Theories about Poor Cinderella's woes

[Argus Sventon]

I acquired the PD version of the Max Fleischer Color Classic, "Poor Cinderella", and noticed a few things unusual.

1. The NTA logo is the black and white version, not the color version, faded.

2. The U.M.&M. copyrights appear superimposed over the original title card. This is similar to the black and white version. U.M.&M. refilmed the color title cards completely.

Did NTA blunder, on making the Eastmancolor TV negative of Poor Cinderella, so much so that they weren't able to make color prints?

[Patrick McCart]

Poor Cinderella was the first cartoon put out by the Fleischer's in color. Disney, however, held an exclusive contract with Technicolor for 3-strip color. 2-strip gave a film a really weird look (see the silent Ben-Hur's color sequences).

Cinecolor was used then. Cinecolor used B&W stock, but with double-sided film (emulsion on both sides).

Cinecolor picked up the red and green hues...but with no blue.

So how do the Cinecolor cartoons have blue in them? They run the negative through a cyan filter onto a new "Full" color negative.

Voila! Full color. (With some catches, of course.)

Poor Cinderella was the OLDEST color cartoon purchased by UM&M, so the print must have been pretty old that they recieved from Paramount.

Since they were already using Eastmancolor for duplicates, they transfered a Cinecolor Poor Cindrerella to Eastmancolor.

Well, Eastmancolor fades...and how it fades!

Since this color process is tri-layered, with blue on top, blue is the first color to go....then green...leaving only the red.

Since all duplicates of the cartoon were printed in Eastmancolor, they faded.

The resulting film would be extremely red, so the smart choice to do was to turn the color off while transfering. Some PD dist. decided to leave the salmon-colored picture.

UCLA restored the cartoon to its near original color using a process not unlike Technicolor...so the color actually would be better than the original!

[Jack]

So how do the Cinecolor cartoons have blue in them? They run the negative through a cyan filter onto a new "Full" color negative.

This part of the process is iffy, I've heard conflicting things about it while researching Cinecolor, and some of the people I e-mailed said they didn't think that happened (or have never seen negatives with any evidence of this). It may have been done occasionally, but....

I've heard/read they achieved limited amounts of blue by dying one strip green-blue, picking up some blue hues.



Jack:D