Short version: what gives old television clips that ‘brown’ look?
Long version: There’s a thread right now in Cafe Society that has a lot of intro clips to TV shows of the 60’s and 70’s, and I was struck by something that I remember wondering about as a child of the 70’s and 80’s, especially while watching CHiPs and One Day at a Time: why is everything so damn brown-looking? The reds, yellows, and blues seem to all be there, but greens all look olive and washed out. Yellows look golden. Greys look khaki. Or maybe I’m misinterpreting the effect, but it seems that way to me. It’s like watching The Matrix or Saving Private Ryan, where the color balance has been messed with, although in those cases it was done as a conscious choice.
I don’t enough about television production methods of the era, but I can imagine some possibilities. If shows were shot on color film, the film used might have had comparatively poor responsiveness to green. Or the video equipment, if it was shot on video. Or it was a stylistic choice for some unknown reason. Or the lighting technology was red-biased. Or all of the shows with exterior shots were filmed in California, which gets its nickname of the Golden State not from the metal but from the annual grasses that turn brown in summer. Or maybe the film and/or video has degraded in a particular way over the last thirty to forty years (along with my childhood memories), and it looked just fine back then.
If it was a video issue, that raises the question as to what the color capability of the TVs was. Given a relatively modern non-HD, non-digital signal (say, Friends circa 1998), would a 1970’s era TV produce equally bright colors as a 1990’s era CRT TV?
Calvin’s father would just say that the world was brown until the 1980’s. Oddly, all of my parent’s snapshots of the era would tend to support that thesis, because they have that same look (for the same reason?).
The 70s represented the skid mark of the 20th century, as well as the the era of Harvest Gold household appliances and ugly sport coats. It was a very brown decade.
(Seriously, have you ever seen 70s kitchen decor?)
My guess is that the color film has faded and lost enough of the blue-green pigment to affect the color temperature. This doesn’t explain why all of it seems warmer, but it certainly explains cheap TV shows and family albums.
If someone took the time to restore Barney Miller we could once again have cold Fish.
Norman Lear was the producer of a lot of 1970’s-80’s TV shows. Most of his shows were about families of working class backgrounds who lived in very basic homes. He thought the color schemes fit the surroundings and the ‘feel’ as it were of working class homes.
No, it’s not degradation, for sure. You know those gold shirts that Captain Kirk wore? They were actually (olive) green. Spock actually had on green tinted makeup to show that he had green blood flowing through his veins. Yet neither appeared their proper color, even when they first aired.
Yes, that was the '60s, but if the same thing is being seen in the '70s, surely the reasons are similar.
Even as a kid, I remember thinking some shows were particularly brown. For instance, The Bob Newhart Show (where he was a psychologist) was a very, very brown show.
I remember, as a child, seeing American colour TV in films in which it looked almost like a sepia toned B&W pictured with a little hand toned colour. I assumed that was what colour TV looked like - possibly because of limits in CTR technology.
When colour TV first arrived in the UK I was literally astounded at the vividness of the colours.
If you see contemporary US TV in current films it looks fine.
It does now, but back in the 70s, in the classic 16mm film syndicated copies it looked gold. Same with Joker’s hair in Batman. I never understood why Joker had blond hair (and a mustache), but it wasn’t until I saw the (Adam West) movie version that I realized it was actually green.
I grew up in the 1980s in the UK and had the opposite view of American colour TV - the imported American TV shows (Dallas, etc) all looked incredibly garish. It was a standing joke in our family that all Americans were bright orange. It was like the effect you get when you turn up the colour control of your TV too far.
I seem to recall hearing that this was an artifact of the NTSC to PAL conversion process, but I could be wrong.
I’m appreciating the responses so far. I could buy that the Harvest Gold aesthetic would drive a lot of color choices for interior shots and costumes, but what about external shots of plants, grass, etc? Did that color get manipulated on purpose? I’ve been to Hawaii several times, and it doesn’t look anything like Hawaii 5-0’s muddy greens and blues.
I’ve always thought that Cesar Romero’s Joker had hair somewhere between orange and green. But then I tend to see most red hair on TV as having green highlights, so that may be my visual problem.
Were there any 70’s TV ‘events’ that were important enough to be filmed/videoed/postprocessed in such a way as to reproduce the “Glorious Technicolor” saturated color effect?
Tangentially, in trying to find out about this on the Web, I ran across this complaint about modern color grading abuse:teal and orange.
It’s probably just old prints. I recall when ION used to rerun “Green Acres.” The show looked horrible. But our local WWME-CA (Low power station that bills itself as ME-TV / Memorable Entertainment TeleVison) used much better prints. The difference was amazing. ME-TV also airs “Barney Miller” and it looks pretty good, at least ME-TV’s print of it.
I was recently involved in scanning in a lot of old 35mm prints and negatives. When I did a side by side comparision, it was remarkable how faded a lot of the prints look compared to the scanned negatives. I did some research and apparently older color prints use different chemical processes that tend to fade over time and get a brownish cast to them. In the late eighties, there was a change in the process that resulted in more color fast prints.
I don’t know how the film printing process compares to stills, but there may be similar issues. Maybe a lot of the old shows were transferred to digital from prints instead of negatives.
Everything filmed in the 70’s feels like it was shot in a mobile home. It’s great to hear someone else confirm not just my suspicion but to even use the same term.
Brown indeed. From the corduroys to the paneling to the very media, we carried the earthy, let-it-be look into every aspect of our lives.
There was a comment in some electronics magazine years ago, when TV was all analog and things like hue an contrast were adjusted with pot dial - that NTSC stood for “Never Twice the Same Color”, since the colour balance was subjective and impossible to nail down exactly on a transmission.
I wonder if this is the same effect taht causes most really old movies to turn pink, namely fading of the blue and yellow dies - especially the blue die?
of course, I have no idea since I got colour TV very late in life so it came as a revelation to me that Kirk and Spock wore coloured shirts, an even later when I realized the colour-coding actually meant something. (You know you watch too much Star Trek when you refuse to get into an elevator with a red shirt on… Or “Kirk, Spock and Ensign Ricky have beamed down to the planet. Guess which one is not coming back?”)
Even today, I find it humourous to walk into a Best Buy and see a wall of state-of-the-art giant LCD flat-screens, all playing the exact same program, all in wildly different colour balances…
