In the case of the article, the 3 Dr Who eps were originally produced in color. BBC retained high quality black and white copies, but destroyed their color copies. Only lower quality consumer copies existed of the color broadcasts. So they basically laid the color copy over the black and white quality, allowing the eye to see the detail of the B & W, but with the color from the less-sharp consumer tapes.
Here's the problem:
King Kong was filmed more than 70 years ago, in black and white. They weren't filming in color at the time. Secondly, there are no high quality black and white copies, because the original copies have an inherent fuzziness to them, because that's the quality that was available at the time. So we have no high quality black and white version, and we have no color version AT ALL. A few years ago, a colorized version was produced, but it has the fuzziness of the black and white version, and the colors have a somewhat washed out quality to them. If you tried to put the 1933 colorized natives in the 2005 King Kong, it would look like hell. You couldn't color correct them and adjust the image so that they fitted in. Compare the two images below (the first is from the 2005 film, the second from a colorized print of the 1933 film):
In the 2005 film, the natives are always darkly lit, their faces are seen in detail, etc etc. Notice the quality difference in the images. Could you slap the dude with the feathers into that second image of the cave, or any of the other native scenes, and not make him stick out like a sore thumb? No.
Sammy:
The 2005 film is pretty much a scene for scene reconstruction of the original film. Jackson liked the 1933 film a lot, and so I guess he felt that he couldn't disrespect the film, just for the sake of being PC. And actually, Jackson's depiction of the natives wasn't all that far off from the look of the aboriginal tribes up to shortly before WW2.
