orphanage tinting

I went to check Ray Harryhausen's book about that scene, and he does not mention any color or tinting scenes. Not sure if it was orginally tinted (with a reddish, brownish color), but for years growing up watching this, I always saw the orphange scene in b/w.

I've read that the tinted orphanage scene did play that way back in 1949 is some key locations but not in general release. Turner's colorization process (actually that of Color Systems Technology (CST) originally) did attempt to turn B&W films into color by filling in faces and objects in a scene not in a frame by frame process, but one in which a frame of film was transformed and then a computerized process would fill-in similarly in successive frames.

I saw the process being done at the CST offices in 1986 when I worked for Columbia Pictures Television. It was quite primitive as it was not done digitally as it is now although they still haven't gotten the palette to look anything like Technicolor, it looks more like the much cheaper Cinecolor process of the 40s and 50s.

It could very well be that there were no vault copies of the originally tinted Mighty Joe Young and that Turner had it duplicated by CST, but it wasn't as if the idea for tinting originated in the 80s.



It ain't easy being green, or anything else, other than to be me
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I saw the scene with reddish tinting on TV in the early nineties.

The fire scene was tinted red (not sepia as IMDB will have it) and Turner had nothing to do with it.

Quite what the point of the tinting was, I'll never know...