11 Facts About Cinecolor

Cinecolor was an early subtractive color-model two-color motion picture process that was based upon the Prizma system of the 1910s and 1920s and the Multicolor system of the late 1920s and the 1930s.

Cinecolor could produce vibrant reds, oranges, blues, browns and flesh tones, but its renderings of other colors such as bright greens and purples were muted.

Cinecolor process was invented in 1932 by the English-born cinematographer William Thomas Crespinel, who joined the Kinemacolor Corporation in 1906 and went to New York in 1913 to work with Kinemacolor's American unit.

Cinecolor later worked for Multicolor and patented several inventions in the field of color cinematography.

Cinecolor bought four acres of land in Burbank, California for its processing plant.

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From 1932 to 1935, Cinecolor was used in at least 22 cartoons, including Fleischer Studios cartoons for Paramount, Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising for MGM; and Ub Iwerks, whose Comicolor cartoons were released by the independent distributor Pat Powers while Walt Disney held an exclusive contract with Technicolor for the use of its three-strip process for animation.

Cinecolor was prominently employed in processing Paramount's Popular Science series of short films although later prints were made by Consolidated Film Industries under their Magnacolor process.

Hal Roach Studios made all of his postwar featurettes in Cinecolor; his was the first Hollywood studio with an all-color schedule.

An oddity of the system was that rather than using cyan, magenta, and yellow primary subtractive colors, SuperCinecolor printed its films with red, blue and yellow matrices to create a system that was compatible with the previous printers.

In 1953, it became the Color Corporation of America, specialized in SuperCinecolor printing, and was a major Anscocolor processor.

The last theatrical feature with a SuperCinecolor credit was The Diamond Queen, released by Warner Bros.