I was watching one of those commercials advertising the Shirly Temple Collection, and looking at how bad of a job they did coloring her teeth when I wondered to myself, how do they color black and white movies. And how do they know what colors to choose? Do they just choose random colors?
PS: Sometimes Ted Turner should just leave those damn movies alone.
Many times, they have scripts to go by and the colors of the costumes can be found there. I’m guessing that there’s a grayscale equivalent of colors and they try to match the colors as closely as possible. I have never seen a colorized movie that looked good. Turner colorized the first season of Gilligan’s Island, but, in an effort to save money, did NOT colorize the insides of the actors’ mouths. It’s creepy looking when you can see it.
Sometimes, yes, they do. Frank Sinatra was famously given brown eyes on the first colorization pass of one of his B&W movies.
Also, for your edification, here’s a link describing the actual colorizing process.
No matter which colors they choose for the colorization process, the results will look horrible and artificial, since what they’re doing is laying color down on top of the original black and white as opposed to replacing it.
I wish there were no colorization of b/w movies. In addition to the above problem, it may ruin the intended bleakness of a film (It’s A Wonderful Life, for example) or destroy the “period piece” feeling of a film (The Elephant Man, for instance–which has not been colorized and I hope it never will be).
I seem to recall that computer coloring films is rarely done any more. The final straw was when the colorized version of Casablanca sold under 500 copies nationwide. Certainly you never see colorized films on TCM or AMC.
The people who like the original films are repulsed by colorizations, while the younger viewers aren’t really interested in the films whether they are colored or not.