I happened upon a MeTV showing of BATMAN this morning and it reminded me of how dazzling that show was on those early color TVs. Neighbors used to come over to see the show in color on our TV. Ironically, the print that MeTV was running wasn't all that dazzling. The whole thing had a look like the brightness control was too high and black levels were too low. I don't onw it, but I hope the DVDs and Blu-rays look a lot better than that. Personally, I thought STAR TREK's color was more dazzling.
We did not get a color tv until about 1981 or so. Sylvania 19" with the plastic sheet that you would detach the TV station numbers you needed and put them in the set. Around 85 or 86 we got a 27" and also a VCR, both remote controllable. I remember watching Dukes of Hazard on Friday nights back in the early 80s.
Was this the kind of set that you tuned slots on the channel selector to the local stations and then labeled them?
it's a great memory indeed...those were the day for sure...today it's nice to have a large flat screen, but nothing compares to the first time of having a color TV in your living room with all those colorful 1960's TV shows!
I remember those number panels. The TV had a panel of channel buttons, at most five or six rows of five or six channels per row, probably a bit less than this. There was a little light in each one that shone through, and each one needed to be pre-tuned to the channel you wanted to be there. Then you found the corresponding channel number on the pre-supplied sheet and stuck it in the window slot. Man, that was messy - and don't try to tell mom or dad or grandpop how this all worked. Like the blinking 12:00 on the VCR, it would never be understood!
That is what I was thinking. My father bought our first color TV about that same time (I believe it was a Zenith). Back in the middle 60's many color TV's were like that, but by the end of the 60's, those kind of issues had long been addressed.
Every color TV that I sat in front of as a kid in the 1960’s once adjusted, never drifted. But I was in LA. Could be the color shift problem was at the local out of town stations and not the fault of the set.
My family getting a colour TV is one of my first memories, maybe my first memory. It must have been in 1972 as later on my dad said he got a colour TV to watch the summer olympics on. Can't remember what make it was or what the first programmes I would have seen were though.
^This. We had our three main network stations, all on VHF, and all pretty solid in the color fidelity department. But the local independent UHFs were all over the place with their color. Below is a piece of video I put up on YouTube. It was dubbed from our local Channel 48 in Philly, and they were one of the GOOD stations. This video is of a commercial break at the end of a STAR TREK episode. Note the pinkish skin tones in the Cascade commercial that starts the break and watch the color levels go up and down on the succeeding commercials. By the time it gets to the Gino's commercial, everyone looks greenish. I certainly understand that commercials were entities all their own and the stations aired what the ad agencies sent them, but somehow these UHFs always varied widely in their color levels and tint levels. And just as commercials varied, so did the syndicated shows.
We didn’t have a color TV until I was in high school, maybe 1972. In the 60’s we’d go to my aunt and uncle’s home around Thanksgiving and they had a big old RCA color TV. We’d watch college football games and invariably it would be like Nebraska vs. Oklahoma or something. Those red uniforms and green, green grass...wow!
I remember when I first visited NBC Color City, Burbank in the early 1970s, there was a "colorist" who's job it was to watch the KNBC broadcast all day long with his fingers on the color knobs, adjusting the tint/chroma, etc. during every show, every commercial..
There were probably only a few hundred color sets in my town so that's possible. Kind of like where there were only a few hundred HDTVs where I live and the stations would keep forgetting to switch to the HD feed.
Okay, how many of you elder statesmen remember the piece of plastic with colored segments you could place over the TV screen that was supposed to sort of turn your b&w set to color, or at least an approximation? At least, that's the story my evil older brother pushed when he came home with it one day and got us younger kids all excited. You can imagine how effective that turned out to be. Good times.
The Philips 405/625 pal colour set we had had a button to put a 'proper' black and bluey white picture out to avoid the hint of sepia and kid you were watching black and white tv. Strangely enough the flagship BBC tv children's show Blue Peter was still having black and white episodes until about June 1974 although by then the major shows were i'n colour; as it said in the tv program guides such as Match Of The Day and Top Of The Pops,
Exactly! I might have enjoyed it more if I were, ahem, indulging at the time but at that age, I had no clue.
I bet if you couple that with a pair of red/blue 3D glasses, it’d be like watching TV from the FUTURE.
My father was one of those who looked down at tv so we were stuck with B&W for much too long,I don't think we had color tv till Barnaby Jones was being shown at 4pm
I'm amazed at how many people didn't get color until the late 70s or even into the 80s. How dreary TV must have been! I mean besides the content.
We got a color TV in the early 70s. But there was something wrong with the UHF tuner (I believe it was a crack in the circuit board). So those UHF stations rarely came in in color, only B&W with a moving horizontal line from bottom to top. So I only saw shows like The Flintstones and Gilligan’s Island in B&W.
I don't remember a lot of beautiful looking shows back then compared to now. Shows like I Spy which were shot in exotic locations look kind of dull to me on DVD. Even Little House on the Prairie on Blu-ray has kind of a brownish look, probably because Kodak film back then wasn't great at reproducing subtle greens. If you look at the top shows of that era, you'll find a lot of sitcoms, a lot of big-city cop shows, a lot of variety shows, and so on. Not many of them scream, "Color!"
