I tend to favor the original B&W versions of TV shows and movies because they were designed to be seen that way. Colorizing them never seems to add much, and it ruins the beautiful tones of black, white, grey, and even silver that were built into them.
The early B&W episodes of Bewitched were described by one reviewer as “cooly sophisticated.” But by the time Darrin said “This makes the Batmobile look like a skateboard!” when Endora gave him a concept car she had stolen, the tone of the series had changed completely and could only have been filmed in color.
Vic Morrow was one of the few actors who complained about the big switch to color in 1966. In an interview, he said that Combat!, which was set during WWII, was meant to be seen through the lens of that conflict. I agreed with him, because adding color didn’t really change either the stories or production values. Instead, I thought it just made the show less “gritty.”
Back in the '80s, I was watching B&W Casablanca on TV with my girlfriend in Minnesota. During the scene where Ilse is wearing a striped top in the marketplace, Susan said “I hope they never colorize this movie. If they did, they’d make her look like a candy cane!”
Somehow or other, I just didn’t have the heart to tell her it was one of the first movies Ted Turner had colorized a few years earlier.
Fast forward to when I was a graduate student in '89–'90. I went to see Casablanca again with some friends at the Rossiya cinema in Moscow. At the time, it was the world’s largest movie theater and had not yet been cut up into different sections. The sole screen was HUGE, and I was spellbound by the detail and quality in those glorious B&W images.
Ray Harryhausen complained about the colorization of King Kong (1933), in part because the jungle plants were all the same shade of green, and in part because many of the scenes were meant to be seen in black and white – some of those vistas of towering rock grottoes based on black and white engravings by Gustave Dore, for instance. Also, although the folks at Turners claimed that they researched the original colors of items that could be identified, they were demonstrably wrong. (and it seems pretty clear that they made the white shirts of the Venture’s crew light blue just as a change.)
Harryhausen was generally “down” on the idea of colorization , although he did release colorized versions of his 1950s films before he died. He also oversaw the colorization of two black and white films NOT by him. One was the 1934 version of She, made by much of the same crew that made King Kong. But in this case I can understand it – the film was originally supposed to be in color, but at the last minute the studio yanked the funding that would be needed. Haryhausen felt that he was restoring to the film the look it was originally intended to have. An it does look great. The other was H.G. Wells’ Things to Come. I just figure that he thought it ought to be in color.
One of the guys in charge of Creature From the Black Lagoon once said that he wouldn’t mind if they colorized it, provided they got the colors right. He said that the Gill-Man’s costume was a delicate shade of mossy green. He thought that posters, toys, and comics always made it too garish.
Don’t ask me which Combat! episode it was, but there’s one where a German sniper, hiding in a tree, was picking off American soldiers one by one. The episode continues with no one knowing what to do or where to find him, until a random GI innocently asks, “That guy over there?” The GI could see the sniper in the tree, only because the GI was colorblind. He was then able to dispatch the sniper. That was an episode that Vic Morrow might state wouldn’t work in color, only in B&W, because in color the viewers would be able to spot the sniper early on and give away the suprise. (Please don’t try to make sense why we can’t see the sniper in B&W but the colorblind GI could, somehow.)
This was common in WWI when aerial observers were tasked with spotting camouflaged artillery positions. The artificial dyes and dead foliage used to conceal them never matched the surrounding vegetation, so they stood out clearly against the backdrop to anyone who was color-blind. Such people were in high demand as aerial observers, at least in the Allied air services.
I remember watching one of Basil Rathbone’s colorized Sherlock Holmes movies set in Britain during WWII. A bunch of Allied officers were gathered in an office for a conference, and the one representing the American air force was dressed in (you guessed it!) modern Air Force Blue.
In real life, he would have been wearing a khaki shirt with a brown blouse and trousers, since the USAF (or AAF) was part of the Army until 1947. I tried ignoring the blunder, but it just kept bugging me.
