Joe Karlosi wrote:
I decided to watch Disc 2, which has all short subjects on it. Again, the PAL speedup did not really bug me as I watched the first few. But there was one interesting observation. I decided to do the unthinkable, and watch one of my very favorite shorts, TIT FOR TAT, in Color. Unless I was imagining things, it sounded as if the audio quality was the "correct" speed as I saw this colorized version. Afterward, I switched over to the same film in black and white, but immediately I could hear the sudden speed-up in L&H's voices... especially having just screened the color one and having it fresh in my mind. But as I re-watched the short in b&w, I found I did sort of get used to the speed thing. On top of that, the visual quality of the black and white version was AWFUL -- tons and tons of thick, white specks all over the picture. I assumed that the color editions would be the same prints as the black and whites, but this is obviously not the case.
Not sure how this works, but in some cases I thought older colorization processes toyed with the frame-rate or number of frames to speed the process along. I suppose it's conceivable that since colorized prints are tinkered with anyway, maybe some of that adjusting results in a modification that makes the PAL thing a non-issue.

The colorization is terrible on these films and a total waste of disk-space, but sadly it may well be what keeps them all in print a decade later. I don't much cotton to colorization, but at least companies like LEGEND have advanced it by leaps and bounds since these were done.