Should The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night Be Colorized for a New Generation To Enjoy?

Not really.

 

If it's required to be in color for a "new generation" to warm to it, they're not going to like it anyway.

 

I love black & white films with no sound
I love black & white films with sound
I love The Beatles
I'd love to see A Hard Day's Night in C-O-L-O-U-R

 

I don't know if colorization is totally dead, but it definitely doesn't seem to get a lot of use these days.

Relevant here: the colorized material in "8 Days a Week". I thought it didn't look very good...

 

Monochrome is as unnatural as computer colorization. Color it.

 

I'm not some Beatles purist and I grew up with Color TV in the 70's and I say No. I love movies like Raging Bull, that was done in 1980 in black and white. I also disliked in the 80s when Ted Turner's TBS network started colorizing lots of old classic movies.

 

I have faith that all new generations will be able to appreciate B&W photography.

 

Some of the greatest films ever made ... and AHDN is one of them ... are black and white. If today's ADHD generation refuses to watch because it's not color, it's their loss.

In other words ... NO!!!!!!!!!!

 

No. It's really sharp in b&w. Honestly, it's not like there's a lack of The Beatles in color for later parts of their career -- and some earlier things that happened to be shot in color.

I don't think it would win new fans of the band or the movie.

 

In 1964, film critic Andrew Sarris called A Hard Days Night, "the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals". I'll go with his assessment.

 

Have they colorized Young Frankenstein, Manhattan, or The Elephant Man yet?

 

Which is a big fish in a small pond. It's pretty good, fairly funny, the music is great, a cinematic masterpiece it is not.

 

Those Turner things did look really bad, but that was 30+ years ago. The technology has improved since then. Didn't anyone see the colorized version of All You Need Is Love? They did that in the 90s and it looked very good, imo. So that was 20+ years ago. I have no doubt they could do an even better job now.

 

Probably a good idea to re-record all the dialog as well, those accents are so
difficult for millennials to understand.

 

Even done better ,I like being transported via black and white to the era that those movies were made. I like that a Beatles movie from 1964 doesn't look like it was shot in 2018 quality color film. Just my opinion/preference.

 

I love their accents, but of course I'm not a millennial.

 

No, no, no

 

The problem with the whole argument that if you simply colorize a film, younger people will watch doesn't hold water with me. The reason is because the results of colorization are still flawed. You would think with the kind of CGI technology we have, it could be done convincingly, but I don't find that to be the case. The colorized footage in the recent Ron Howard documentary on The Beatles looked horrendous. Younger viewers can likely detect that something about the images is still off.

 

Yes, and the beauty is, the original's not going anywhere. This would be just another option for those who might like it.

 

Too bad for them. Their loss.

My thoughts? No, no, a thousand times no.

 

New generations become old generations and they come around to appreciate the things they disdained in youth. One and all eventually enjoy perspective and history.

 

Have you ever seen the colorized All You Need Is Love video? It's not perfect (nothing ever will be) but it's pretty darn good, imo. That's sort of the gold standard at this point and that was done over 20 years ago. Don't know what happened with the Howard movie.

 

Everything the The Beatles did, needs to be digitally enhanced, colour-added, shadow-detail amplified, grain smoothed, 3d effects algorithmically extrapolated from the original 2d, silence de-noised, noise de-silenced, mono made stereo, stereo made quad, quad made 5.1, 5.1 made 7.1.

I agree - they started it with Pepper's', and now there should be no stopping them - no square inch (or millimetre) should remain unturned, no corner remain undusted until – until, they get to the Magical Mystery Tour film – which as a final memory of everything that was simple, innocent, good, amateur, beautiful and poetic in the The Beatles' venerated Canon should be left to remain intact – as a reminder to us all of how naive I, we, you, they, all were in those golden and fond days or yore.

In other words – 'NO!'.

 

Colorize A Hard Day's Night?

Only if they also Auto-Tune all the vocal tracks.

That would be necessary to make it totally acceptable to a younger audience.

 

We could preserve the original by hiring 4 musicians to act like The Beatles, have them pretend to perform songs that sound like The Beatles, film it all in color and put it on TV!