How Technicolor Created Ruby Slippers Without Using Color Film
6th August 2021
Technicolor film was not color film, and it did not produce anything like lifelike colors. But how did it produce color movies? And why did those colors glow? And why did all of it lead to Dorothy getting ruby slippers?
As anyone who has seen an old Technicolor film knows, it looks weird. Blue eyes look like they glow. Pink faces look like they’ve been painted peach. Red looks scary. It all looks dyed, not recorded — and that’s because it was. There wasn’t any color film at the time that Technicolor was making its big splash. No one had figured out how to create a film stock that would record color. They had, however, found a way to make film stock that would filter out all the color that shouldn’t get through. And they had dyes. By putting them together, they made Technicolor glorious.