3 Strip Technicolor Movie Database

[old_tv_nut]

Technicolor did a great job of color control on the sets to make up for the deficiencies of the over-all process. For one thing, they would gray down the whites so that the colors stood out by comparison - this is a good way to make up for deficiencies in the dyes, because you can user denser printing and get more saturated colors.

The other advantage that has been mentioned is that the dyes were very stable and therefore prints have lasted without significant fading.

However, the greatest thing about Technicolor movie longevity is when the original 3 negatives have been preserved. This allows various techniques of restoration that are impossible with a color negative that has faded. Disney's classis animations are preserved this way

1) reprint the negs - this may suffer from degraded registration of the colors if the three negatives have shrunk differently over the years
1b) same as (1), but follow with electronic color correction. This is typically what you see on DVDs.

2) Scan the negatives, and then, the sky's the limit on what you can do with computer restoration (including re-registration of shrunken negatives) and electronic projection.

At the SMPTE conference in 2006, Warner Bros. treated the attendees to a demo of their restoration work. Clips from Robin Hood were stupendous. No film weave, no dust, and the improved registration showed gold threads in Olivia de Havilland's costume that probably were not visible even in the original theater prints.

The studios are working on very high resolution projection for theaters (4000 pixels wide), but even converting these restorations to Blu-Ray disc should be beautiful. I hope they see a commercial path to remastering a bunch of the old classics with the full process.

By the way, the 2-disc special edition of Robin Hood includes a bonus program "Glorious Technicolor" on the history of Technicolor. There is also a companion book of the same title that has been printed in 2 or maybe 3 editions.

[Steve D.]

Always enjoy the 1938 Technicolor "Robin Hood". Happy to say I have both the first edition of "Glorious Technicolor" by Fred E. Basten, 1980, A.S. Barnes & Co. publisher. The book is out of print and somewhat hard to find these days. And the 1998 one hour TV documentary "Glorious Technicolor" as seen on TCM. TCM has repeated, from time to time, this fine history of the Technicolor Co. Hosted and narrated by Angela Lansbury. A great extra on the Robin Hood DVD. I also have in my collection, along with many three strip Technicolor films, several 2 strip Technicolor shorts and films from the 20's and early 30's The Widescreen Museum web site listed in the previous post is an extensive and fun tour of all wide screen and color film processes. Highly recommended.

-Steve D.

[Eric H]

The Wizard of Oz and Robin Hood are two of the best examples of what they can do when they go all out to restore one of these films, they're are absolutely stunning in their clarity and color, no doubt better than their original theatrical prints.

Robin Hood was just released on Blu-Ray, can't wait to see how that looks!