Was just reading an old thread and old shows got mentioned and it made me think of my childhood and the older shows I watched. I didn’t like black & white shows or movies when I was a child. Actually, I recall an age when I default-rejected anything live-action (including puppets) favoring cartoons, but I mean when I was older than that, but still prior to my teenage years. I would watch some old shows, but only the ones in color. Only some of them, and some of that palette-based, but that’s a whole separate thing.
Anyway, besides a child’s rejection of many things old, I was thinking about color tv, I’ve read about how, back in the 1960s (in the US) the networks found viewers with color tv favored color programming. So, I was curious - if you are old enough, when only some programming was in color (and if you had a color tv), did you ever favor color programming over black & white just because of color?
And for those that are younger - did you ever have a phase where you tended to disregard anything in black & white?
By the time we got a color TV, almost everything was in color. But, if there was something I wanted to watch in Black and White, I would watch it despite it not being in color. (remember, we were very used to B&W)
The parents had the color TV in the living room. The only shows I got to watch that I wanted to actually see were the Saturday Morning cartoons, which were always in color.
We watched our movies and shows upstairs in our bedroom with an old black and white TV. Enjoyed all of Star Trek TOS in black and white, AND WE LIKED IT!
Of course we favored color over black and white, and it was pretty common knowledge.
My aunt and uncle had the only color TV in the family. We used to go over their house to watch the Thanksgiving parade, and broadcasts of The Wizard of Oz, and Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color
In case you didn’t realize, Disney started out with a show called Disneyland (just like his theme park) on the ABC network, but they switched to NBC when they offered them the chance to broadcast in color. And Disney made the most of it, changing the title to “Walt Disney’;s Wonderful World of Color”, so that the title alone shoved it in your face. They got a brand new theme song for the show, written by the brothers Richard B. and Roger M. Sherman (who would shortly go on to do the music for Mary Poppins. Suddenly Tinkerbelle and the Castle, which had been in black and white all those years, was in color
Disney had been making a lot of his Disneyland shows in color over the years, even though he’d been broadcasting in black and white, just so he’d be able to do it in color when he got the chance.
Back at home, I watched black and white TV for years until the price came down. I saw the first couple of years of Star Trek in black and white. (Which, now that I think of it, is kind of like the phrase “Science Fiction by Gaslight”, as was used in one anthology). We finally did get a color TV, and you could see how Star Trek exploited the use of color, just like Disney. Early shows on TV in color wanted to show off, just like the color movies of the 1930s and 1940s really chose scenes and contrasts to showcase their use of color.
So, yeah, we would go out of our way to see color shows.
Nevertheless, I have come to an appreciation of the use of black and white. Those old TV shows and advertisements really did make the most of the gray palette they’d been stuck with.
I did know that. I’ve read some articles on the history of tv (test stations, death of Dumont, color tv) and looked at old tv schedule on wikipedia before (I get bored and think about old comic books or tv shows and what the characters would be wearing/watching/listening to and then go read about said era)
Definitely today, I prefer to watch black and white “originals” (some of these have been cleaned up) over colorizations of programming originally done in black and white.
The other way around; because the first color TV’s I saw had such poor color reproduction that I thought the black and white was clearer. I’d rather see somebody’s face in black and white than in green (no, I don’t mean the Hulk) and/or with the color not lining up with the lines of the face.
Oh, great, you’re one I can ask. I have read about terrible colors on early color tvs. Did that refer just to 1950s color tvs or was it still that way in the mid-to-late 1960s, once they were getting more common? I’ve read about how early ones were bad, but not when they shifted to not being bad. Was it something that could be fixed by adjusting settings (way too often) or just always that bad?
Very similar experience in my household growing up. And forget the 1960s – I’m talking circa late-1970s through mid-1980s. Watched a lot of kid fare in B&W. I think we got our second color TV in 1986 – a 25" color console that relegated the 19" color set to my sisters’ bedroom.
Even though I loved color TV, I acknowledge that it could be a bitch getting the colors properly adjusted. You had controls that adjusted these, but getting the proper balance was as difficult as adjusting the three knobs in an Irish hot water shower to get a comfortable level of “hot”. You could easily end up with orange so saturated that it looked like Day-Glo. Once you got the controls decently set, though, the experience was fine.
I think most people preferred color, but there’s a lot of excluded middle between preferring color, and refusing to watch black-and-white at all. If I wanted to watch, say, Gilligan’s Island, and it was a black-and-white episode, I’d watch it in black-and-white.
Though we were very late adopters of color. Basically for as long as black-and-white TVs were cheaper, we had black-and-white. And then for many years after that, because we weren’t going to buy a new TV when we had a perfectly good one.
