Post 809 - Eddie Cantor's "Whoopee" (1930) - Comparison of VHS release to DVD restoration

 

 

With its blackface scenes and extraordinarily contrived humor (despite some great songs), Cantor's first film, in all its glorious two-strip Technicolor, has not aged all that well since its 1930 release.  

However, some team, uncredited, took it upon themselves to do a master restoration of the film, somehow coaxing shades of blue out of the turquoise limits of the original.  Here are a couple of frame comparisons - first from the 1980s VHS, and then from the 2025 DVD reissue.

It's worth a viewing, if for nothing more than the songs and the very fine musical accompaniment by George Olsen "and his Music."  But the scene where Cantor, joyfully unrestrained in his Jewish heritage, hides in an oven and comes out of the ensuing explosion in blackface, in light of what Germany was doing just a few years later... yeah, that was a cringe moment.

You can track down the DVD on Amazon or Movies Unlimited, or download/view it on the Internet Archives:   https://archive.org/details/whoopee-1930 

One final frame to show that they pulled or pushed, but squeezed out the color blue in a two-strip color process:

"Am I blue?"