You might at this point, be wondering why I'm so concerned with colorizing black and white photographs and how this could be connected to styrene plastic models. Going back to the yester years of youth, a fascination with films and all things entertaining. I was pleasantly surprised when Aurora first released figure kits based on motion picture characters. My youth was spent just learning how to build and paint these things and although my imagination ran wild, I still limited it, to following the boxart. Boxart, I learned years later was based on Lobbycards plus black and white Stills. The Lobbycards were 11 by 14 in size and were colorized by some nameless Hollywood photo tinter, whom most likely used Marshalls photo oils or some kind of ink to color these black and white images. These colorists as I call them, must have worked right there on the set at the time of filming. They were limited in the variety of tints and most likely in the time spent in the process of coloring so depending on the film and situation these images could be quickly toned in or highly detailed with more variety of hues. Most "horror" films seem to have been quickly tinted  using the three basic -red, yellow, blue, a limited palette. When you think graphics was labor intensive and detailing time consuming, not to mention the release dates of the motion pictures themselves, you can understand the haste. However these "colorists" remained for the most part true to what they saw.Thus many years later the graphic artist hired to do boxart for models, used what was his best source of that time. James Bama did most Aurora boxart  for the horror figures, he colored the Mummy in shades of blue and white because I suspect, this is what he saw on the few Lobbycards supplied to him to use. Hence my tribute above to his steller masterpiece for The Mummy. Now I finally found the actual photograph that sculptor, Bill Lemon used to carve this prototype model for Aurora and I have colorized it using the greyscale and it was very  different. The Mummy is actually shades of earth tones! The Lobbycard colorist just didn't have time to color it the way it really was so simply reduced it to blue for dark hues and white for lighter hues. Universal Pictures resident Artist when the films were being made was a man by the name of Jack P Pierce. He was a stickler for detail so it's not really a surprise. This makeup genuis spent hours and hours detailing a costume for filming and being an artist painted it as a real mummy might look like. Just knowing that Jack P Pierce spent so much of his life dedicated to his craft, wouldn't you love to see it in full glorious color? Remember I'm NOT proposing willy nilly colorizing but finding out the ACTUAL colours of these iconic films. The purists will argue that it doesn't matter since to film in black and white, they used costumes and makeup to contrast better in black and white, so Superman for instance had a brown and yellow costume instead of red and blue or the Frankenstein Monster was a blueish green to look pale white. The fun is in the finding out...the journey... the discovery. Sometimes the actual colors used are refreshing to what we've come to accept as the "real" color. Where will this all lead me? The Mummy is getting a twin who will be different only by his "true" colors. Stay tuned.....