Before I go any further, I want to address the purists.

November 24, 2015 1:34 PM

A colorization of the Munsters opening sequence

See also a colorization of The Addams Family opening

posted by ilama (25 comments total)

Wow! That looks really good. I like the sickly hues on Herman's head.
posted by ian1977 at 1:48 PM on November 24, 2015

The Munsters colorization mostly works, thanks to the fact that everyone sports unnatural ghoul makeup...except for Pat Priest, and her colorization looks typically wrong and unconvincing. As soon as she appears, the effect is derailed. YMMV, of course.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:50 PM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

Good colorization can be really good. I have found that the best colorizers are those who have experience and talent with watercolors—they really get the how and why of fading and mixing hues.
posted by infinitewindow at 1:51 PM on November 24, 2015

That's really, really, impressive. I watched the unaired colour pilot at Halloween (we had the complete boxset on in the background at a party) and this is arguably better.
posted by garius at 2:00 PM on November 24, 2015

I remember being kind of weirded out by the in-color Munsters revival movie(s)(?) from the '70s/'80s and how everybody was painted the exact same shiny opaque blue-green color, which looked super-garish (think '60s Batman) and not at all how their respective makeups read to me in black and white. The colors in this are so much better -- still monsterlike, but more subtle.
posted by Strange Interlude at 2:05 PM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've always hated colorized movies, with the exception of a cheap VHS copy of Night of the Living Dead that I picked up at some point in the early 90s. The bad colorization job gave everything onscreen a dingy, sickly, otherworldly quality that frankly enhanced the viewing experience.
posted by Atom Eyes at 2:06 PM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

This was really well done, and what a labor of love. One upon a midnight dreary, I met Butch Patrick, who had color images of shots from the show, and in memory, they weren't terribly far off from what this artist has done.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 2:12 PM on November 24, 2015

Colorization is generally disdained not because it is badly done; even Turner's 1980s attempts were not done really worse than this. The problem with colorization is that it inherently looks bad because the lighting was done for black and white, and makes a well-lit B&W film look like a poorly lit color film.

It seems especially weird for the Munsters where so much of the main characters is greyish anyway.
posted by graymouser at 2:23 PM on November 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

I always imagined Homer I mean T-Rex I mean Herman as more of a true green rather than blue-ish but I guess it makes sense scientifically. I didn't picture any of them as being as tinted blue as they are. That being said it looks great, great work.
posted by bleep at 2:24 PM on November 24, 2015

as the Munsters were kind of a rip-off/parody of a bunch of monsters from an era of horror movies which was B&W, that's another point to deduct, but from a technical perspective they did a good job.

Wonder if it would help any to DE-color those really awful color episodes of The Andy Griffith Show?
posted by randomkeystrike at 2:33 PM on November 24, 2015

I always loved the theme song for this show. Like, loved it.
Here's all the intros, for reference, including the really bad pilot intro (Incest Grandpa, Eddie is fucking terrifying, dumb-looking Herman, who the hell is Phoebe?)

As far as the music goes, I always preferred the season 1 version of the theme. That crazy dissonant Farfisa organ riff, the super-chunky twang guitar (which I always pictured as a big fat Gretsch Chet Atkins or a White Falcon or something), the harpsichord, the tuba. Kickass. They cheesed up the season 2 theme too much, although I love the surf-beat on the drums.
posted by chococat at 2:40 PM on November 24, 2015 [7 favorites]

A recap of my last 5 seconds:

"Who cares what they do to the Munsters? There's no such thing as a Munsters purist. It's not like they did it to the Add.... OH HELL NO."
posted by MCMikeNamara at 3:26 PM on November 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

Interesting. I just taped a Munsters marathon and Fred Gywnne is a genius.
I cannot be remade, IMO. There could be a movie or one-off but damn if Al Lewis cracks me up.
posted by clavdivs at 3:36 PM on November 24, 2015

Autotune the munsters happened.

I do not know what it means.
posted by vrakatar at 3:37 PM on November 24, 2015

clavdivs, I assume then you did not catch Bryan Fuller's pilot for Mockingbird Lane.
posted by infinitewindow at 3:47 PM on November 24, 2015

infinitewindow, so many hopes were raised only to be mercilessly slaughtered.
posted by ilama at 4:33 PM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

I really wanted to hate this, but I think they got the mid-60s monster revival palatte exactly right - washed out and sickly, heavy on the browns, greens, and blacks, contrasted with bright Technicolor titles.
posted by ryanshepard at 5:33 PM on November 24, 2015

clavdivs, I assume then you did not catch Bryan Fuller's pilot for Mockingbird Lane.

God, I was so upset that that went nowhere.

"You ate a lion while naked."
"The lion was naked. It seemed polite."
posted by middleclasstool at 5:38 PM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

As far as the music goes, I always preferred the season 1 version of the theme. That crazy dissonant Farfisa organ riff, the super-chunky twang guitar (which I always pictured as a big fat Gretsch Chet Atkins or a White Falcon or something), the harpsichord, the tuba. Kickass. They cheesed up the season 2 theme too much, although I love the surf-beat on the drums.

The guitar in that first season is at least a baritone, and maybe even a six-string bass. AFAIK all the ones in those days were at best semi-hollow (Danelectro) but usually solid (Fender, Mosrite) -- no big fat anything.
posted by Sys Rq at 5:43 PM on November 24, 2015

... although I love the surf-beat on the drums.

The Munsters theme is by Jack Marshall, who the year before had recorded the monster/surf/Allan Sherman exploitation LP "My Son the Surf Nut". It has been covered by a slew of surf bands since, and is basically now a standard.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:14 PM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

The cover that always plays in my head when I read about the Munsters: The Comateens
posted by user92371 at 6:24 PM on November 24, 2015

Wait wait, "Mockingbird Lane"? What is this and how good/horrible is it?

(Al Lewis was a feature of my childhood.)
posted by mephron at 6:32 PM on November 24, 2015

It's a different kind of vibe, but I really enjoyed it. Eddie Izzard as Grandpa was great. It got decent ratings, so I'm not sure why they didn't pick it up.
posted by middleclasstool at 7:32 PM on November 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

middleclasstool, the tldr they didn't think it was going to pan out right
posted by ilama at 7:48 AM on November 25, 2015

Very attractive work, achieved by brute force. Professional film coloring systems employ keyframing and feature-tracking, which greatly reduce the labor required. Encoders are often outfitted with separate luminance and chroma inputs, and colorizers can simply manipulate the chroma and leave the luminance alone. This has the virtue of fidelity to the original black-and-white film. On the other hand, film colored in this way has a characteristic "tinted" appearance, like black-and-white photographs that have been tinted with oil colors. For a more satisfying conversion to color, color maps that change hue with gray level within a colored region can be applied. See Fast image and video colorization using chrominance blending for examples.
posted by 0rison at 4:23 PM on November 25, 2015 [1 favorite]