Cheap and nasty sonorisation and colourisation

Bud Fisher

Charles R. Bowers

The Globe Trotters

This is a really rather entry in the Mutt and Jeff series and the last that Bud Fisher himself (along with Charley Bowers) would produce.

There is nothing whatever amazing or wonderful about the sonorisation and colourisation carried out by the Modern Films Sales Corporation sometime in the early thirties. It is a two-colour system but a really rather poor one, Kromochrome. The two-colour systems had been around since the 1910s and Technicolor two-colour was far superior to this (see the surviving Toll of the Sea from 1922)and by the thirties three-colour Technicolor was already available (see the surviving The Viking from 1928). So by this time many much better natural colour systems already existed but would have been doubtless too costly for this kind of exercise.

Several Mutt and Jeffs were sonorised and colourised at this time but, where they still exist, the original silent black and white versions are distinctly superior. This films seems only to have survived in its remade form but Sick Sleuths, for instance, also survives in black and white and Westward Whoa seems to exist in a sonorised version that has not been contaminated by Kromochrome. Some other Mutt and Jeff films survive in their original form but many alas were redrawn, sonorised and colourised for television in the 1970s.

bappamtv

The Globe Trotters

🎬 Technical Specs

🏷️ Keywords

🎯 Categories

⭐ Featured Review

🎬 More Like This

📖 Synopsis