By Rich Lynch: It happened about a half century ago, back in 1962 or 1963 I think. My parents had brought me, along with my brother and sisters, on a visit to my aunt and uncle. They had lived in the northern New York town of Adams Center, about 20 miles from where we were in Chaumont, and it was far enough away that we really didn’t see them very often. And sometime in the interval between that visit and the previous one they had gone out and done something that my 12-or-13-year-old self back then had probably considered to be almost science-fictional. They had purchased a device which had brought them into what I had thought of as the World of the Future.
I remember that we all gathered around it when my uncle turned it on. It sprang to life, showing the cartoonish image of a multi-colored bird as it spread its tail feathers. And then a disembodied voice solemnly proclaimed: “The following is brought to you in living color on NBC.” It was the very first time I’d ever watched a color TV.
Until then my television viewing had been limited to the black-and-white set my parents owned which had brought us TV programs from just three television broadcast stations – one in nearby Watertown and two in Syracuse. I’d been aware that color television sets existed, of course, but they were expensive and not something that my parents felt they could afford. And for that reason I don’t think that I or any of my siblings had ever campaigned for them to get one – saving up for holiday gifts and summer activities was a far greater priority. That the situation was different for my aunt and uncle was, I guess, a revelation to me – I hadn’t realized they were that better off than us. Or maybe it was just a different set of priorities for them. In the end it hadn’t mattered – I’d just been happy that they’d shared the experience with us.
It wasn’t until sometime in the early 1970s that a color television finally came into my parents home and I remember that I was the instigator – there had been a spectacular NASA Apollo launch scheduled during a week when I was going to be home from college and I had used that as an excuse to convince my older sisters to help me underwrite most of the cost. My first color TV came a few years after that, after I had married Nicki and we were living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The inducement was an even more grandiose space spectacular, though it was a movie and not real life: one of the broadcast networks was going to show Silent Running and I had thought, you know, the planet Saturn would probably look glorious in color. And hey, it did!
It was all a long time ago and I guess I’m a bit surprised to realize that my two sense-of-wonder color TV experiences bracketed a time span of only about a dozen years – Nicki and I have had our flat screen TV for longer than that! And now I can only wonder what televisions will be like a half century from now. Already we’re being inundated with promotional material for advanced TVs with newer technology than what was available when we had bought our flat screen: first there was 4K, 8K and UHD; now there are the even more cutting-edge OLED and QLED, whatever the heck they are. I have no doubt that decades from now we’ll have media streaming technologies that will make even these current-day innovations seem very old-fashioned in comparison. But you know, I’m still pretty sure there’s always gonna be one thing that will never change. Whatever the technology turns out to be, it will always be presented…in living color.
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You know the “horse of a different color” scene from the Wizard of Oz? Yep, it wasn’t until I was an adult and happened to flip to the WoO one day on my color set that I had any idea what was going on. The joys of growing up with b&w…
Happy fourth, everyone.
I was so annoyed as a kid when NBC got rid of their Peacock logo (which wikipedia tells me happened in 1976)
@Andrew (not Werdna)
I’m glad DragonCon TV stole it.
https://dragoncon.tv/
A Jacques Cousteau special was the first color show I watched at home. It was in the late 1960’s.
As a visual thinker (grew up in the television era), it seemed to me that the black and white shows prior to color tv were alright, and enjoyable for their time, but when shows went to color, it was like the world opening up. How with Hi-Def, it’s even better.
I recall the opening images of “Wonderful World of Color,” from Disney, in which Tinkerbell waved her wand over a black and white image of the Disneyland castle, and it became color. It was….magical!
Mm… the US TV system was known (officially : NTSC=National Television Standards Committee) as (ahem) “Never Twice The Same Colour” cos when it was introduced, quite early, I’m told that they merely imposed the colour signal on the then (otherwise excellent) 525 lines B+W one. So if a vehicle went past, sometimes one’s colour signal went a bit haywire. In western europe, alto Baird (way way back in the 1930s) had introduced some, crude, colour TV, it was then very basic. It needed the arrival in western europe of the 625 lines PAL (Phase Alternate Line) system to bring in there, full interference-free colour TV signals. But no sooner had that been brought in and agreed internationally in europe (and BBC2 in B+W started on 625 PAL, later to go into full colour), than the French wanted a slightly different system -SECAM (Sequential Colour And Movement). Fortunately both were on 625 lines and the colour signals were slightly differently placed on the spectrum.. But this meant that colour video cassettes on SECAM would play on PAL and vice versa, but only in B+W! SECAM/PAL cassettes wouldnt however play on NTSC, or vice versa!!
Our family bought our first color TV (and signed up for cable TV–I grew up in a town without CBS, so I’ve never seen Lost in Space) in 1968, in order to watch the Olympics that year in color.
My parents got a color tv about that year, too; however, my brother and I had a portable b/w tv for our bedroom, which I think is the same one I was using until the late 1980s.
My memories of the Shatner & Nimoy Star Trek, from the first run, are in black and white, as my parents didn’t upgrade to a color TV until the end of the 1970s. I don’t think I knew Spock was supposed to be slightly green until I started reading references to the show — maybe not until I entered fandom.
We all gathered at the home of the Hodgeheads to watch Star Trek from the beginning. They had the only color TV in our group, and it was a big one. It kind of brought back group television watching. We still do that on Sunday nights, when many of our Sunday Tea guests stay to watch whatever my son chooses.
I bought our first family color TV when I was working for Tom Laughlin as an extra in “Billy Jack Goes to Washington.” My kids told me I could go to Southern California for some months if I bought a color television. When I told that to Tom, he arranged for me to get a good deal on a big screen projection TV,
I didn’t see the film for many years, but was not surprised that all the scenes I was in were cut: the plot changed direction. By the time I saw it, my family had replaced the old Sony with a plasma screen much larger.
Tom was great to work for.
Jon DeCles: Billy Jack Goes To Washington was profitable for me too in a way. There was a “Billy Jack vs the Critics” essay contest. They held a drawing to distribute the prizes and I won a bicycle which I sold to my brother. (He was still in college and I’d just finished.)