Серия мультфильмов "Color Classics" студии Fleischer

Animated film series

Color Classics are a series of animated short films produced by Fleischer Studios for Paramount Pictures from 1934 to 1941 as a competitor to Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies. As the name implies, all of the shorts were made in color format, with the first entry of the series, Poor Cinderella (1934), being the first color cartoon produced by the Fleischer studio. There were 36 shorts produced in this series.

The first Color Classic was photographed with the Two Color, two strip Cinecolor process. The rest of the 1934 and 1935 cartoons were filmed in Two Color Technicolor, because the Disney studio had an exclusive agreement with Technicolor that prevented other studios from using the Three Color process. That exclusive contract expired during September 1935, and the 1936 Color Classic cartoon Somewhere in Dreamland (1936) became the first Fleischer cartoon produced in Three Color Technicolor. The first cartoon in the series, Poor Cinderella, featured Betty Boop (with red hair and turquoise eyes); future shorts usually did not have familiar or recurring characters. Many of the Color Classics entries make prominent use of Max Fleischer's Stereoptical process, a device which allowed animation cels to be photographed against actual 3 dimensional background sets instead of the traditional paintings. Poor Cinderella, Somewhere in Dreamland, and Christmas Comes But Once a Year all make prominent use of the technique. Disney's competing apparatus, the multiplane camera, would not be completed until 1937, three years after the Stereoptical Process's first use. In 2021, after decades of being shown in altered, worn, and "beet red" prints, the Fleischer estate (in co operation with Paramount Pictures) launched an initiative to formally restore the entire classic animation library from the surviving original negatives, beginning with Somewhere In Dreamland, which has had its restored World Premiere on the MeTV network in December of said year as part of the Toon In With Me Christmas special, presented uncut with its original front and end Paramount titles.