synch" track that had audio pulses recorded on it. There were two frequencies, one would advance the 16mm film strip a frame, the other would stop the film & narration while the trainee was working on the subject matter. The projector had a start button on the front to fire it up again. These were used by Mercedes Benz for mechanic training like the AMC stuff described on your site. Also, the military used them, a company called Instructional Concepts Inc out of Port Washington, NY made a large set of reading and math training material for schools, soldiers, etc. A subsidiary of the company called AV Labs did production work for other companies like Mercedes that had their own training material.

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