I recently watched most of the known surviving episodes of The Avengers on TV. The values of the ones with Cathy Gale (Seasons 2 & 3) were not great at all since they were videotaped in a studio and then transferred to film. Sometimes it was difficult to understand what the hell was going on.
Season 4 with Emma Peel was much, much better because it was filmed and never videotaped. But it was still in B&W. When they switched to color film in Season 5, the art directors went crazy with bright colors.
Truncated Seasons 6 and 7 with Tara King were, of course, filmed at the peak of the Swinging Sixties and could get downright psychedelic.
Not long after I finished watching the series on cable, I discovered some of the B&W episodes with Cathy Gale and Emma Peel had been colorized and archived. The older ones transferred from videotape were actually enhanced, but still not as good as the ones shot on film.
That was a side point in an episode of “Happy Days.” Howard had bought a plastic film, such as you describe, for the TV, that was supposed to render things in colour. He installed it incorrectly, as was demonstrated when Joanie said, “Dad, why is the sky green and the grass blue?”
I watched a Betty Boop cartoon that had ben colorized somewhere in Asia. You could tell that it was by someone not entirely familiar with American culture, because it was a Halloween cartoon, and, when they showed the jack o-lanterns, they were GREEN, not Orange.
We always had a color tv for the main room, even as a kid. But we got a “portable” BW tv later on that went upstairs. I preferred the big TV for it’s size, the color wasn’t the reason. A lot of stuff I watched was BW, like “I Love Lucy.” To me, the show wasn’t dependent on being in color, and it didn’t affect my enjoyment. When shows like “The Andy Griffith Show” converted to color later in their run, it didn’t change the experience for me either.
I remember how shows would boast about being in color: “Rat Patrol! In Color!” Or have it labeled on the bottom of the title card. And of course NBC adopted the colorful peacock logo starting when they switched to color in 1956.
Hence the running joke in the 1982 Zucker/Zucker/Abrahams series Police Squad! Each episode began by announcing that it was “In Color!”, which was par for the course in 1982.
GDR television was only B/W up until the end (when I was almost 10). I preferred the fully colorized Western channels, but I don’t think the color as such was a factor.
I’ve never been able to recall if my dreams are in color or B&W…until I watched this video yesterday. I woke up this morning and was able to vividly recall a dream about eating in a fancy restaurant where I was served a piece of toast with bright red caviar piled on top. After 62 years, I may have had my first dream in color.
I don’t know if I dream about specific people, objects, or places in color. But I know for sure that if I dream about a place I should know well, I often see it not populated by buildings or other landmarks but as a slowly undulating contour map laid out in a ghostly green grid, like a special effect in the movie Tron. If I’m dreaming about people I really want to see (like a lost love), I will probably find them but not be able to see their faces, or only view them from a distance as they disappear around a corner or go up a flight of stairs. If I do see the face of someone I knew at one time, it’s never what I remember they actually looked like.
My family had a black and white TV from the early 1980s until it broke down during the winter of 1985/86. I don’t know why we still had it at that date, maybe my parents bought it cheap used.
I remember one of the first times I saw a color TV, it was when watching TV with some neighbors’ kids when I was about 4, and it was actually kind of weird seeing the same TV show as I normally watched at home but in color. I was used to b&w and switching over may have taken some momentary getting used to.
It was nice to have everything in color but I don’t recall ever “rejecting” b&w things. I’ve always enjoyed old films and TV shows that were still b&w.
I think the first time I ever watched a full show in color was 21 April 1966, while I was at the house of a friend whose parents owned a color TV. The show was Batman, and the episode was “While Gotham City Burns,” with Roddy McDowell as The Bookworm. I was blown away by the lavish use of color in the series.
(I also remember being surprised to learn that the Hi-C can was actually blue, or so it seemed to me.)
Prior to that, I’m pretty sure I had seen color TVs in the lobbies of hotels, but they worked badly (they had to be adjusted constantly) and were always tuned to shows like Sing Along with Mitch, Dean Martin, or Bonanza, none of which interested me much.