It probably would have looked cheap in color. You can cheat a lot in monochrome.
On the other hand, it would have been funny if it looked exactly the same in color as in black and white!
Malachi Throne in The Cage -- pitched up from the beginning?
- Thread starter Neopeius
- Start date
It probably would have looked cheap in color. You can cheat a lot in monochrome.
On the other hand, it would have been funny if it looked exactly the same in color as in black and white!
You can read about one stray 'version' here. You can also check the two Youtube links with the Keeper's voices that I posted earlier in this thread.
Last edited:
The caption writer there complains about the color choices, but I guess they're unaware that colors for black-and-white film were often chosen based on how they registered in monochrome rather than what they really were. For instance, George Reeves's Superman costume in the B&W first season of his show was brown and gray rather than red and blue. (It looks more like a Batman costume without the cowl.) And in Frankenstein, Boris Karloff wore green makeup because it registered as sallow, corpse-like skin, not because it was actually meant to be green (something The Munsters' makeup artists apparently didn't realize or chose to ignore).
That's pretty amazing, and just goes to show the creative color work that had to be done to make black and white look good! Thank you.
In the B&W era a piece of special yellowish glass was often used to view things through because it made everything monochromatic so you could get a better sense of how things would appear on B&W film. They used such glass when designing and lighting The Nightmare Before Christmas to try to get the contrast values you'd get in a B&W horror movie or German expressionist film. In more recent times to make B&W look better on old SD video cameras you'd shoot through red or orange filters to heighten the contrast, then kill the chroma in post.
Similar threads
