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Aw yeah! Way back when in the early 1990s, a cable channel, pretty sure it was Cartoon Network UK, actually showed these to fill up time. Although the ones I saw weren't Technicolor, perhaps they were from a non-Technicolor print taken on a cheaper film method? The blue was completely washed out, as often happened in early film.
Actually REALLY early colour film didn't even HAVE blue! They used a method, "bipack", of gluing together two thinly sliced B&W films that had been sensitised and tinted. One to red, one to cyan or green, usually. So you could get a lot of the colour gamut, flesh tones looked good, but oceans or grass, not so much, and crap contrast for dark colours.
Technicolor was different, the champion of colour film formats. It was shot on 3 reels of film, each behind an R, G, or B filter. So no "colour" to actually degrade in the 3 monochrome films. You had to have a Technicolor technician on set all the time you were filming, to manage the film and cameras. But the results need no exaggerating, even 80 or 90 years later.
I mention all of this, partly cos I'm high, but also cos it's a noticable thing in a lot of early animation, certain colours washed out over the years, but just a few animations were only ever shot on bi-colour film. It's fascinating how they solved their problems. It's also amazing to realise the exact same 35mm projectors were in use, from back in the 1930s, up til only a couple of years ago in some cinemas. It's only been a couple of years since all cinemas went to digital, getting films delivered on hard drives. Before that, decades of shining light through film onto a screen, as generations lived and died.
Anyway... those are Fleischer Superman cartoons. Same studio did Betty Boop and the rest. His stuff was always very, very fluid, lots of movement and lines bending all over the place, compared to Disney's much stiffer style. Fleischer's stuff looked more like the comic strips had escaped from the page into life. Actually he did one film on just that subject. |
