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By
NICK ZEGARAC
To state the obvious: The
Three Stooges are classic. There I said it. Not
that anyone inside Columbia Tri-Star has taken
notice, even though The Stooges have rarely been
absent from public consciousness since their debut
as Ted Healy and The Three Stooges back in 1931.
From the early '30s to the late '60s, this trio of
chuckleheads made some two hundred plus shorts and
several feature films. And although television,
VHS, laserdisc and now DVD have kept their memory
alive, the current trend of releasing Stooges
material on DVD seems to be inconsistent at best
-- it should be noted that Stooge aficionados
continue in their widespread dissension over
Columbia's lack of establishing a chronology for
The Stooges body of work on DVD.
There seems to be no logic in Columbia's releases,
often providing consumers with numerous different
and sometimes overlapping gift sets. Thus
purchasing every Stooge short is an expensive
proposition. This is to say nothing of the various
bootlegged DVDs, which continue to circulate
Stooge shorts in poor to downright dismal quality
transfers. How Columbia chose this batch of shorts
to inaugurate its new colorization process remains
a mystery.
Here's the long and short of it: in the mid 1990s
somebody at Columbia decided it was high time to
honor The Stooges on laserdisc. So technicians
went to the vaults and digitally remastered 32
short subjects in an impressive looking, limited
edition box set. However, in the intervening
years, DVD replaced laserdisc and, with sales of
classics slumping, the new regime at Columbia
decided that they would just slap any old transfer
onto disc rather than take the time to repair and
remaster more classic shorts. But, they still had
the original 32 remastered laserdisc transfers at
their disposal. So what Columbia did was to
intersperse these 32 restored shorts throughout
their recently released DVD series and shove in
three or four truly awful transfers in between on
each disc, hoping the consumer wouldn't notice,
wouldn't care or wouldn't complain about the
varying degrees of quality.
And now we come to yet another insult to the
legacy of these immortal comedians: Colorization!
The two newly minted discs from Columbia -- "Goofs
on the Loose" (which includes the shorts "Men in
Black," "The Sitter Downers," "Punch Drunks" and
"Playing the Ponies") and "Stooged and Confused"
(which includes the shorts "Violent Is the Word
for Curly," "You Nazty Spy!", "No Census No
Feeling" and "An Ache in Every Stake") have been
bastardized by the gimmick of ChromaChoice, a new
and allegedly superior process than was previously
made available. Despite a featurette included on
both discs, in which Columbia technicians brag of
the realistic representation of color with several
brief examples (which I must admit look far better
than anything seen on these short subjects) the
results are pretty much the same.
Flesh tones are pasty and overly pink while
background scenery gets painted with a broad
stroke of mono or duo colorization that is about
as accurate at capturing life's palette as is the
state of the art of embalming. Outdoor scenes are
painted with a flat watercolor blue sky and flat
watercolor green lawns and trees. All buildings
are brown or grey and most suits are a flat black,
grey or brown. The appearance of the Stooges
suddenly wearing bright orange or red suspenders
and overalls is the equivalent to watching a
Mexican fiesta crash an Irish wake. The most
satisfying byproduct of the ChromaChoice process
is that you can turn it off and watch the Stooges
as originally intended -- in a series of shorts
that have been very nicely cleaned up and
digitally remastered in all their black and white
glory.
In the late 1980s Ted Turner attempted to take his
acquired MGM/Warner classic library and dye the
films for contemporary audiences -- the logic
being that contemporary audiences were just too,
too sophisticated to appreciate black and white
photography as an art form. But the process so
outraged film purists and those in the know in
Hollywood that an actual injunction was filed
against colorization by the likes of director
Martin Scorsese and others to stop Turner from
destroying the integrity and purity of classic
motion pictures. Rightly relegated to the dustbin
of celluloid history some years ago, colorization
has now unfortunately reared its ugly tri-colored
head once more.
For The Three Stooges discs technicians claim to
have done an extensive research of old costumes
and firsthand accounts of the colors used in order
to accurately reproduce them when the shorts were
originally shot. What needs to be pointed out,
however, is that costumes, makeup and set colors
were chosen then because of how they would
register in black and white. For example, green
make up gives a more luminous quality to flesh
tones. Does this mean that we should be watching
The Stooges painted in color like a trio of
not-so-incredible hulks?!?
The black and white image quality on both of these
discs is infinitely better than what we've come to
expect from Stooges shorts released on DVD from
Columbia. Though a discernable amount of film
grain still exists, the gray scale is nicely
balanced with deep blacks, solid contrast levels
and a considerable amount of fine detail. There is
edge enhancement throughout but it does not
terribly distract. The soundtracks have been
preserved in stereo but are shrill and extremely
dated. The only extra included is the
aforementioned "colorization is good" featurette
that, while fascinating in terms of technical
information, does not dismiss the cold, hard fact
that colorization is still wrong! Films should be
experienced as they were originally intended to be
seen. The average consumer has only recently
savvied up to the fact that widescreen is better
than full frame. Time for another education lesson
on why monochromatic can superior to color! |
