Colored Films

You can download basic movie data from imdb. I do so every few years, most recently about six months ago. Every once in a while I do some exploratory analysis.

datasets.imdbws.com has the files

Here's an example line from the tab separated value title.basics.tsv file:

tt7811018	movie	A Yellow Animal Um Animal Amarelo	0	2020	\N	115	Drama,Fantasy

In field order: you've got an identifier, a media type (other types include short, tvSeries, tvEpisode, video, etc), an English title, an original title (might be the same as English), a flag for "is an adult" title, a pair of years (start and end, for which movies only have the first one, while tvSeries will have both), runtime (in minutes), and comma separated list of genres. Even Les Vampires, the serial film for which the first part was broadcast November 1915 but the last in June 1916, is a movie with a start year of 1915 and no end year.

tt0006206       movie   Les Vampires    Les vampires    0       1915     \N      421     Action,Adventure,Crime

Les Vampires at Wikipedia with episode release dates

But that digresses from my project.

$ zgrep "^tt[0-9]*${tab}movie${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz | wc -l

703671

Just over 700,000 movies in the list.

$ zgrep -E '^tt[0-9]*${tab}movie${tab}An* (Black|Brown|Violet|Purple|Blue|Green|Yellow|Orange|Red|White)${tab}[A-Z][a-z]*${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz |wc -l

27

Just twenty-seven are "A (Color)" (or "An Orange"), and you've probably heard of none of them. Note that I'm looking for just a single word, no-hyphens, after the color.

FWIW, I used the eight colors of the basic Crayola crayon pack as the basis for picking the colors to care about, then added white. They label one of them as "Violet (Purple)", so I used both color names.

Lots more with "The (Color)":

$ zgrep -E '^tt[0-9]*${tab}movie${tab}The (Black|Brown|Violet|Purple|Blue|Green|Yellow|Orange|Red|White)${tab}[A-Z][a-z]*${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz |wc -l

1115

And more still with no article:

$ zgrep -E '^tt[0-9]*${tab}movie${tab}(Black|Brown|Violet|Purple|Blue|Green|Yellow|Orange|Red|White)${tab}[A-Z][a-z]*${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz |tee /tmp/colors | wc -l

2642

What colors are common? Mostly black:

$ for color in Black Brown Violet Purple Blue Green Yellow Orange Red White ; do
        printf "$color${tab}"
        grep -c "${tab}$color " /tmp/colors
        done

Black   950
Brown   16
Violet  11
Purple  53
Blue    370
Green   132
Yellow  83
Orange  31
Red     556
White   440

All of this was inspired by a movie titled Black Tuesday (1954)[*], so now let's look at the days of the week here:

$ for day in Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday ; do
        printf "$day${tab}"
        grep -c " $day${tab}" /tmp/colors
        done

Sunday  5
Monday  3
Tuesday 2
Wednesday       1
Thursday        2
Friday  20
Saturday        1

And I'll look at those titles. The ones with null (\N) for year are a bit sus:

$ zgrep -E '^tt[0-9]* movie${tab}(Black|Brown|Violet|Purple|Blue|Green|Yellow|Orange|Red|White) (Sun|Mon|Tues|Wednes|Thurs|Fri|Satur)day${tab}' title.basics.tsv.gz | cut -f 3,6

Black Friday    1916
Black Friday    1940
Black Tuesday   1954
Black Sunday    1960
Black Sunday    1977
Black Thursday  1974
Black Friday    2001
Black Friday    2004
Red Thursday    2003
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    2020
Black Friday    2021
Yellow Saturday 2021
Black Friday    2021
Blue Monday     2021
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    2021
Black Friday    \N
Black Sunday    2010
Black Sunday    \N
Black Tuesday   \N
Blue Wednesday  2023
Black Friday    2015
Blue Monday     2016
Black Sunday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    2017
Blue Monday     \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N
Black Friday    \N

[*] Film noir about an escaped con: Black Tuesday (film) at Wikipidia

Film historian and critic Alain Silver said of the film, "When society at large is threatened, the psychopaths presented tend to be of the most violent ilk, as if to justify social repression by exaggerating the threat. Edward G. Robinson as gangster Vincent Canelli in Black Tuesday... exhibits a sadistic bent rivaled only by James Cagney in White Heat."

Black Tuesday and White Heat. Color theme detected.

For some reaon, I always has a highly diverse "recently viewed" list at imdb.