Friday, July 24, 2009

1951 National Screen Service Color-Glos

When I first saw this ad in the campaign book, for a set of what I assumed were 8x10 photographs, I wondered what it was about them that made them 'Color-Glos'. I mean, it is a black and white illustration, but the copy implies that they are full color, so I assumed they were just color stills, rare but not unheard of in 1951.

I imagine many theatre owners were caught as unaware as I was when I found my first one. If the campaign book had been in full color, the ad would have looked more like this

When I got my first one, I didn't put it together with the campaign book ad, I thought it was a homemade art project kind of thing, you know, someone found this old black and white still, and hand tinted it. My high school had a photography class that did exactly that.

It wasn't until later when I found a group of them with a couple of duplicates that I made the connection.

And again with the weird colors. Geez, can't anyone color Alice's dress blue?!

These are really neon, it is not a trick of the scanner, the colors really are this vivid.

Also, there must be something about the process used to create these, they are extremely brittle, and they almost always turn up either torn or chipped. I've torn more than one accidentally as well.

And these are really scarce, it took me 15 years to put together a complete set.





2 comments:

Vintage Disneyland Tickets said...

Hi Matt! I really like this set, I bet you're a proud owner, I would be! The colors are "wrong" but they are just about as fun as the real colors. Interesting about them being fragile, are they photo prints or off-set or ? Thanks for sharing these gems!

Matt said...

These really are hand-tinted stills, when you see several of the same scene together you can detect slight differences, but they are essentially standard 8x10 B&W stills that someone at NSS (I guess) tinted.