Roy Rogers Lost Trucolor Films

With Kino's new Blu-ray release of the beautifully restored SUNSET IN THE WEST, there is finally renewed interest in the Roy Rogers films.

Here's information on the six that are lost in color: Roy Rogers in Trucolor - 3dfilmarchive

 

Paramount has an active program of preservation on the Rogers films and showed clips at the TCM festival. They're finding LOTS of complete elements in Europe and they look amazing.

Pick up the SUNSET IN THE WEST Blu-ray and be prepared for a shock at how good it looks!

 

Bob,

Thanks again for sharing these articles and Treasured films!

Sad the state of many of these films have been left in...i know my photo scrapbooks are sitting on the shelf, and occasionally flipped through and enjoyed. Shame many Film Studios neglected their Archives/Library of heritage for so so long!!

 

There are many prints in the Roy Rogers estate. For a while, Bells of San Angelo was lost in color but it has since been found.

 

What's the deal with the Roy Rogers TV show? Hasn't it fallen into PD? Not even sure it there is a legitimate distributor for the series.

 

Yes, The Roy Rogers estate does have prints for the TV show as well and many of the movies and TV series episodes have fallen in to the public domain.

 

Roy sold all rights and elements of the TV show and clean transfers were running on (I think) Hulu. They were from 35mm and looked very good.

 

Has anyone contacted the current owner of "Roy Rogers Restaurants"? If there's any restoration funding needed, they might come up with something, especially to get a little screen credit. They always did and they still use Roy Rogers memorabilia - (reproductions of) movie posters and cards - in their restaurants. They might even have some film materials, really doubtful, but possible.
Roy also did a few commercials for the chain, and it could be nice to get and restore good copies of those, maybe for use as extras on authorized DVDs.

This was in color:

 

The Blu-ray stills indeed look very good considering the technology didn't seem to include a green film element.

 

They are also rerun on RFD-TV.