November, 1961
I realized that it's been quite some time since I shared some scans of slides that were very faded and pink. As usual, I attempted to color-correct them, and they definitely look better, though they still leave something to be desired.
So... here's one, in its unrestored state. Pretty bad!
The restoration improved things a lot, we even have a bit of blue in the sky. There's still a pinkish cast to some of the buildings; after fiddling around with it for a while, I decided that this was about as good as I was going to get. Imagine going to the park on a November day (presumably a weekday), and seeing it so empty! Walt was surely not happy about it, but the holidays were approaching, and I'm sure tens of thousands of people would show up soon.
Next: Fantasyland, right next to Merlin's Magic Shop (to the right). There's not a child to be seen!
3 comments:
Major-
I'd be happy to go back to that Disneyland - faded or no-! I would bet many of the folks in the 2nd image were born in the late 1800's. Must'a felt like going back home for them to just walk down Main Street, USA.
Thanks, Major.
Wow, the smog is reeeeally bad in the first image! ;-)
In the restoration, like you said, things look a LOT better! Also like you said, not perfect. The color and lighting here remind me of the look of the movie "Asteroid City" (2023), which had an exaggerated, somewhat weird lighting and coloration to it... i.e., surreal.
The second faded image looks like it was taken at the moment a hydrogen bomb was detonated. I was going to add that everyone here was turned to ash a second later... but that seemed too dark humored, even for me. So I deleted it. ;-p
Now THIS one turned out much better! If we hadn't seen the original, faded version, I would never have guessed that this had been restored. Although, now that I look more closely, the roof tiles on Merlin's Magic Shop look really magenta-colored. They're not normally that color, are they? We also see the Disneyland mailbox next to the keppy cap. I think that's Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) staring at us , wearing the gray suit and hat. He must've used his DeLorean to go back to 1961 and photo-bomb this picture just to mess with our minds. Now he's back in the here-and-now, looking at this post and chuckling.
Nanook, facts like that (born in the 1800s) really set my mind spinning. Kind of amazing!
Major, don't wait so long to show us more before-and-after scans next time! Thank you for showing us these restorations.
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