I'm with xraffle (and others) on this one. The original black and white has a "period" feel that's totally destroyed by colorization, no matter how well it's done.
I notice that Sony didn't colorize its recent DVD set of Columbia Buster Keaton shorts, and I'm sure I know why— Keaton fans are
real purists, and the Damfinos (the major Keaton fan club) and a lot of other people, including me, would have raised hell! Sony would have been absolutely deluged with negative letters and e-mails if they'd done that, not to mention being stuck with a product that hardly anyone would buy.
The difference here is that Buster is a member of the Holy Trinity of Silent Comedy, along with Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd. He's a true film icon, and even his lesser works like the Columbia shorts are held sacred. Some of his fans, though, are
such purists (or snobs), they even look down their noses at the Columbia shorts; I'm thinking here of Keaton biographer Tom Dardis and filmographer Jim Kline, neither of whom have anything good to say about Buster's Columbia period. Mr. Kline even likes some of Buster's Educational Pictures shorts better, and those are absolute bottom-of-the-barrel Keaton, shot during his alcoholic years and on budgets that make the average Columbia short look like "Gone With The Wind." By the time Buster went to Columbia, he'd overcome his drinking problem or at least fought it to a draw, and he was back in good form, doing his brutally hilarious pratfalls with all of his old elan.
In any case, after all these years the Stooges still aren't treated with nearly the same kind of respect; which I think is dead wrong, but that's how it is. One reason, perhaps, is that they never made a feature film during their peak years with Curly and Shemp, so they're thought of by some as "second-tier" comics. Another might be that if you're a Baby Boomer or a Gen-X'er, you probably had at least one parent who sneered at the Stooges and maybe even wouldn't let you watch them due to the "violence."
So, we get the colorization, the cheap packaging, the missing scenes, etc., and I'm not buying into any of that. I've seen one colorized short, "An Ache In Every Stake," and to my trained eye (trained in graphic design, that is), the color still looks artificial. Bleahhh...!
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