Stooges DVD available in color or black and white

The DVD era is resurrecting the great colorization debate of the 1980s, and at the heart of the matter are Curly, Larry and Moe.

Sony’s Columbia TriStar home-video unit today is releasing two Three Stooges DVDs that allow viewers to watch either the original black-and-white or new, digitally colorized versions.

Purists consider it desecration, but Sony executives say colorization can help introduce Hollywood classics to young audiences reluctant to watch anything in black and white. The new discs also give die-hard fans better black-and-white versions, the studio insists.

The new Stooges DVDs, “Goofs on the Loose” and “Stooged and Confoosed,” each contain four shorts featuring Moe and Curly Howard and Larry Fine.

To prepare for the colorization process, Sony says it did a more extensive restoration than it had with previous black-and-white Stooges DVDs.

“The best thing about this DVD release is it gives the consumer the ultimate choice,” said Suzanne White, vice president of marketing for Columbia TriStar home entertainment. “They can watch the very best, the finest restored image of the black-and-white version, or watch the new colorized version and switch instantaneously between the two.”

But that doesn’t appease such colorization critics as Sam Raimi, director of Sony’s “Spider-Man” blockbusters.

“I don’t think they should mess with black and white,” said Raimi, who is such a Stooges fan that credits on some of his movies label extras as “fake Shemps” – a reference to doubles used to complete Stooges shorts after the death of Shemp Howard, who replaced brother Curly after his stroke in the 1940s.

“I think they should just leave it as they are and try to preserve them as best they can,” Raimi said. “I feel like it’s an artistic interpretation that’s not anybody’s right to make except the director’s.”

In the 1980s, media magnate Ted Turner enraged film-lovers when he colorized “Casablanca,” “The Maltese Falcon” and other classic black-and-white films from the MGM library he had acquired.

Those ‘80s dye jobs often tinted actors’ faces an unnatural, pasty hue, while colors of clothing, sets and props were arbitrary.

The new digital process allows greater range of colors that give people, objects and backgrounds a more natural look, Simmons said. Researchers also mined Sony’s archives and prop warehouses to more accurately re-create colors, he said.

For example, they found the actual stove used in “An Ache in Every Stake,” in which the Stooges play ice-delivery men caught up in preparing a fancy birthday meal that climaxes with an exploding cake. The stove was yellow, so that’s the hue it has in the colorized version, Simmons said.

Yet critics say it’s bogus to match colors to studio props, whose tints were chosen for the way they photographed in black-and-white.

For consistency’s sake, says Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, colorized versions would paint the actors’ faces light green – the color of makeup that was applied so they would photograph better in black-and-white.

Still, Columbia hopes to use the colorization process on some black-and-white feature films. If that raises consumer interest, White said, “it may be a way of getting more black-and-white films released.”

“Star Wars” creator George Lucas, who testified with Steven Spielberg before Congress in the 1980s against colorization and other forms of alteration, said the process yanks such slapstick performers as the Stooges out of the black-and-white universe they belong in.

“Maybe just the fact that they’re in black and white makes it funny, because their humor is dated,” Lucas said. “But you try to make it in full living color and try to compare it to a Jim Carrey movie, then it’s hard for young people to understand.”