Wikipedia:Today's featured list/November 11, 2013
A series of fourteen films based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories were released between 1939 and 1946. The roles of Holmes and Dr. John Watson were played by Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, respectively. The first two films were both released in 1939 through 20th Century Fox, which set the films in the Victorian era; the remaining twelve were produced by Universal Studios, which updated the stories to have Holmes investigating the Nazis. Universal also changed the production value of the films, lowering them to produce B pictures with lower budgets. Rathbone and Bruce continued their roles despite the switch in studio. In the 1970s four of the Universal Studios' films fell into the public domain; these were subsequently restored and colourised. Although the two 20th Century Fox films had survived complete and in good condition, those in the Universal series suffered badly over the years, with the unstable cellulose nitrate film found to be suffering from deterioration. In 1993 the UCLA Film and Television Archive started a restoration process on the entire series, with the costs met by UCLA, Warner Bros. and Hugh Hefner. (Full list...)