Ted Turner, RIP

[Martin McCaffery]

While I can never forgive Turn for his massive colorization or the Warner Brothers movie catalog, I will be grateful for the restoration and preservation of the negatives that was required to do those colorizations.

Ted Turner, the media maverick and philanthropist who founded CNN, a pioneering 24-hour network that revolutionized television news, died peacefully Wednesday, surrounded by his family, according to a news release from Turner Enterprises. He was 87.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/06/us/ted-turner-death

[Jim Cassedy]

While I can never forgive Turn for his massive
colorization or the Warner Brothers movie catalog, I will be grateful for the restoration
and preservation of the negatives that was required to do those colorizations.

I remember back in the days when Turner was controversially churning out colorized
versions of classic movies, one of the late night comedians (it might have been Johnny
Carson) quipped: "The next thing Ted Turner is planning to do is to buy up all the Marx
Brothers movies, and make Harpo talk."

Back around 1980 or 81, I worked a live Q&A event which included Frank Capra on
stage, and at one point I had an opportunity to spend a few minutes alone with him.
- - well, we weren't completely alone: There was a nurse, and his son Frank Capra
Jr, who were chaperoning him during the event. At that time, Frank Capra had
recently publicly expressed his extreme distaste for the colorization process on
several occasions. So, before I actually got to speak to Capra senior, his son,
whispering in my ear, requested that I NOT bring up anything about Ted Turner or
colorization, because it gets his dad "extremely upset". I don't recall it being
discussed by the moderator during that Q&A event either.

But I do agree that Ted Turner did rescue many, many classic and unknown film
from never being seen again, even ones he did not colorize.

[Leo Enticknap]

About the one positive thing to come out of that aspect of his legacy was the memorable joke in Gremlins 2, in which the cable channel owned by the thinly veiled caricature of (a much younger) Donald Trump promises its viewers "Casablanca - now fully restored in color, and with a happy ending!"

[Leo Enticknap]

Another Ted Turner/Gremlins 2 reference: it appears that the "end of the world" video shown in the movie after the gremlins take over the TV studio actually existed, and was presumably commissioned by Turner to be broadcast in the event that the Cold War turned extremely hot. It would also seem that the Daniel Clamp character is supposed to be a mashup of both Trump (real estate) and Turner (media).