Hallmark is showing the first season of "I Dream of Jeannie" but they're in color! Have they been colorized? I remember very vividly the first season being in black and white.

Yep, the first season has been colorized. All though I don't know too much about when it was done or why they were colorized, I know it was done fairly recently.

They were colorized at least two years ago by a company called Dynacs Digital Studios. I talked to one of the artists that worked on it, and he mentioned each artist had something like 5 minutes per frame. Well, at 24 frames per second for normal film, that works out to 6 seconds of film per day! I don't know how long the project took, but look at how much stuff is colored in some of the more intricate scenes (like When Jeannie changes the living room into a harem room.) I know he said about five minutes was their limit, but they must have done some of these scenes in groups.

Also, I do wonder who was in charge of deciding what Jeannie's various harem clothing sets would look like because if you look at the old promos from the first season, only the clothes she wore all the time were pink and red. The one she wore when she blinked the living room into the harem room was an arange and peach set, while the one she wore when coming out of the cake at the bachelor party was the same green set she wore in the later color seasons.

I can understand if you have not seen the original black and white episodes in years and now they are only being shown in color, but maybe we should all get together and insist Sony/Columbia/whoever to release the entire series on DVD, unedited, and restored to original lengths and film stock (such as black and white...though I would like to have both version on DVD) How about it, eh? : )

I forgot the url for the studio: http://www.dynacsdigital.com/ddsweb005.htm

Well, as of Wednesday (Nov. 14), Hallmark has now started airing the second season of episodes. Wow, it's hard to believe how fast that first season went, but I'd have to say they did a wonderful job of colorizing them. You could hardly tell the difference between the first and second seasons, except for the opening theme, of course.