ABSTRACT
In the 1910s and 1920s, slapstick comedy shorts were released by the thousand. Nearly all of these productions were filmed in black-and-white, which tallied perfectly with the cruel slapstick world of stereotyped characters and violent and destructive actions. The fact that Mack Sennett was also a pioneer in natural color processes is far less commonly known. 1 In line with so many legends and apocryphal stories about the self-proclaimed King of Comedy, color does not fit in easily with the slapstick studio’s image of a crude and mocking use of the technology of picture production. This article studies surviving film prints, shooting scripts, and press material to examine Sennett’s exploration of natural color through his use of Technicolor and Multicolor, culminating, in 1930, in the launch of his own two-color process, aptly called Sennett-Color. In addition, a filmography listing all the released Sennett shorts containing color film, including the identification of the color process, is added as an appendix.
