How Technicolor came to dominate cinema

They’ve already found a cure for the common cold. It’s called Technicolor. My first dose of it came during the Christmas holidays when I was about 12. There I was, ailing and miserable, when The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) came on the television at the end of my bed. Nothing had prepared me for this. A Sherwood Forest that was aflame with green. Clothes that shimmered purple and blue. Olivia de Havilland’s oh-so-cherry lips. Under two hours later I cast off the duvet and leapt from the fug. The sickness had gone.

I now know that this medicine, Three-strip Technicolor, was a revolutionary process, the first to properly mix the three primary colours of light — red, green and blue — so that film could capture all of the colours in nature. From this technique came movies such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Meet Me in St Louis (1944) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952).