Sunday, November 25, 2012

Two interesting things I saw on TCM today

After The Lemon Drop Kid finished, TCM had a good ten minutes or so to kill before the 8:00 PM movie. They showed the "Classic Movie News" for November, the promo with the woman who always starts off by saying, "Hi! This is the TCM Classic news report for" such-and-such month. I might not have the quote exactly right, but the phony "Hi!" is unmistakeable. This time, however, the whole thing sounded funny, as though the voice were computer sampled or something. It sounded quite odd. I could swear that I saw at least part of the Classic Movie News piece earlier in the month and didn't notice anything wrong with the sound.

The reason I could swear I'd seen it before is because the "new to DVD" portion of it mentioned The Iron Petticoat, which will be airing on Thursday evening as part of a night of films with westerners falling in love with Communists. It's getting a DVD/Blu-Ray combo pack with a restoration, which was displayed with a scene from the old print being transformed into the sharper print by a left-to-right wipe. So what followed next was interesting as well. It was a trailer for The Iron Petticoat, with the trailer being in black and white! If you had just seen the Classic Movie News report, you'd know the movie is a color film. I could swear I saw another trailer on TCM within the past week or so for a color movie where the trailer was in black and white, but I don't remember which movie it was. I thought I had posted on the subject some time in the distant past, but the closest I could find was a March 2008 post mentioning washed-out colors, not not color movies having trailers in black and white. I just wish I could remember what the other movie was.

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