How do you ruin a perfectly good black and white cartoon? Colorize it of course! There's two ways to do this either do it with a computer or the old fashioned technique of having it redrawn. The problem with both of these is that ruins the of the cartoons. The redraws are always worse. The animation is always worse and the color choices are usually absolutely abhorrent. At least with the computer colorization the original animation is preserved. Both still crap on the artistic visions of the people that made them originally. The tones and shades of all the blacks, greys, and whites in the originals were chosen for a reason.
Sadly many great classics were subject to this nonsense. Looney Tunes, Betty Boop, Merrie Melodies, Popeye, among others. All of varying quality and stink. The most infamous of them all has to be the Looney Tunes done in the late 60s mostly consisting of Porky Pig cartoons. There were 79 Looney Tunes cartoons in total redrawn in 1968 by Fred Ladd's Color Systems Inc. Warner Brothers had originally sold their black and white cartoons excluding the Harman and Ising Merrie Melodies to Sunset Productions/ Guild Films in 1955.
In 1961 Guild Films was bought out by Seven Arts. Then in 1967 Seven Arts and Warner Brothers merged creating Warner Brothers Seven Arts. That's when the infamous Seven Arts era Looney Tunes shorts started appearing.
By this time color TV was becoming the norm and black and white cartoons were harder to sell to TV stations. Which posed a problem to companies trying to sell black and white cartoons to TV. Warners was apparently impressed with Fred Ladd's experiments with colorization and tasked his company Color Systems Inc. to redraw 79 black and white Looney Tunes cartoons in South Korea. Only problem was the first couple of tests were done with a much better team then the rest. The animation process was done by skipping every other frame of animation. Thereby lessening the animation in the process. This plus the poor quality of the animation in general ruined the cartoons. With many animation errors and mistakes. One infamous example being in the Porky Pig cartoon "Ali Baba Bound" where a fly got stuck on the animation cell.
Plus due to the skipping frames process sometimes parts of the animation do not sync up to the audio. It didn't help also that the color choices stunk. Bright and garish colors were chosen most likely on purpose I would imagine to really make them pop. Well they couldn't even keep the colors of the main characters consistent. Clearly evident in the cartoon "The Impatient Patient" (1940) where Daffy Duck is brown! Also a pink neck wring. I kid you not.
Guess what they did it twice! He's also brown in "Daffy's Southern Exposure".
Pretty sad isn't it.
It's blue in "The Daffy Duckaroo"
By the way Warner's sent over some prints of the cartoons with the Sunset Productions logo causing it to be redrawn.
Here's some more general incompetence, and funny errors.
By the way Warner's sent over some prints of the cartoons with the Sunset Productions logo causing it to be redrawn.
Well thankfully these redraws are mostly absent from TV now. In the early 90's these same cartoons plus some other previously not colorized cartoons were computer colorized. While not perfect or better than the original black and white presentation at least the original animation is there. The thing that irks me about them more then anything is that they were done under the assumption that kids won't enjoy a black and white cartoon. Which is just stupid.
Next time we look at these redrawn atrocities we'll look at Popeye and Ted Turner's fetish for colorization.
