I agree -- Addams Family was perfect in B&W. It was perfect in general, and The Monkees is a worthy spiritual successor (that makes good use of color).
I'm afraid I never liked LiS. Lord knows I tried.
Malachi Throne in The Cage -- pitched up from the beginning?
- Thread starter Neopeius
- Start date
I agree -- Addams Family was perfect in B&W. It was perfect in general, and The Monkees is a worthy spiritual successor (that makes good use of color).
I'm afraid I never liked LiS. Lord knows I tried.
I wonder if they could restore the unaltered voice. With technology today I imagine they could probably do a pretty good job remastering that. I'd love to see a B&W version of The Cage with the Keeper's original voice.
I know, I'm kind of weird like that
"The Cage" was originally filmed in color, correct? It wasn't colorized later for "The Menagerie" than for later releases?
The Munsters too. B&W fit those shows perfectly.
I Dream of Jeannie was another show that started in B&W for the first season (I read because at first they didn't think it was going to make it and they didn't want to spend the extra money for color). I have the series on DVD and in my box set they colorized the first season...and not well. Now that show was better seen in color and I'm glad they filmed in color the 2nd season. But they probably should have just left the first season alone.
When I went to see Night of the Living Dead at the theater they colorized it and changed it to 3D. The 3D didn't turn out all that well. During the scene where they throw molotov cocktails out the window to scare away the zombies the fires they set looked like they were floating above the ground.
The colorization in that case was ok, but that was a film like I noted looked better in B&W. Plus, well I guess you could say I'm someone that prefers to leave films the way they were. I don't mind remastering for quality. But if a movie was B&W I just assume leave it that way.
Yes, it was filmed in color, as you can see in "The Menagerie." Computer colorization technology did not exist in 1966. The only reason the original home video release of "The Cage" had portions in black & white was because the only intact copy of the pilot was Roddenberry's B&W workprint. The original color master was physically recut into "The Menagerie," and the removed portions were believed lost. A while later, those removed portions were rediscovered and incorporated into a new home video release of "The Cage," replacing the B&W workprint scenes. Not one single frame of the pilot was ever tainted by computer colorization in any version.
I guess I probably could have looked that up now that I think of it.
Now that I think of it, it was pretty dopey of me to think "The Menagerie" might have been colorized. That would have been the most amazing colorization job if it were done way back in 1966 (did they even colorize anything back then by any method). Duh.
Watching "The Cage" in B&W does have a certain charm.
I also have an old VHS copy of It's A Wonderful Life that I've never been able to part with. Since that movie was in the public domain at the time there were tons of copies floating about and my mother had bought be a cheap VHS copy way back when that looked like it was transferred directly from a film strip. It had all the splotches and lines running through it like an old reel to reel film (and the sound quality to go with it). It's sounds crazy but it actually adds a bit of charm to it.
Sadly, as the years pass my VHS player has a bit of a harder time playing it correctly, probably because it was a bargain VHS tape. But I'm trying to keep it going. I had a similar VHS copy of Night of the Living Dead and sadly that one finally kicked the bucket. I couldn't save it
Hand tinting of black-and-white film had existed since the days of silent movies, though often the tinted versions were lost and only black-and-white prints remained.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_tinting
Here's a YouTube playlist of some hand-tinted silent films:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSC6ykdWzbjF-gbj4b4Bv7kkTbSxPIAx0
It sounds like the VHS master tape was probably transferred from a 16mm TV syndication print.
"Filmstrips" were an educational tool we had back in my school days. They were short spools of 35mm film projected a single frame at a time, with an accompanying audio track on a phonograph record. The record had an audible signal -- a beep, click or chime -- to tell the projectionist when to advance to the next frame.
I wonder if they could restore the unaltered voice. With technology today I imagine they could probably do a pretty good job remastering that. I'd love to see a B&W version of The Cage with the Keeper's original voice.
I know, I'm kind of weird like that
Says the fellow in the same thread with the person who lives 55 years in the past.
You're not weird at all!For sure, though it's not as good a show IMHO. Addams and Munsters were definitely a specific slice of history!
When Jeannie would come on our tv, I'd set the saturation to zero to make the experience authentic. It looked better. My daughter noted how much more real the color looks in the second season than the colorized first.
Computer colorization never looked good, because it was just superimposing slabs of color onto the original grayscale images, which just didn't look the same as actual color film. It made clothing look like it had a metallic sheen or something. Granted, it was done as a concession to people who wanted to see it properly by turning down the color saturation on their TV sets, as Neopeius mentioned, but it still looked weird. (The technology has probably improved since then, but does anyone really do colorization anymore?)
