I, as a cinefile, know that the colorizations are wrong, and that they look awful. But there is something so ridiculous about how they look that I can't help but collect them. To this date, I have over 30 VHS tapes of black and white films that have been colorized, from Hal Roach's It's a Wonderful Life, to King Kong, to all of the Cary Grant films, and my absolute favorite, Metropolis. Growing up in Milwaukee with parents who were incredibly against cable television and where weekend afternoon syndication goes for the cheapest product possible, a lot of colorized films would pass through the stations. Of course they looked goofy, and I hardly ever wanted to tune in, but I couldn't help it. It was like hearing that my mom was going to pop a blister on my sister's finger. I knew it was going to be a painful disgusting experience, but I couldn't help but watch-- I was so curious!
You can imagine how happy I was when I got my VHS to DVD recorder and found that most of the MGM/UA colorized VHS tapes were not macrovision encoded, meaning I could transfer them to DVD without any issues. King Kong was at the top of the list. The Turner colorizations seemed to favor a yellow palate for some reason. During a dissolve, the color will switch to black and white, and come back as color as soon as the optical trick is finished. As you can see from the posted clip, the palate of colors wasn't a wide variety either. And for being of a limited variety, there were some WACKY colors chosen. The cute orange masks that the plane pilots wear always geeks me out. Isn't it interesting that the lead female has a dress that is the exact same color?
Leonard Maltin, bless his heart, once said in an interview, 'if you're bothered by the color, you can just turn the color down on your television set.' Well, here's the issue with that. To do a colorization back in the 80s and 90s, the film needed to be transferred to a 1" video (this VHS has 1" video overhead plastered all over the right edge of the screen), put through certain filters, and have the grain washed out before the color is added to the image. Not to mention, the colors chosen are so bright and smudge the image so badly, that when you turn the color off, you have a terribly washed out, soft, blurry image.
Still, I do enjoy these colorized films for the simple reason that they are a part of our cinematic rerelease history. Just as the cropping of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz for rereleases was done, and years later these and a large batch of films were upmixed to 5.1 stereo for home video, we need to remember that there was a point in time when this was how these films WERE rereleased to the public, and while no one is happy to admit it, for a lot of people, this is how they remembered seeing the films on television, whether that was how the public wanted to see them or not. A former coworker of mine once told me that she had seen Arsenic and Old Lace colorized for so many years without knowing that it was colorized, and when she found out it was actually a black and white film, she was shocked.
Here's an interesting fact I'll bet you did not know. For Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, the first couple seasons were originally broadcast in black and white and were later syndicated in colorized form. For the last 20 years or so, many people have seen these episodes colorized, not in black and white. So, when the DVD sets came out, it was no surprise that the colorized sets actually outsold the black and white sets!
Colorizing is wrong, it's bad, it's sinful, it's immoral. Is it? Let's take a look at an example where this so called evil force has been used for good. The BBC has a series of programs which were originally televised in color but only black and white copies of the program exist. You can read more about these tests here:
http://www.techmind.org/colrec/
In a case like this, by studying sources and restoring the color back into the program, the engineers of the project were able to actually make a closer representation of the most original form of the program than when it was first released. Take a peak:
A totally different project done than the Turner colorizations, mainly because the proper research was done in this case. For Turner's work, the idea of turning Frank Sinatra's eyes from blue to brown didn't even phase them! This was noted in a Siskel and Ebert at the Movies episode about the dangers of colorizing movies. The value of these horrible blotch jobs, still, lies in the fact that they are now incredibly rare and out of print. Beyond the fact that VHS is so obsolete now, which is really the only format these existed on, only a select number of each of these were made as they failed so terribly with consumers and nobody wanted to pick them up. Beyond Ebay, it is hard to come across these unless you're a dedicated thrift shopper like myself. Still, when you do, don't turn your nose up. You might be picking up a one of a kind item that people will want to look back at one day...wondering of course how a video distribution copy could ever allow that to hit sales shelves, much like Debbie Reynolds workout video from the 1980s.
Incidentally, if there are people reading this who are shaking their fists in anger because I am attracting attention to colorized movies, I encourage you to channel your anger to another source. There still are colorizations being released, and they look just as terrible as the Ted Turner releases. Sony Pictures released a box set of very orange versions of The Three Stooges. Reefer Madness has now been colorized and released on DVD, with different colors of smoke blowing through the air. Some films, such as It's a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th St, and Night of the Living Dead, which have established their mark with audiences who remember watching them on TV in color, have now been released in NEW colorizations on DVD. And, while they may look a little better, they still will make you cringe.
Signed,
The Celluloid Avenger
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