God I Miss Technicolor

I miss when movie musicals were good. This isn’t me trying to shit on the ones we have today, even though some of them are entirely questionable cough cough Cats. But to me these movies don’t have the same sense of magic that older ones do, and I am unashamed to admit that my favorite era of musicals is the Golden Age. These films are ones that I constantly come back to for some comfort and feel very nostalgic about every time I watch them. Sure they may run rampant with misogyny and other problematic themes that you just can’t quite gloss over, but the music is superb and the costumes are even better.

In the era we are currently in, the movie musicals we have are subpar at best. They lack the sense of soul these older films have, not to mention that everything has been pop-ified. I’d argue that Into the Woods wasn’t terrible, but Emily Blunt can only do so much. Can we please bring back actual talent? I want to be hearing a large chorus, intricate orchestrations, actual legit singing, and seeing talented dancers. If you can’t find people that can actually sing, dubbing people over is totally acceptable. Rosemary Clooney did it in White Christmas when she sang for both herself and Vera Ellen and I don’t see anyone complaining about that. While we’re at it, why don’t we resurrect Bing Crosby or Gene Kelly from the dead and put them back to work? 

My solution to our very predicament: Bring back Technicolor. I know that it’s literally physically impossible, but I truly think it would add magic back into everything. Technicolor adds such a dream-like quality to films, especially with the fuzzy softness around the edge of the screen and I think that this might be the solution to our problems. Why does everything just look so dull now? Life truly used to be full of color and now we are stuck in millennial grey/corporate minimalism hell and that’s really shown up in movies. These older films also really nailed the blueprint of what makes a good movie musical, and the filming technology of the time was a key feature. 

Take shows like White Christmas, The Sound of Music, Singin’ In The Rain, or generally any other movie from that time period. There’s just something so captivating about them that modern-day shows just fail to replicate. The only movie I’ve seen that comes close to this is Wicked, and that’s by a very small margin. Shows back then also used to be (mostly) original with the story they were trying to tell, and now we have Mean Girls that is a movie musical that was based off a musical that was based off of a movie, or High School Musical: The Musical: The Series (seriously what the fuck is that?) 

I guess what I’m saying here is that I want to go back to the way musicals were made. Hiding the fact that some movies are musicals maybe isn’t the only reason that people hate these new films, but that just might be me. Growing up with actual talented actors and artists was truly a privilege that I overlooked when I was younger, and now I don’t think I’ll ever take that for granted. You can keep James Corden in whatever cesspit he crawled out of, but me and Gordon MacRae will be over here chilling.