[old_tv_nut]

Sad to tell you that an attempt was made to do this, and while the technique would have worked, there is a problem in that the dot pattern fades out in the highlights, perhaps due to kinescope spot size. The result is that the important well lighted areas, like Julie Andrews' face, have no chroma dots to recover, so you would be going to a colorization process instead of chroma recovery. At that point, you may as well just do artificial colorization of the whole thing.

More details: Ed Reitan initially saw this on the DVD, and enlisted me to take a look at it, in 2005. I determined that the MPEG-2 encoding on the DVD scrambled the dots badly, so that a scan of the original film would be needed. We discussed it further around 2009, including the successful work that was done in England to recover color from monochrome kinescopes of PAL programs. Ed passed away in early 2015 before being able to obtain access to the film.

In 2015, I discussed the project with some people at ETF, to find out that he had never mentioned it to anyone. They looked for anything in his effects, which they were curating, but nothing turned up. I also talked to a colleague of Ed's who had worked on video tape restoration - still nothing. The father of one of his colleagues on the quadtape list, age 97 in 2016, had worked on the show, and had his hands on a copy of the kinescope at CBS when he worked there, but nothing in 2016.

Then in August 2016 I contacted the Library of Congress. They had only a Betamax copy, and suggested contacting the Paley center and UCLA. This got me in touch with Jane Klain at the Paley Center, who connected me with the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, who hold the rights to the program and held copies of the Kinescopes. She informed me that she had spent years searching for a copy of the quad tape, but none had been found.

At this point (Sept. 2016) I was put in touch with Ted Chapin, President and director of R&H, and Dan Wingate, a well known film/video restoration expert. Everyone was excited about the possibility of restoring it in time for the program's 60th anniversary in 2017.

Then began a search for where to do some test scans, arrange shipping, etc. Finally in January of 2017, scans were done by Deluxe on the Sony Pictures lot.

The samples were sent to me, and the very simple processing I was able to do on my computer at home showed color of good amplitude (very much out of sync, but not noisy like the DVD) on darker objects, but alas little or nothing on brighter areas like actors faces. It was verified that this was the case on the film, and not any error in scanning.

And that's where the project ended. I think proper color could have been recovered without the advantage of phase insensitivity that PAL has, but there was no use proceeding any further when important areas of the scenes had little or no chroma. The last email I have is from Dan Wingate in early March, 2017, agreeing that we were at a stopping point.