First motion pictures went talkie, then everybody got on board the color train, leaving those black and white gems to gather dust because later generations found the lack of color "uncool".
This video shows a side-by-side comparison of the black and white original versus the colorized version of "Smile Darn Ya, Smile" Here's how this Merry Melodies short got it's color:
...in 1992, Ted Turner paid to colorized a batch of black and white Merrie Melodies from 1931-33. This was back before computers were employed to add colors, so the cartoons were shipped to South Korea, traced frame-by-frame (well, almost), new cels were inked and painted and shot under the camera – creating a “color” cartoon from a “worthless” black & white print.
I can't believe they would go through so much trouble just to add color, and the end result looks a bit too wonky to me. But what do you guys think-with digital colorization available now, should we colorize black and white films or not?
--via Cartoon Brew
Would you assume that a charcoal rendering by Picasso should be colored because he couldn't get his hands on some paint? If you had books with black and white engraved by plates by Gustav Dore or Hans Holbein, would you automatically assume they need to colored-in?
Sure, I'm obscenely rich, I can fix that stuff for them.
anyway, i'm not militant about it, but overall don't really see the point in colorizing film. it seems to destroy a lot of the artistry in it, especially because production crews had to go to great lengths to balance contrast (ie, if you saw a color photo of many of the actors, they'd often have on tons of strangely-colored makeup to make the contrast look correct in black and white.)
i don't have a problem with "cleaning up" black and white films (like correcting balance, saturation, that sort of thing), or fixing audio which seems to lose a LOT of high end as it ages. but i think of that more as maintenance and preservation, rather than fundamentally changing the whole film, like colorization does. celluloid film does not age well, especially if it's just tossed in the corner of a warehouse somewhere. i'm all for cleaning up and digitizing classic films, but i still don't understand the point behind colorizing them, since it doesn't seem to benefit anyone in any way.
The color one lost a lot of detail in the conversion, corners seem to have been cut.
I'm again colorization and remakes. the new generation that can't stand the black and whites or that feel the need to remake films, they can go blow themselves and find something of their own. Stop messing with the past.
Actual colorizing I find almost always looks fake, especially in skin tone, and almost always ruins the intended artistry, the men and women who had to figure out exactly how different colours would be rendered on different types of black and white film.
If they are to do colour it shouldn't be done carelessly (like some sloppy 2D to 3D conversions,) If they would put as much or more attention into preserving the original artistry as the filmakers did, then I'm all for it. Unfortunatly most of what I see colorized today seems like a sloppy paint by numbers, where skin tones become flat, eyes become glossy and lighting and shadow go out the window.
The idea is ridiculous, of course. The scene composition is so much different between the two formats. It would ruin Citizen Kane and all of Kurosawa's early work, for example.