More fun with image restoration...

Well, it's my understanding that the 1957 TV version of "Cinderella" is on its way to making a DVD debut, allegedly sometime in 2004.

Much to my chagrin, they haven't let me near the transfer of the surviving kinescope with LUSTRE , but I'm still looking forward to the show being issued. Along with "Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall" (which thankfully still exists on 2" quad videotape), it's one of the glaring omissions from the Silver Age of Television, in terms of public availability. To date there has been **no** official release of the program on tape or disc, and it has never been re-aired on network television.

The original program was one of CBS's **very** rare forays into early color broadcasting, and its live airing attracted the largest audience recorded to that date. Although there was surviving file evidence that the program was archived on B&W film, all prints of it were lost until just a few years ago, when one was donated the Museum of Television and Radio. It is available for viewing there, but there have been conflicting reports as to the condition of the existing print, which evidently underwent some restoration before being added to the collection.

There is persistent speculation that with the great strides that colorization has made in the past few years, the powers-that-be may utilize that process for the proposed home video release, in an effort to move that much closer to the look of the original broadcast, and (in some market researcher's opinion) make it more palatable to the mass market.

Even though they haven't asked me, I'm happy to do my part for the cause... I had never seen any color photos from the production, though it seemed logical that they should exist. Well, I recently had the pleasure of finding someone who had an original slide transparency and got a scan of it. Even though the original has since faded considerably (Eastmancolor stock-- need I say more?), it's my pleasure to show y'all something of what it must have looked like originally...

So here 'tis... Julie Andrews (Cinderella) and Jon Cypher (The Prince).

-Kevin

 

Thanks for the comments, guys....

To answer your question though, Mikey... let's just say that it took some color correction that's ananlogous to the type of EQ that Steve added to his "Mamas & Papas" MCA disc-- adjustments that were necessary, but are so drastic that they're not the type that a pro would normally apply to source material.

Nice to know that much color was still there, though!!

And no, as far as I know, NBC was the only network that made color kinnies (their "lenticular" system), so unless they were kind enough to do it for CBS, this was only preserved in B&W.

-Kevin

 

One way to get a good start at it is to identify a portion of the picture that is supposed to be neutral (typically something white or grey), read what the RGB values are, and "reverse engineer" the fading to the whole picture. This assumes that the fading over time has been uniform.

Regards,

 

Robert:

I like the lighting balance in yours (I **do** feel that mine errs on the side of being a bit daker and moodier that the original), but at least on my monitor, I prefer my warmer color balance. Although I'm in complete agreement with you about the prince's outfit, for example, the skin tones as I view them in your version are a bit jaundiced, and from a costuming standpoint, I find it much easier to believe that they'd have dressed Cinderella in a pink outfit (which makes the commonly-available blue apron a nice contrast), hence my tendency toward that color scheme.

And then of course there's the whole 1950s Technicolor-style color schemes that they used back then anyway, particularly to show off those new-fangled color TVs...!!

But you know, in general, this is why they have a lot of different horses for people to choose from in every horse race...

Thanks for your contribution!

-Kevin

(...and you know, I never **have** gotten the hang of Photoshop. My effort was done with manual tweaking in Paint Shop Pro.)