I know I’m poking a hornet’s nest.
I watched and taped it many years ago, but watching the original B&W tonight on Turner Classic Movies, I recall how cool the casba scene in the opening looked in color.
Has anyone else seen it?
It is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord and you will be smitten (forced to watch the David Soul version) for not averting your eyes.
What are you talking about? There never was a colorized version of Casablanca, or any other B&W movie. There is no such process as colorization. You must have dreamed it.
And stop even thinking about it before someone get the stupid idea of doing it and ruining classic movies.
It would destroy the fabric of society: we’d have rampant immorality, corruption of high government officials, the economy would go into a deep recession, and…
Wait a minute!
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!! Just…no. HELL NO.
Watching the colorized version of Casablanca would be about as good an idea as listening to Donnie and Marie Osmund sing the songs of Led Zeppelin.
I’d gouge my own eyes out if confronted with such a horrific shock to all I believed to be good and true, in the manner of Oedipus.
It would cause hair to grow on your eyeballs.
In a more serious answer to your question, I’ve seen it, and it doesn’t do anything to improve the movie. It doesn’t horribly distract from the movie either, but YMMV with respect to how offensive you might find this masterpiece in color. I’ve also seen the Bogart/Astor Maltese Falcon in color. It was an abomination. It was a movie that was very definitely hurt by the inclusion of color, and it was badly colored at that. The Casablanca colorizing was not a bad job in the way the MF was, shitty, washed out colors. Nor was it a noir that depended so heavily on b&w for motifs. All in all, I prefer the Blu-Ray version of Casablanca, which is better than any print I’ve seen in an art-house. A movie should be shown as the artistic team (usually the director) intended. They could have made Casablanca in color, they did not.
All I remember is Sam’s gold lame jacket. Then I manually turned the colour off on the TV and watched it like that.
Holy cow, Sam is black?!
There’s been some debate as to whether Casablanca is a film noir. Well, it isn’t. It’s a film noir et blanc.
Let’s all stand up and sing La Marseillaise in monochrome.
Agreed, film noir should not be colorized. The shadow of “Spade and Archer” from the door, for example.
The marker scene in Casablanca with the parrot was beautiful, though. 
No. Just…no.
Another big negatory vote on color Casablanca. Hell, those movies were MADE to be viewed in B&W. All the lighting, sets, clothing, etc were chosen with an eye to how they looked/would look in black and white. But you already knew that, I bet.
So, was Ilsa’s dress really blue? 
Don’t know, but Rick’s eyes were really brown.
As Calvin’s Dad succinctly explained it once to Calvin, back then, there was no color. All the world was in black and white. So it’s impossible to colorize the film because that would be making things up that aren’t real. 
Can I get an AMEN?
Sounds good. Most colorized versions look better than black and white, although a lot of them were done with a process of putting the color over the black rather than replacing it, so you get a Currier & Ives effect. Also, they tended at first to just swipe each scene with blue, green, brown and red. I guess to make the process go quickly. But seldom an orange or purple anywhere.