I watched a couple minutes of the end of it last night.
It was absolutely awful. It completely changed the feel of the show.
One thing that people need to understand is that everything about the set and film was geared around it being shown in black-and-white. The overall tone and lighting of the set, the clothes worn, the types of makeup used, etc. All intended to work together. Once you colorize you have a Frankenstein’s Monster of a show. It looks like a bunch of separately inserted things thrown together in a mish-mash.
It’s for the, sadly all too common, assholes that refuse to watch anything that’s b&w.
I don’t really care either way about colorization. If it’s too ugly, I can just adjust the color control on my TV all the way to 0. It doesn’t come up often enough to really think about these days, though.
I have a special edition DVD with a colorized version of the episode Lucy Goes to Scotland on it. In that particular case the episode was originally intended to be broadcast in colour as a special event, but CBS balked at the cost.
Please note that contemporary color TV looked pretty shitty, too. Anyway, it’s Lucy, not German Expressionism or Film Noir where B&W film was used as part of the art.
Except it’s been noted that aspects of production were chosen on the basis of working in B&W. That is part of the art, if not thematically central in this case.
There is an interesting technique called “chroma dots” that has been used recently to re-colour some old BBC shows.
The idea is that black and white film recordings of colour transmissions still hold some colour information that can be used for restoration.
I agree though that is doesn’t help if the original was filmed in monochrome.
For the restoration to colour of the 1971 Dr Who serial “Mind of Evil” even this technique didn’t work for episode one so artificial restorationhad to be done.
And if Desi Arnaz was alive today he’d have the entire series colorized if he thought it’d make more money. He was as much a businessman as he was an entertainer.
In the episode I mentioned earlier the sets & costumes were designed for colour before they ended up having to shoot black & white.
Yes, that one episode could be colorized without objection on that principle.
It would still be a fakey kind of color (because there are no original color reels, right), and untrue to the original audience experience–for whatever extent those things matter to one.
