In 1953 even black and white TV was a luxury for most people. Color sets were still expensive, but becoming common , a decade later. That’s when “Disneyland” switched from ABC to NBC and became “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color”. I remember watching the first show, on my aunt’s color TV. We used to go to her house to watch The Wizard of Oz and the Thanksgiving day parade.
We didn’t get our own color TV for several years. I watched the first season or two of Star Trek on a black and white TV.
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Is it true that in the earliest years of color, the technology was unstable?
Did you have to buy a service contract when you bought the TV set, because you needed regular visits from a technician to keep it functioning properly?
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Not so much for the color, but because the TV used a couple dozen vacuum tubes that were endlessly wearing out and causing failures. The technology wasn’t particularly unstable, just fragile.
I don’t think service contracts were “a thing” for consumers back then, but you certainly kept the phone number for the TV repairman handy and he’d show up with seemingly a suitcase full of tubes.
I’m no spring chicken but I do not remember not having color TV. I do remember being mildly annoyed when a show I watched all of a sudden had a black and white episode. I’m thinking of Hazel (I LOOOOVED that show as a little kid and nobody remembers it), I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched.
What the hey?! Is this the stone age? Hazel is a color, why doesn’t she have any?
I had a friend whose father had a hardware/appliances store, and they got in color TVs. We went down to their store, which he opened on a Sunday night, to watch Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color” opening broadcast on Sept 24, 1961. It was a shameless effort to push color TVs, of course.
I remember when we got our first TV, it was the week that the Mickey Mouse Club opened (1955?) and neighborhood friends all came to our house to watch.
My neighbor had a radio/TV sales & repair store in town, so he got one of the earliest color consoles for home ca. 1955. I was allowed to visit him for only an hour, once a week (because everyone knew that TV was a bad influence for kids and screwed up your eyes), to watch the Disney show. After kid-dom, TV became less important to me, and I never bought a TV until the 1980s, although people gave my family failing old black & white units which we used until they failed completely.
Come to think of it, that was the only TV I ever purchased. Once upon a time, a friend felt sorry that the only TV in the house was a 12" b&w one, so he bought me a color unit. That way he could watch color TV when he came over, as it didn’t matter much to me.
And the TV I have now is one another friend threw out when he redecorated his mansion and the nearly-new TV didn’t match his drapes.
I was born in 1973 and my mother tells of me waking up at about 18-24 months old at 2am to turn the console TV on full volume to whatever old Western or test pattern was showing at that hour. So I guess I’ve always had a color TV.
However, that TV was in the basement and we had a black & white in the kitchen which I think was about 11". One of those portable models. I remember well into the 80’s it wasn’t strange to have a black & white set like that and owning multiple color TVs would have seemed something of an extravagance.
The “giant” color console TV died in the late 80s and I took the back off and marveled at all the vacuum tubes. Thinking about it now, even the console was probably no larger than a 22" screen; it just seemed bigger because of all the wood around it. Compared to our 46" screen, young me would have probably flipped out.
I was born in '69, missed the mass introduction of color TV by a couple of years. (We had a color TV in our house, but we also had a smaller black & white TV kicking around that still got used occasionally.)
What this thread makes me remember is the little “teaser” tag that could still be seen on syndicated re-runs in the 70s. Shows from the mid 60s would often make a point of boasting how they were filmed in color. For example, “Bewitched” would start with a brief shot of Elizabeth Montgomery gushing 'Coming up next is the story of a witch and her mortal husband - IN FULL COLOR!" And then the show would start. That quasi-iconic shot of The Brady Bunch (sans cousin Oliver) descending the staircase was originally a bumper that read “the Brady Bunch - in color!”
Eventually by the late 70s, the companies syndicating the shows would just remove those little bumpers. But they stick out in my memory for some odd reason.
Ours would have been around the same time. I just remember us getting one of those big furniture-like Zenith consoles, and being very excited because Creature of the Black Lagoon in 3D was going to be showing shortly after we purchased our set. I also remember being very disappointed with the 3D, and the only thing I remember actually sticking out at all was a fish from some underwater scene.
I was 6 years old in 1960 when I won a color TV! The Ruth Lyons 50/50 Club show on WLW-TV in Cincinnati had basically a lottery for a charity. If you sent in money, you had a chance to get your name drawn out of a hopper. Then she called you live on the show and you had to answer a question to fulfill some legal requirement. My Mom put my name on a donation and I had to answer the question. While I don’t remember the question, it was easy enough for a 6 YO to answer correctly. Still I think that Ruth was impressed that a 6 YO got it right. I may have been the youngest contestant up to that time.
I believe that it was a 19" TV and the cabinet was much larger than the screen. As the years went by, I use to take the various tubes up to the local drug store to check them on a machine and buy new tubes when they failed.
My father put a motor device on our outside antenna so that you could point the antenna towards the TV towers to get the best reception.
In 1960 Cincy had 5 television stations. Two of them were PBS (or whatever they called them back then) and the rest were the Big 3 networks. Later came WXIX (channel 19) which was an independent station that played all kinds of weird stuff. My favorite.
I have vague memories of Hazel. (Not looking it up). I remember that she was a maid with red hair in the Baxter house and that during the opening sequence there was a kid in a tree throwing white pieces of paper down so that it looked like snow. I probably saw it in syndication.
The first season of Hazel was broadcast in black and white, except for one episode in which Hazel bought a color TV. Hazel was on NBC, which was owned by RCA, which invented the color TV system approved by the FCC and was a major color TV manufacturer. It switched to color in the second season and remained that way for the remainder of its run, which included the final season on CBS.
This commercial is what I always think of when I hear the phrase “color TV.” It must be from 1963, as I associate it with watching TV in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. It would be years before my own family had color, though.
My father sold TVs, so we got ours in the late 50s. But we couldn’t get NBC, so there were few color programs. However, the cartoons looked great; my father used to show them when demonstrating a set (since skin tones were difficult to adjust).
I bought my first color tv in about 1982, my parents did not own a TV at that time after their old Black and white had given up. I gave up my little portable that I saved up for only when everything went digital. My folks now have 4 tv’s and I have none (that work).
I went with friends to see the Wizard of Oz at a theatre in the 90’s and was shocked that part was in color.