There I go again, using you as my Wikipedia resource
/ Thanks for indulging. But now that you mention it I recall reading about that. In Hitchcock's film, Suspicion, they added just a bit of a tint to a glass of milk Cary Grant's character was taking up to Joan Fontaine's character. The idea was to make you wonder if he had poisoned it (I recall Hitchcock actually had wanted Grant's character to attempt to murder his wife in that movie, but the studio wouldn't sign off on the idea because they didn't want to make Grant a bad guy--nice to know studio interference is nothing new
). And I saw an old silent Hitchcock film, "Downhill", that was restored with the 'tint' intact that gave everything a yellowish-gold look.
Yeah, maybe. It was definitely a transfer that probably originally came from an old film reel. HDTV actually makes it look even more like an old filmstrip because it seems to project it as clearly as possible, making all the splotches and lines more obvious.
It was probably when I got to 9th grade that the film projectors started disappearing in favor of the TV/VCR carts. But before that we see a lot of films on projectors. We also had the slides, sometimes they would shift automatically. And sometimes there'd be a beep you'd have to listen to that would let you know when to advance to the next slide. It was usually a cassette by my time though. Usually one of the students would get picked to advance the slide (and there'd always be some slowpoke who did advance them fast enough
).The Addams Family was the more intelligent of the two. Munsters were just campy fun. I always liked how they thought they were perfectly normal and they could never understand why other people were, um, a bit nervous around them. And Herman was always good for a laugh, esp. when someone would see him and run away scared, and Herman, thinking something scary was nearby would run away himself in fear. The scariest looking one of them all was also the biggest scaredy cat
Yeah, the colorization was pretty poor for season 1. I usually turn the color off when watching season 1 myself. I swear sometimes Jeannie had pink hair.
I always preferred that show over Bewitched. I know that one came first, and in many ways was probably better quality, but something about Darren always got on my nerves. Major Nelson would get exacerbated with Jeannie (justifiably usually because she did get him into trouble a lot), but he never stopped her from being who she was. And sometimes it was just funnier. Poor Dr. Bellows
. He'd always walk in at the wrong possible time (and Hayden Rorke's acting was great in that role, he played it perfectly). One of my favorite moments was in season 1 when Nelson think's he's had it and finally agrees to tell Dr. Bellows everything. Then of course Jeannie comes in and sets everything right at the last minute and as Nelson gets ready to leave Bellows says "wait, you were about to tell me everything" and Nelson just laughs as he says "yeah, how 'bout that" and then leaves. I was always disappointed Hagman didn't return for the reunion movies. I know he was busy with Dallas (another favorite of mine), but I really missed him in the reunion movies, esp. the first. How strange it would have been to see Hagman in that role in the 1980s, a character that was about as opposite to JR Ewing as you could get. In a bit of an ironic twist, Ken Kerchevel, who played JR's nemesis, Cliff Barnes in Dallas, was in the 2nd reunion movie sort of taking Hagman's place.
Ok, well, I've really gone off on a tangent now
Yeah, the colorization was pretty poor for season 1. I usually turn the color off when watching season 1 myself. I swear sometimes Jeannie had pink hair.
I always preferred that show over Bewitched. I know that one came first, and in many ways was probably better quality, but something about Darren always got on my nerves. Major Nelson would get exacerbated with Jeannie (justifiably usually because she did get him into trouble a lot), but he never stopped her from being who she was. And sometimes it was just funnier. Poor Dr. Bellows
Ok, well, I've really gone off on a tangent now
Agreed with all of this. IDoJ was more madcap and focused more on Tony and his profession, where as Bewitched tended to lean harder on Samantha's family and the witchcraft. They had stories about Jeannie's family but not nearly as much. Bewitched was about a married couple, so the in-laws were always showing up. Jeannie was a "secret" so it took a different road. So Tony, Roger and Dr. Bellows did the comedic heavy lifting and the show was filled with bits which still give me belly laughs. Dr. Bellows was so incredibly deadpan and perfect in his exasperation. Everyone on the series was perfectly cast.
We should probably get back on topic before we get a chiding....
