After years of experimentation and development to deliver the primary colors of green, red and blue onto one film-strip, the Technicolor company finally arrived at the moment theater-goers were breathlessly anticipating. Walt Disney's 29th installment in his "Silly Symphony" series, July 1932's "Flowers and Trees," became the first film to be shot and projected by Technicolor's new 'three-strip' process to the public, showing cinema's first true realistic colors onto the screen.
Technicolor's camera, introduced in 1931, captured the entire color spectrum, a goal its researchers had been working on since 1924. Labeled 'Process 4' by insiders, three black-and-white film strips wound their way through the camera, using a prism to separate the primary colors, and then were fused in the lab onto one strip for playback on any projector. The technology was a gigantic leap from the company's previous 'two-strip' process of capturing only yellow and green.
Technicolor felt an animated short was the simplest way to present its newly enhanced color process. Disney was in the middle of making the black-and-white "Flowers and Trees" when the two companies connected and agreed the cartoon would be the first to introduce the public to Technicolor's advanced technology. But in its early stages, the process was prohibitively more expensive to produce than black-and-white cartoons. As an incentive, Technicolor gave Disney a three-year exclusivity in the animation field for its vivid, true-color film, expiring on September 1935. It was a gamble on Walt's part since if the cartoon failed to generate a profit because of the high costs, his studio could potentially be bankrupt.
Fortunately for Disney, "Flowers and Tress" became an enormous success. His "Silly Symphony" series, monopolizing the three-strip color process for cartoons for three years, easily made money for Walt and company. The entire film industry was impressed. Producer/director Merian C. Cooper, in production with 1933's "King Kong," said he saw "Flowers and Trees" and claimed he never wanted to make another black-and-white picture again. He was instrumental in getting the first three-strip Technicolor feature film, 1935's "Becky Sharp," produced.
Technicolor slowly rolled out their new cameras and film stock to Hollywood studios for live action. Some studios inserted short Technicolor segments embedded into their black-and-white feature films while others produced full-color two-reeler shorts before the arrival of "Becky Sharp." The years Disney animators worked with color proved to be invaluable when Walt began production of cinema's first color animation feature film, 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."
