By William Armstrong

A few years ago, a big controversy began about the colorization of black and white movies. I really don't understand what all the big fuss was all about. Movies have always been a business and businesses are first and foremost started to make money. And if colorizing movies is done to attract a larger audience to see those movies, where is the harm?

Don't get me wrong; I would be the first in line to protest if the master prints had been destroyed to make color copies from them, and no one would be able to see the original black and white versions.

But this is not the case. You can still watch both versions, and those people who will not watch black and white movies can still watch the film in its colorized form.

I find it interesting to view the colorized film and compare it to the original. I wonder how certain movies would have loooked had they been made in color instead of in black and white. The only thing I object to is a poorly done job of colorization, like the 1932 Tarzan The Ape Man which looked as though the color was all washed out. The Tarzan films are an ideal subject for colorization because of the exotic backgrounds, etc. The Disney Zorro series is the best use of colorization I have seen yet. I can think of TV series like the black and white episodes of The Adventures Of Superman which, if done right, would be a welcome addition to the list of television shows that would be given a new life to today's audiences.

Which brings me to my suggestion which surely will be objected to by purists, but again I say, if the original version is still available and peope can watch both versions, I see no real need to worry or object. And that suggestion is: why not take the silent movies and have them dubbed like they do foreign movies?

Add appropriate sound tracks (not today’s be-bop, rap or anything like that, but the kind of music done by Danny Elfman and James Horner) to them so the people who will not watch silent movies will have the chance to watch them in this version, and people like me can have both versions to watch and enjoy.

If done correctly, this will surely bring these movies greater visibility and even TV stations that won't carry these films will now be able to show them to an audience who have not seen movies like Metropolis, Faust, Phantom Of The Opera, Tarzan Of The Apes, Nosferatu, The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, etc., because they were silent, and today's audiences seem to have little patience when it comes to having to read "dialogue cards" every few minutes to know what is being said.

Still from Edison's Frankenstein (1910)

I personally don't mind watching them in their original context but there seems to be a lot of people out there who do mind. which is sad, but true. This would open these films up to a whole new audience. Lets face it, these films were silent because sound had not been available to filmmakers back then and I'm sure many would have been filmed in sound had they had the option.

In Star Wars, James Earl Jones did the "voice-over" for David Prowse's Darth Vader and Glenn Close performed a similar service when they used her voice instead of Andie McDowell's in Greystoke; Hollywood itself often uses other people's voices in movies now. Stunt men and women double actors and actresses. Many of the original silent movie stars are no longer with us so they wouldn't be able to dub their own voices in these movies.

(And on a different subject, wouldn't those RKO Tarzan movies look great in color? They were going to film Tarzan's Peril in color but ran into all kinds of technical problems and changed their minds.)

To sum it all up, I present some food for thought. To dub or not to dub, that is the question (to paraphrase William Shakespeare).

Let’s finally hear the screams!