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Has anyone ever taken an old silent film colorized it and put sound to the characters, with todays technology it would be interesting to see if it was watchable or entertaining?

Dance Hall (1929) looks like the dialogue and sound effects were goat glanded onto it.

Bob

I read on another forum that Chuck McCann is trying to negotiate with the heirs of Richard Feiner to do a series of colorized and dubbed versions of the Laurel and Hardy silents (I can almost here Ollie saying in response to this: "Well , here's another nice mess you've gotten me into").

Uhg! I would rather have sound films made into Silents. Adding dialogue is incredibly stupid. It's been done before and it was horrible. All the artistic merit is lost. Parish Forbid.

McCann successfully did this for Laurel & Hardy's Double Whoopee, but normally this would really interfere with the pace and rhythm of a film. Usually a silent film didn't have the full speech of a character's lines. We'd see their mouth move, see the title of their dialogue, and then see the final syllables of the line.

It's an interesting experiment, but just as bad as colorizing a film, which greatly alters the original work.

Little Caesar wrote:I read on another forum that Chuck McCann is trying to negotiate with the heirs of Richard Feiner to do a series of colorized and dubbed versions of the Laurel and Hardy silents (I can almost here Ollie saying in response to this: "Well , here's another nice mess you've gotten me into").

Strikes me as pointless. Who is the intended audience for this? People who reject black & white movies because they're black & white, or silent movies because they're silent, aren't going to become interested in Two Tars just because it's been "updated" with color and sound. They'll reject it anyway because it's old.

Sacrilege!

Gagman 66 wrote: Uhg! I would rather have sound films made into Silents. Adding dialogue is incredibly stupid. It's been done before and it was horrible. All the artistic merit is lost. Parish Forbid.

I watch many modern movies and imagine them being better in silent format. For that matter, many would be better in black and white.

I can't stand the narration over The Iron Mask Douglas Fairbanks that I saw. It ruins the memory of the movie. It took a long time to get the memories out of my head so they didn't come into my memory when I watched the movie again. I'd hear the narration as I was watching the silent movie. Might as well eat a piece of dog shit while your watching it. I've also seen something similar call Apollo boy? something like that with Don Juan John Barrymore movie. Horrible.