Cinderella (1957)

[Doctor M]

Here's an interesting thought...

The 1957 TV production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella was broadcast live and thought lost in time. They discovered a kinescope recording of the March 17, 1957 of the first dress rehearsal. It was published on DVD.

Watching clips of it today, I noticed a lot of dot crawl artifacts... which is awesome!! You see, kinescope recordings are film captures from TV monitors. Although black and white, it usually didn't have the chroma information filtered out. When it isn't, it showed up as dot crawl.

In 2018 the British came up with a digital recovery method that analyzed the dot crawl patterns in order to restore the original chroma data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_recovery

So that means Cinderella could be restored to color, not just colorized.
I'm assuming this is beyond a home computing process, but I was wondering if anyone here knows the process and if it's fan restore-able.

[Nick_M]

There are two kinescopes of Cinderella: the March 31 broadcast and the March 17 rehearsal. The Image DVD has the broadcast, minus commercials, while you can see the rehearsal at the Paley Center.

Paley Center listings:
Cinderella (Rehearsal)
Cinderella (Broadcast)

The color recovery process only works on PAL telerecordings. There's something about NTSC that messes up the entire premise that makes PAL recovery possible.

[Doctor M]

Did not know either of these things. Thanks.
It was my understanding the kinescope of the broadcast was lost.

Edit: This, I believe is a ridiculously cropped to widescreen version of the dress rehersal(?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1F4YhBOA14

[Nick_M]

That's the broadcast version, since it starts with "The Prince is Giving a Ball."

[Doctor M]

I thought 'The Prince is Giving A Bell' number not being at the beginning was only the 1965 remake. You seem to know details that Wikipedia is missing.
Edit: What's really strange, is for all the things that CLAIM the version on YouTube, DVD, etc. is the final broadcast version, this year at the AFI Lifetime Achievement ceremony, Julie Andrews said that version was lost and all that survives is the rehearsal. At least that's what I heard and one of the reasons I started this thread. I'll try to find that clip.