MOE AND LARRY'S HAIR

BY DAN MILLER
(originally posted August 17, 2004)

I’ve always enjoyed the Three Stooges. It’s a guy thing I suppose.
Whenever I don’t know how to handle a particular situation, I always ask, “How would Larry, Moe and Curly handle this?”, then I try to do the opposite.

I mention this because I read last week that Sony’s Columbia TriStar studios is about to release the old Three Stooges movies on DVD, in color, or at least “colorized”.

Movie purists, as you can imagine, are up in arms.

“How dare they deface the delicate work of the Stooges!”, they cry.
Or, “If the directors and moviemakers back then had wanted those comedies to be in color they would have filmed them in color!”

The fact is, most movies fifty or sixty years ago were made in black and white because it was enormously expensive to distribute them in color, and B&W was perfectly acceptable.

Now, I happen to like black and while movies.
Some would simply not work in color.
Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ as an example. It had to made in black and white.
Same with “To Kill A Mockingbird”, “Shindler’s List” and many others.

But I must say I always enjoyed “It’s A Wonderful Life” in the colorized version. It was sort of a sepia tone. Old looking, but with a certain warmth.
Of course they’ve now put the legal clamps on the colorized version of that Jimmy Stewart classic.

As for the Stooges, the good news is, the studio is offering both versions on these new DVD’s. You can watch in black and white, or you can watch it “colorized”.

It’ll be interesting to see, because some critics say the Stooges just won’t be as funny in color. But the studio is hoping a new generation - spoiled to color - will discover the Stooges for the first time. Time will tell.
Such a dilemma. What would Larry, Moe and Curly think?

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