I think you hit it. I was talking about this with others, in the 70's there was not only a lot of older shows on TV in syndication, a lot of them were incredibly popular. There was almost always something fun to watch. We focus on Star Trek here (naturally) but a lot of shows from the 50's and 60's were huge hits after the fact. Cartoons were big in the mornings and afternoons and many of these were not only 60's era but also 40's and 50's movie shorts mixed in like Popeye, Tom and Jerry, Terrytoons and so on. We were inundated with entertainment made in prior decades. Afternoon, weekend and late night movies were often from a the 30's - 50's. My dad and I would watch Tarzan and Abbott and Costello films on weekends. With so few channels to choose from, our generation got exposed to pretty much every era of film and TV. I don't know about you, but I sat through it because I loved TV and watched pretty much any era, especially if the genre appealed to me.
It's such a different landscape now, unless you actively seek it out, as you say, you won't find it.
MeTV's syndication package for Gilligan's Island has the first season colorized. Not only could I tell the difference in color quality, but most distractingly, people's tongues and the insides of their mouths looked green. I mainly noticed this with Alan Hale, probably because of the way he delivered his lines.
Astute. I used to watch the Sunday movie on KTLA, narrated by Tom Hatten. Later, Hatten narrated a bunch of films in a weekly package aired on County Television Network that my wife and I used to enjoy. This phenomenon happens with all media/fandoms: when it's small, everyone has a common experience. Anime, science fiction, Trek, TV, movies -- there was a time when someone could consume everything. It used to be true even of knowledge up to about Dante's time.
With the arrival of more stuff, fandom fragments, common experience becomes harder to find. Is that a bad thing? Depends on what you're looking for, I guess. There's a reason this is the only forum I hang out in these days.
What topic? How much is there to say about Malachi Throne's voice?
This has been the most active this forum has been in a while. I'd rather enjoy a meandering productive conversation than the 10 millionth "Which episode did we hate the most?" poll. Anyway, discussing TV contemporary to Trek is quite germane.
As a very happily married man, and also something of a progressive, Bewitched was just the worst. A couple constantly bickering, the strong woman having to throw away her very identity for the schmuck she loves. Blech. Jeannie is froth, but it's fun froth. Eden and Hagman have a lot of charm and palpable chemistry. Jeannie is a "slave" except she's also clearly in control.
Damian said:The Addams Family was the more intelligent of the two. Munsters were just campy fun. I always liked how they thought they were perfectly normal and they could never understand why other people were, um, a bit nervous around them. And Herman was always good for a laugh, esp. when someone would see him and run away scared, and Herman, thinking something scary was nearby would run away himself in fear. The scariest looking one of them all was also the biggest scaredy cat
I like Fred Gwynne, but I found Munsters just too broad. Maybe it's because we identify with the Addamses -- a well-off family of nonconformists who don't give a damn what others think of them, but open their house to everyone and find ways to make everyone's lives better. A married couple passionately in love after decades, who fence in the living room, look at old Viewmasters, and come up with interesting games to play. We even have a kitty! (though she's not a lion...) We're just missing Pugsley, though if you squint, our daughter is Pugsley and Wednesday rolled into one!
He hosted The Popeye Show too!
Yes! Sunday afternoons. I loved that guy. Geeked out quite a bit when he turned in the cameo in the otherwise lamentable Spies Like Us.
I take it you're a SoCaller, too?
Yes, born and raised in Los Angeles.
KTLA NEWS AT 10! Hal Fishman, Larry McCormick... and 200 year-old Stan Chambers, man on the street.
KTLA NEWS AT 10! Hal Fishman, Larry McCormick... and 200 year-old Stan Chambers, man on the street.
I was more of a Jerry Dunphy man.
“From the desert, to the sea, to all of Southern California, a good evening.”
When I was a child I saw a few movies in theaters in color.
And I watch B & W tv including many movies on b & w tv. I eventually learned that there were color televisions and even saw some programs on one once in the hospital.
So it was a big surprise to see to finally see Star Trek in color instead of greyscale. And to eventually see 1950s science ficiton movies that I assumed were black and white in color.
I liked the The Addams Family more than The Munsters, for various reasons. For one thing, I had a desire to live in the Addams mansion. If you could livie in the Addams mansion, would you prefer that it was in grayscale or in color?
And I watch B & W tv including many movies on b & w tv. I eventually learned that there were color televisions and even saw some programs on one once in the hospital.
So it was a big surprise to see to finally see Star Trek in color instead of greyscale. And to eventually see 1950s science ficiton movies that I assumed were black and white in color.
I liked the The Addams Family more than The Munsters, for various reasons. For one thing, I had a desire to live in the Addams mansion. If you could livie in the Addams mansion, would you prefer that it was in grayscale or in color?
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