My memory on this is blurry; but I’m pretty sure the really bad ones I’m remembering are from the 50’s, though probably the late 50’s as I would have been too small to notice in the early 50’s. By the late 60’s I’m pretty sure they were a lot better. But I’m not sure just when the changeover occured or whether for a while it was a matter of what brand/expense level you bought.
I don’t think it was something adjustment would fix at first; but I think it was at least partly adjustable later. What I really remember needed frequent adjustment, though, was vertical hold.
During some of my childhood we had no TV (though my grandfather, effectively next door, did and I occasionally watched it there); and when we did have one there was one set in the family room. I don’t remember people having multiple TV’s including in the children’s bedrooms till at least the late 60’s, though I’m sure it depended on income level and may have depended on where you lived – some places got better reception than others.
Hard to say. I don’t like a lot of old movies and television, but I’d like to say it’s because I struggle to identify with the social mores deemed acceptable for display on screen and antiquated filmmaking techniques/styles/tropes. But that’s true whether in color or not.
FWIW, although I was born well into the color TV era, my first personal (bedroom) TV was black and white and it hardly detracted of my enjoyment of MASH, for example. So, again, I’d like to say it’s the style of B&W-era shows that throw me off.
As a data point, I am not a huge fan of Star Trek’s TOS, even though it’s in color (I think the motion picture really is transitional and represents a shift towards STII and beyond). By contrast… I kinda like I Love Lucy reruns.
This was the situation for all of my friends in the early 70’s and through the mid 80’s. Old B&W tv upstairs in the parent’s bedroom where kids watched “their” shows. Color tv in the living room mostly belonged to the parents. Exceptions were made for “events” like the Macy’s parade or the annual Wizard of Oz presentation. Some families watched Wild Kingdom together on Sunday nights in color.
I don’t ever recall caring particularly about whether or not something was in color. I did hate having to schlep upstairs once the parents settled in for adult programs in the evening.
We went directly to colour television in South Africa, and I don’t think anything in B&W was shown originally (and before that, we had home cinema showings, also in colour). I only experienced B&W in special circumstances, and that was fine to me because they were presented as special vintage items, like Casablanca or the like. The B&W was part of the experience. We didn’t have old “regular” B&W shows in syndication here.
I’m old enough that despite growing up in the TV mecca of SoCal we only had B&W TVs until I was about 6. And only one at a time.
Then we got our first color set & got rid of the B&W. Which was the first time both kids of programming became visible at our house. We weren’t the first family among my circle of friends to get color, but we were close. I don’t have any recollection of avoiding or desiring B&W content vs. color. I watched what I wanted, or what parents wanted, base on content, not color/B&W. Or at least no more than I preferred “new” over “old” in just about everything.
I was about 9 when we moved to a larger house and we finally had a family/adult TV in the living room and a kid’s TV in the kid zone. Both color.
My parents never bought a colour TV. The first time I had one at home was after I was on my own and bought one myself. In fact, I also bought one for my parents and that was their first colour TV.
As for quality, I tend to think that quality improved a lot around the time that colour picture tubes went from round to rectangular. I thought that was early 70s but looking it up, it appears to have been around the mid-60s. Before then, most colour tubes were round (literally circular), and a vaguely 4:3 aspect ratio was achieved by physically cropping the top and bottom of the circle with the picture tube frame. This gave early colour TVs that distinctive rounded shape at the two ends. I remember a special TV Guide issue heralding the imminent arrival of the rectangular colour picture tube.
The reason for the round tubes was basically the technical challenges of achieving perfect convergence of the three RGB electron beams in any other way, but the circular aspect ratio had its own challenges. I remember as a kid playing with the colour controls on a TV in a department store until a sales clerk came over to shoo me away. It was virtually impossible to get a good colour balance, and I think the convergence was off, too. When the salesman complained about kids messing around with their TVs, my smartass comment was “it couldn’t look any worse than it did before”.
Anyway, when proper rectangular picture tubes finally arrived, great progress had been made with problems like convergence and colour balance. The high-definition flat screens we have today would have seemed miraculous back then!
I was 17 when my father finally broke down and bought a color TV. It was 1969, so the color was a lot better than the 1950s models, but still nowhere near perfect - especially if you didn’t have perfect reception. I remember watching something with a couple of buddies and one of them pointed at the scream and said, “Look! An orange black man!”
One of the problems with colour TVs in the old days of analog TV and rooftop antennas (or just rabbit ears) is that instead of “snow” on colour broadcasts when the reception was weak, you’d get something more like confetti. Hey, look, it’s snowing in every colour of the rainbow!
