(Above are two ways to advertise original content. At left is the B&W manner in which a great film was created. At right is the version you might see on the 1980’s muddy-color version. Thirty years after that effort it is much better, almost Hallmark in quality).

We talked about it with wonder yesterday morning. Splash had immediately succeeded in diverting sober conversation about an event as big as our nation’s landing safely on the Moon fifty years ago. That is a little excessive, since only a period of time “three decades in length” is considered long enough to legitimately measure real change in earthly events.

We reported that the scientists at the Lawrence Livermore Labs Ignition Center had achieved a fusion event in their labs. Some of the chat this morning, without sherry enforcement, resurrected something they have been saying for more than thirty years: “Fusion Power will be here in only thirty years or so.”

That is a number curiously common across topic areas. According to the literature, we have been saying that about fusion energy since the 1950s.

You may remember other thirty-year equations in defense of observed measurements in Science. For example, the meteorologic community relies on averages over three decades to separate the dual uncertainties of “weather” and “climate.” For accuracy, you know. Or to permit wild ideas to be expressed without threatening an entire professional career.

Dr. Paul Ehrlich had some comments yesterday on that yesterday. He has been wrong on topics like mass starvation, the population bomb, acid rain, global cooling and heating issues since at least 1990.

We laughed about that after the two bottles of sherry were gone yesterday morning and we confronted the rest of the day with a certain edge. What we used to do down at The Farm was switch satellite channels from the news to watch Turner Classic Movies. There we found some charming old movies at least thirty years of age. Like seeing Donna Reed, the comely matron in our youth with her own TV show. We think it was B&W, but all memory seems to be.

When we first saw it more than thirty years ago, it was in the format of actual old celluloid, sometimes worn and splotchy, and always with that sort of bluish tinge to the shades of gray and white.

So, on a chilly morning only partly in the bag and with lunch still an hour or two away, we “tuned in” to a film on our Netflix service. It is dramatically on the wonderful big-bandwidth fiber-optic system that serves the 249 units in the Big Pink building. We saw the title and dutifully snuggled in to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  Frank Capra directed Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed and crusty old Lionel Barrymore in the 1946 release. The big war was over. Millions had just served, men and women alike. With their time done, they were ready to roar in peacetime activities.

We looked at the flatscreen as they started to run the film, and noticed there was something new. A brightly colored screen depicted a warning about the film. This holiday classic “might not be suitable due to alcohol use and sexual conduct inappropriate for those under 16 years of age.”

We suspected something might be different coming at us in this version, and when the traditional credits started to roll we realized we were in for something unexpected. The film had been redone.

Not with a resurrected cast. Redone. This wonderful film now depicted a world that looked like ours. It was a world changer. We had first seen this film when it was a decade old, a bluish-tinged worn gray-and-white version broadcast from CKLW in Canada on “Mary Martin’s Million Dollar Movie” and “Bill Kennedy at the Movies.” We had not consumed enough sherry to alter our senses much, but we swiftly realized that something significant had occurred. They had digitally restored the film to modern standards, refreshing the cell images to perfection and coloring them to believable modern standards.

They did this version with a dive into the RKO film archives, finding three copies of celluloid masters that were digitally merged into “best image,” frame by frame and colorized professionally to match the world we imagine we live in. This version had never been seen by the Writer’s Section at Refuge Farm. We saw it yesterday as something completely new in 4K definition. You may remember the commotion thirty years ago when Ted Turner first started colorizing some of the B&W films in his extensive archives. The technology was new, and the color process only vaguely successful.

Not this version! The Paramount company spent a year producing this one in 2019. They used the original nitrate negative along with two fine-grain masters made as the World War was coming to an end. Each element was carefully scanned using the very latest technology to “preserve the delicate negative and create the best possible digital image.” Fortunately, 13 of the 14 reels of the original negative survived, but portions had begun to deteriorate so the best image was selected from one of the three original sources on a shot-by-shot basis. The result is a knock-out, producing a vibrant and detail-rich picture that brought this classic to a strange new life with that a reviewer claimed made “Every single frame look like a Rockwell painting.”

Considering the muddy colors achieved when they did this 30 years ago, that is quite an achievement but also controversial. We just watched it in colors that made it share something with the endless stream of modern Hallmark movies. Critics say it’s not the way in which a guardian angel is dispatched to Bedford Falls to rescue Jimmy Stewart from suicide was meant to be seen.

Technicolor had been invented in 1916- thirty years before RKO released the film commercially. It opened to modest box office success, and vaulted into the “100 best films of all time” after the copyright expired and anyone could show it on a no-cost basis. It can be pointed out that they could have made it in color back then, but even Jimmy Stewart pointed out the lighting, shadows, clothes and make-up were crafted and created deliberately around a B&W reality. It was intentionally different, a point that the actor made himself in testimony to Congress in 1988.

No one lies to that body, you know? Or at least they didn’t 30 years ago. We now know that is exactly the right amount of time to have a decent professional career. That applies to energy, weather, climate, films, and everything else in our world. And we will be safely retired with pensions secure. Regardless of how wrong we were.

That is the view from Big Pink, anyway. And we will say so with vigor, since in 30 years we are not likely to be available for comment, pro or con.

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com