Perhaps I will get tossed out of some gathering of film buffs for saying this but I find myself unable to drum up any real objection to the "colorization" of old movies — especially things like Three Stooges comedies. Yes, there is a certain implied insult of us, the buying public; like we're all so shallow and teenage that we'll pass up a great film because it's in black-and-white, whereas we'll patronize it in color. Since most TV and movie marketing panders to that kind of consumer, I don't see the point of getting incensed over it as it relates to colorization.
I would love it if every movie ever made was available in the full, complete form that its makers intended. That's never going to happen. In the real world, a lot of changes are made to movies, including trims for TV time limits and broadcast standards, recropping for TV format, insertion of commercials, restoration of deleted scenes, exhibition of alternate endings, remixing of music, reformatting for airline showings, plus all sorts of adjustments of color and image during film-to-video transfers. Some of those are done not by mercenary exploiters of the material but by well-intentioned film historians…and they're not always for the worst. Of the changes that I think are not for the better, colorization strikes me as one of the lesser offenses, especially since I seem to always have the option of viewing the non-colorized version.
That's a key point. Back in the eighties when colorization first reared its controversial head, a lot of the upset seemed to flow from the premise that the colorized Casablanca would supplant the genuine, black-and-white article and we would never again be able to see Bogie in the original monochrome. That has not happened. Maybe it's because colorization has never become as popular as some hoped/feared but at no point has anything more important than the first season of Gilligan's Island ever become available in only its colorized edition — and even there, the black-and-white quickly became available again. So that argument has pretty much gone away, and it is less true than it once was to say all colorization is hideous. A lot of it wasn't very good when it started but it's improving. I have yet to see a case where it makes a movie better but I don't think that's outside the realm of human possibility. At its very worst, it's just something you can ignore, like you don't have to listen to the commentary track or watch the deleted scenes they include on the DVD.
So I guess I should be happy about the newly-released Stooges DVDs (like this one and this one) which offer both b/w and colorized versions of the same films. After all, they give you a choice, right? Well, not really. You can watch either but you have to pay for both. Sony-Columbia Home Video previously released DVDs which each contained five Stooges shorts for $20, marked down to $17.36 on Amazon. They also had this collection of 18 shorts for $45.86 (Amazon price). Each of the two new collections contain four shorts in color and the same four in b/w for $22.46 each…or you can buy both discs for $31.47. Unless you think having two copies of the same short is just as good as getting two different ones, that's a substantial price increase.
The shorts on these two new sets are pretty well chosen but most of them have already been on recent, still-available DVD sets. So if you're a Stooge Completist, assuming there is such an animal, you're going to buy a lot of material you already have in order to get a few items that aren't already on your shelf. I don't know about you but I'm really sick of seeing things I already own repackaged in an attempt to get me to buy them again. (Which reminds me: Aren't they about due to force another edition of Goldfinger on me? I haven't bought a new, improved version for months.)
Lastly, I will say this for the new Stooge sets: The colorization is pretty danged impressive. It still has that "lobby card" look but it's quite pleasant. I have no idea if it's "historically accurate," as they claim, and don't think it matters…but it was no hardship to see Moe in full color as he jabbed his fingers in his brother's eyes. It was also no better than seeing it in black-and-white. Ultimately, I don't think colorization is, as some put it, "a desecration" of a great art form. I think the main thing wrong with it is that it raises the price.