I'm a big fan of colorized history over on Reddit. The old pictures become much more appealing this way.

Wouldn't it be great to colorize these classics, and also remove the title cards and hire some foley and voice artists to create a soundtrack for them?

These are artworks, and even though they are made with limited technology they are built to those constraints. You can't update the medium and not lose the essence of the piece.

You don't make super mario more appealing to modern audiences by rendering it from first person. We should build emulators so that people can play the original. Or you can draw inspiration from the original and make a new piece that works in modern ways.

So I think it would be waste of effort. Colorizing historical photos is cool, but I don't think it's the same thing.

> You can't update the medium and not lose the essence of the piece.

I don't find this argument compelling at all. If the director at the time had color film and sound, he certainly would have used them. After all, how many silent films have been made after 1930? 2? B+W persisted for a while because it was so much cheaper than color film, but now that that differential has gone away, how many movies are released in B+W? 1 every 5 years? Even film noir is done in color today.

Yes it's a technical limitation which he would not have chosen today. I agree.

In the silent era they had to work around the missing technology and that affects acting style, story points, the pacing, lighting, set design etc. This created silent film. To reverse those creative decisions you need to redo lot more than color and sound.

Even today when you shoot b+w movies and probably use color camera you light it totally different. Just simply desaturating the image does not work.

The examples in Reddit's colorizedhistory subreddit show how good and effective colorization is. It doesn't have to be effective, and those colorized pictures don't quite look like color photography, but things don't have to be perfect to be a huge improvement.

Not really, the pacing is completely different from modern movies.

And there still is an audience which watches it in cinema in 2015, so there's no need to vandalize it for mass appeal.

I know that colorizing it will offend some people, but the originals are not damaged and people who want to see the originals can.

Is it so much different from converting existing movies to 3D?

I watched a restored print of 1929 "Wings" and they added a few foley sound effects here and there. It dramatically improved watching the picture. The flick is already in HD, and looks great. Colorized, foley soundtrack, and dubbing will make it much more fun to watch.

I know a lot of younger people who simply refuse to watch anything in black&white, and I don't blame them.