My roommate asserts that early episodes of Trek in the first season were originally shown in black and white, and later colorized. He also said he owns a DVD with b&w episodes. I say he’s crazy-- although the pilot MIGHT have been in black and white, I’ve never seen a b&w TOS episode unless it was in on a b&w TV set, and since Trek was in the late '67s, I was pretty TV shows were in color by then.
There’s just the black and white pilot, The Cage, which was not aired in the 60’s. Footage of it was used in the episode The Menagerie but it was in color.
“The Cage” on the DVD set is in black & white because they used Roddenberry’s work print of the episode. The only parts of “The Cage” that were ever aired on broadcast (shown as portions of an actual episode (“The Menagerie”)) were in color. Therefore there never was any B&W Star Trek (except, as noted, on B&W televisions). By 1966 (Star Trek’s premiere season), all 3 networks had full prime-time lineups of color programs.
Now that is not quite true. While The Cage was never broadcast during the show’s original run, it was included in syndication in 80’s. So black and white version of The Cage has been broadcast.
I saw it in black and white at a lecture given by Roddenberry in the 70s. At that time, he said that the B&W version was the only one in existence. Which has turned out to be untrue.
IIRC, The Cage was made in color. By the mid-1970s the color print had been lost. I attended a Roddenbery lecture which concluded with a showing of “The Cage” in black and white, because that’s all they had. They have since found a color copy. I’m pretty sure I have a copy. I KNOW I’ve seen it available, and I’m pretty sure it was broadcast in color several years back.
I saw it in black and white also, when Gene was touring campuses trying to stir up interest in the still to come movie. Plus that was the first time I saw the blooper reel, which was in color.
“The Cage” was filmed in color, although workprints were created in black and white. Later, when the production company decided to reuse footage for “The Menagerie” the original color print was used, leaving B&W workprints to be the only intact copies. Later, a reel of the edited footage was found and splice back into the main print to create an (almost) complete print of the episode. (I believe there are still a couple of minor scenes that are missing.) A retrospective broadcast in 1988 and subsequently made available on VHS tape was in all color. The Wikipedia article on the topic has a not-too-inaccurate history on the episode.
Gene Roddenbery was a noted revisonist of his own history and that of his productions, and nothing that he is quoted as claiming should be taken at face value without corroborating evidence.
I thought this was all fairly common knowledge; I’m not even a Star Trek fan (well, except for Gates McFadden, who I had a serious crush on as an adolescent and refused to watch the second series of The Next Generation on the basis of her unceremonious departure) and I knew this.
Actually a friend of mine, and a huge Trek geek, has an ad for color televisions that play on the fact that Star Trek is “In Color!” and that is the way to see it. He also states that a reason for the bright color design of the costumes is to take advantage of the color TVs.
So, I say, the show, TOS was in color. He may a dvd of one episode, that was never an episode of the original run of the show that is in b&w but he needs to suck it up and deal with the fact that he is wrong and you are right.