The Blu-Ray release of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! presents the special with radically different colors compared to what we’ve been used to over the years. I would like to give Warner Home Video the benefit of the doubt, as the new colors do match the sericels Chuck Jones/Turner put out years ago; but it still doesn’t make the supposed original colors any less jarring after years of viewing the same faded copy ad nauseam.
Really Grinched
Filed under classic animation
Neither version looks like the original animation cel I have. The bright green is closer, but it looks a little too bright, a little too overpowering. The old off-brown version is very far from the cel.
We were having a discussion on this on Spumboard
Yes they do match the sericels but what about the original production cels ?
The new/restored colors seem to match the original production cels.
Back in 1902 (ok, the mid-70s) the Grinch was still green. Not quite the neon green of the 2nd screencap, but certainly not yellow. So… the print kept fading so much that eventually he turned kind of a goldenrod color, and no one at any of the networks did anything about it? My stars, I had no idea. I’ll have to watch this year to see what print the various Turner channels use.
Not really radical. Aside from the big change of the Grinch, most of the colors don’t seem to be too out-of-line (at least not to the same extent as the worst Disney restorations)
Ah, such were the wonders of Metrocolor, and the fact that MGM was pretty much sucked dry by Kirk Kerkorian from 1968 on, who wanted the studio more for his “Grand Hotel” Las Vegas casino concept more than any care about the preservation of the film library.
Combined with Turner’s limited funds pre-Warner merger to actually correct the colors that were supposed to be there (as opposed to Ted’s pet project of putting colors on B&W films), it’s no surprise that until some people who actually cared about the show finally got a chance to fix it for the new release, the cheaper color process MGM had gone to by the 60s was turning the Grinch into Metro’s version of all those NTA Paramount cartoons.
It’s not the restored colors, but the saturation that bothers me. It’s too intense. I wish the technicians would stop once they get the colors corrected, and leave the saturation levels alone.