majority of animated shorts originally produced for theatrical release by studios like Warner Bros., Columbia Pictures, and Fleischer Studios had entered television syndication. However, a significant portion of these cartoons had been made in black and white during the early sound era (late 1920s through the mid-1930s). Because color television was rapidly becoming the standard by the mid-1960s, black and white content was considered visually outdated and commercially less viable.

To make these older cartoons more marketable, companies like Color Systems Inc., founded by Fred Ladd—who had previously been instrumental in adapting Japanese animation like Astro Boy for American television—developed a method of “redrawn colorization.” Unlike later digital colorization techniques that simply added color over existing footage, this process required artists to trace and redraw every other frame of the original animation, effectively recreating the cartoon by hand in color. These redrawn frames were then photographed onto new color film stock. While the process allowed for bright, television-friendly visuals, it inevitably caused a loss of animation fidelity: timing, subtle motion, and line quality suffered because the redrawn versions simplified or altered the original movements and designs.

The Krazy Kat cartoons selected for colorization were part of Columbia Pictures’ output between 1929 and 1940—produced first by the Charles Mintz Studio and later by Screen Gems. The selection of 18 shorts for colorization placed the series alongside early batches of Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies that underwent the same redrawn process beginning in 1967. These projects were among the first systematic efforts to colorize prewar black-and-white animation, marking a transitional point in the way studios preserved—or altered—their legacies for television audiences.

However, the Krazy Kat cartoons, based loosely on George Herriman’s surreal and sophisticated newspaper comic strip, had never achieved the same enduring popularity as Looney Tunes or Popeye. Consequently, their distribution in television syndication was far more limited, and over time, most of the redrawn colorized prints appear to have been lost or destroyed. The poor quality of the process also meant they were often disregarded by archivists and collectors in favor of preserving the original black-and-white versions.

Today, only one example of this 1968 colorization project—The Lone Mountie (1938)—is known to survive. This short serves as an important artifact, illustrating the experimental and imperfect attempts at film preservation and adaptation during the early years of television. The rediscovered colorized Lone Mountie offers modern audiences a glimpse into how older properties were reimagined for new mediums, reflecting both the commercial motivations of television-era studios and the technical compromises that came with early analog colorization.

In essence, the Krazy Kat colorization experiment sits at a crossroads between nostalgia and modernization: an attempt to breathe new life into early animation history, but one that inadvertently obscured the artistry of the originals in the process.aph.