In Britain, Sky has just broadcast this, via the sci-fi channel and it was in colour. I have never liked these 50s b movies (in colour) and it lost some of its appeal. What next, are they going to colour up Plan 9, Them, Day the Earth stood Still or The Thing? Lord have mercy on our souls if they do!
shareI recorded that Sci Fi channel version and watched it last night. Haven't seen the film in ages so the first thing I did was turn the colour down so it was black and white again! I will give the coloured version a go in a day or two though, as from the brief snippets I saw the colour didn't look half as bad as other examples I've got... it certainly looks better than my 'colorized' Night of the Living Dead (yuk!). And my 20 disc Laurel and Hardy collection has 'colorized' versions of most of their classic shorts sitting alongside their black and white counterparts. Again the colours look horrible.
Back to 'It Came From Beneath The Sea', and Kenneth Tobey offers up a fine example of 1950's sexual harassment in the workplace. I can't blame any red blooded male for getting hot under the collar over Faith Domergue, but if Tobey had come onto my girlfirend like that it would have been pistols at dawn, "modern woman" or not!
Unfortunately they did colorize Plan Nine. A company called Legend Films restored and colorized quite a few movies including House on Haunted Hill, Carnival of Souls, and Plan Nine from Outer Space. I'm not too fond of the whole colorization thing. Funny as it sounds I sometimes find myself turning the color on my tv down to black and white to enhance color horror movies, it just adds something. The one bright side is the beautiful restoration these films recieve. I'm just happy that the black and white versions are included on the dvds.
shareThey also colorized The Thing From Another World (to give it its full title) on VHS 20 years ago. Dreadful, like all colorization. No justification for such artistic tampering. (I've posted many screeds on this topic!)
However, I did get the colorized versions of both It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (this is the extent of my colorization!), because I learned that these "toggled" discs (you can go with either b&w or colorization) restored the original Columbia logos at beginning and end, which for some reason had been cut out of the old pure b&w DVDs.
(The b&w DVD for 20 Million Miles to Earth retained the logo -- probably because on the first two films there was no music underlying the logos, allowing the studio to needlessly delete them at beginning and end, whereas 20 Million had music over both the opening and closing statue of Columbia.)
I'm an obsessive enough purist to want a print with that great Columbia logo restored, and I can just toggle the DVD menu to play the black-and-white original. I watched some portions in color, just to see what it looked like, and despite what some pro-colorization people say, it actually looks terrible. In fact, as much as I think colorization looks bad to begin with (the ethics of artistic mauling aside), even I was surprised at how very poor the colorization was -- the supposed "improvements" over what was around in the 80s and 90s notwithstanding.
I hope my Commonwealth friends on this thread will forgive my colonialist revision of the words "colourised" and "colourisation". Hey, we invented it, we ruined the movies, we get to spell it. Like "Technicolor" (which it definitely does not resemble!).
Harryhausen always wanted to make these movies in colour but cost at that time was too high, so really this is just fulfilling a fifty-year obsession for him. Personally I thought the colour on all three looked great, although I love the original version as well.
shareThis is one of the myths/phony justifications/lies the fast-buck colorization con artists always claim -- that they're making the movies look the way the people who made them intended. This is crap.
Almost every filmmaker whose movies have been colorized has opposed it and denounced it for what it is, an artistic fraud. Harryhausen only made the claim that he and Charles Schneer had always wanted to use color when he was getting paid to "supervise" the colorization of his three Columbia b&w films; he's nowhere on record in the preceding 50 years as saying they had wanted to shoot in color. (Schneer never said he had wanted to do them in color.) But the most telling aspect of all this is that after the colorized films came out, Harryhausen was appalled at what he saw (which makes you wonder what he "supervised"). He particularly singled out the octopus in It Came From Beneath the Sea and the Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth as being badly and inaccurately done -- both have been colorized a dull, solid green, which neither model was, nor is either color appropriate, according to RH. At the end, he came to realize how he'd been conned and what a lousy fraud colorization is.
The inescapable fact is you can never make a b&w film look as though it was actually filmed in color through computer colorization. Black & white films are lit, photographed and designed expressly to be photographed in b&w, which is entirely different from the way color films are similarly laid out. Smearing fake colors on top of images not filmed to support color means any colorized film is inherently and unavoidably phony-looking.
