Question about the colorized version and the studio logo

What most people on this thread don't seem to realize is that the colorization on this movie was personally supervised by Ray Harryhausen himself. The film was originally supposed to be filmed in color but in the end the budget wouldn't allow it.

I got the colorized EVTFS solely because as a hard-core purist I did want to see a version of this film with the Columbia logo restored. It was -- beginning and end. I'd never seen it at the end and wonder if it was there in the first place, back in '56, but no matter. The new print looks great -- IN BLACK & WHITE!

During the film I of course "toggled" over to the colorized calamity to see what things looked like, several times. Granted I'm a major opponent of the process, but even so, I can't understand what all the excitement was about. I thought the colorization looked poor and obvious, much more fake than I had expected with all the hype about how "good" the process had become. I don't think it's in fact all that much better than what was going on twenty years ago. True, the picture was sharper, and the color didn't bleed as it did in the bad old days. But it still looks like exactly what it is -- artificial, unreal color painted on black & white images. No color depth, just the same old pastel appearance, and as usual no effort made to colorize things that were, or are deemed to have been, in black, white or other neutral color (silver, for example), which take on a different tone than colorized items in any shot. (All the buildings and monuments in Washington are still just plain uncolorized white, as in the original.) Plus, a lot of backgrounds still lack any colorization -- at most, some have a faint sepia tone meant to mask the absence of real color or any detail. And things like trees and grass still appear just a blurred green, nothing remotely like the crisp, clear images of actual color cinematography.

And for all of that, the flying saucers have just a faint metallic tint -- no big deal. Hardly worth the effort.

On the plus side, Bernard Gordon's writing credit has been restored to this new print, as has been done with a lot of writers who like him received no credit back in the 50s because of their blacklisting, but who still worked on so many films incognito. Many of the DVD's extras were interesting too.

But except for that needed screenwriting correction, and the restoration of Columbia, all this work was to no point. Colorization remains useless, a travesty -- and is still very, very fake. Again I say to those who think it looks so good: compare it to a film of the same period actually shot in color -- see the difference reality makes!

I've written a similar post on the same subject for IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA.