La Cucaracha (1934), dir. Lloyd Corrigan. Technicolor investors inveighled Pioneer Pictures to shoot the twenty-minute short, mainly to deliver the message to major studios that "three-strip" Technicolor, used in Disney cartoons since 1932, could work in live action, too.

Like ink scribbles on a picture postcard, three-strip blue (hard to control in two-strip Technicolor) courses through La Cucaracha.

Hollywood spread the news to the world at large. On screens in Omaha and Paris through the turbulent two decades that followed, "natives" and "Americans" incubated in the major studios danced and sang in black-and white and, above all, in three-strip Technicolor.