Add to this that the colors are all made up -- since no one knows what the color of most things in a film actually were, the colorizers simply arbitrarily decide what color to make something. Colorizing cannot capture the shadings, subtleties and nuances of real color: you just get broad-brush smears of single colors, with objects in the distance and actual black or white objects left uncolorized, thereby looking conspicuously out of place in the washed-out prints used. It's just basic, invented and phony colors smeared inexpertly and arbitrarily over a b&w image. Besides, who gave some computer geek the right to change someone else's work? Especially since they're substituting their own whims for reality.
It's crap? And you can prove this, I presume? No need to shoot down other people's opinions just because they differ to your own.
shareFirst, the only opinion expressed in your post was your saying you like colorization. I was offering a contrary opinion and explaining why colorization is phony. You can like or dislike, or agree or disagree with, whatever you wish; nobody said otherwise. But anyone has a right to post a disagreement. I didn't "shoot down" your opinion, just differed with it, and in doing so offered some facts that discredit the process and mindset behind colorization.
Second, yes, it can be proven that it's crap that filmmakers whose films were later colorized said they'd always wanted to shoot them in color. Going back to the late 1980s, when colorization was first invented, many actors, directors, producers, cinematographers, and others who'd seen Ted Turner and others colorizing their and others' work denounced it publicly -- including Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, Robert Wise, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Billy Wilder, John Huston, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Fred Zinnemann, David Lean, James Stewart, Fred Astaire, Gregory Peck, Katharine Hepburn, José Ferrer, Alec Guinness, Richard Widmark, Shirley Temple, Virginia Mayo, Maureen O'Hara, James Whitmore, Jack Cardiff, Gordon Willis, John Houseman, and many others, along with the families of such deceased filmmakers as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, William Wyler and a number of others. Apart from its technical shortcomings, they protested the maiming of their films by people with no idea of what they were doing and no right to do so. None said they had ever wanted these films in color.
It was because of the leadership of such people across the industry that the U.S. Congress established the National Film Registry in 1989, to preserve and protect films from being colorized or altered in any other way. Google the subject of colorization and read about the storm of protests from most of Hollywood and elsewhere as well get the facts.
As to Harryhausen, it was only after he'd been hired to consult (or whatever) on the colorization of his three films (plus at least two others, She and Things to Come, neither of which he had had anything to do with making) that he said that he would have liked to have made them in color. Maybe, but there's no record I've seen of him ever saying any such thing in the decades before that. In any case, his subsequent disillusionment with the result is a matter of public record you can also check out.
Lastly, three things for you to consider:
(1) Colorization is not color. It is not technically possible to colorize a movie so that it looks as though it was filmed in color. All it is is arbitrary, phony computer-imitation colors layered over a black & white image not designed to accommodate color. The colorized It Came From Beneath the Sea does not look the way it would have looked had it in fact been shot in color.
(2) If you think a colorized movie looks good, compare it to a film made around the same time but actually shot in color. There is no comparison between the rich, full, nuanced look of real color cinematography to the bland, erratic, inaccurate colors manufactured by a computer.
(3) If you believe it's all right to change a film by colorizing it, then by that logic it should equally be fine to change it by substituting a new music score, or digitally removing or adding images, or excising language or dialogue someone doesn't like, or reconfiguring the image, or anything else that can now be done to films. This isn't theory: all these things and more have been done to various films. If you think it's okay to vandalize a film by adding fake color, you can't with any logical consistency object to changing it in other ways either.
Anyway, you said you loved the b&w originals. Aren't they good enough?
Can you not get your point across without writing a dissertation? As previously stated, it is personal opinion that I like both versions. Why would you care so much as to write a thesis to try and dissuade me?
shareMy humble apologies for my length, and for taxing your reading limits. Sometimes explaining something takes more effort than posting a one-liner. I wasn't trying to dissuade you from your opinions, which is not my interest and would be a waste of time, but to refute your assertion that Harryhausen always wanted to make these films in color, and the implication that colorization is the same as filming in color. End of discussion.
sharehobnob of 7 years ago, here's my one-liner: you are correct in all you have written here about the travesty of colorization.
share