Hmm. The game shows, variety shows and many sitcoms were awash in day-glo colors. I have lots of dvds where the colors just pop. Then again, we can't be sure what kind of mastering was involved in transferring old shows to disc. I will say that the color in TV sets back then seemed to be brighter but that may just be faulty memory.
We got our first color TV in 1976 or perhaps the year before. I recall seeing KISS on the Paul Lynde Halloween special in color. It was a big Sylvania console unit in the living room.
I was an electronics nerd from a young age and was constantly visiting the local shops to hang out, buy parts. We lived in Marin County and the big shop was Electronics Plus in San Rafael, which, incredibly, is still there. Just down the street was Melody TV, the biggest local independent. Like Steve wrote, the owner was a portly guy, a little grumpy, who always had a cigar in his mouth. I'd hang out there to watch the display sets and sometimes they let me come back to the repair benches to watch the guys work, which was a thrill. The cigar chomping owner lived a block from our house and I was a friend of his daughter. Of course Mr. Harwin had a color set in his home, and I got to come over and watch it sometimes. This was probably about '64 or '65. I don't think my parents sprung for a color set until the late 60's.
Tell me which DVDs have the popping colors. Yes, lots of taped shows had bright colors but do you really think people spent the equivalent of three thousand bucks to see them? The reason most people got color TVs was for sports.
It's not necessarily a faulty memory. I think it's fair to say that many people were a bit aggressive with the "color" knob back in the day. When I'd visit friends and relatives, their sets were always bleeding chroma. There were no color reference signals embedded in video until the late 80's/early 90's, so color levels could be (and were) all over the place. And, I suspect some stations boosted chroma levels on their video processors so their channel popped a bit more than the competition. Some RCA camera controls in the 70's had a "Colorplexer" module that would let you emphasize particular colors and increase their gain, like making a glass of orange juice REALLY orange.
Gilligan's Island looks pretty darn good to me with good primary colors. Brady Bunch, Early MTM, Bewitched, Laugh-In, Beverly Hillbillies. Just off the bat. I don't know what you're talking about with the three thousand bucks comment. We got a Sylvania console in '69 and it cost nowhere near that.
Yeah, primary colors and that's all. To my eyes yellows and browns abound in shows like The Brady Bunch and Bewitched. I don't recall anyone being excited by those colors. Adjust for inflation and you'll see what I'm talking about.
I can guarantee you my lower middle class parents would not have spent such a sum on a TV set then or now. Anyways, our eyes see what they see although I'll counter your yellows and browns with the teal that seems to be all the rage these days.
I turned the disc behind a knob on my TV and it turned a VHF channel into a usually scrambled cable channel (without the scrambling but plenty of snow).
The first show I remember being excited to see in color was Space:1999. I was probably a little disappointed that The Munsters and Addams Family still looked the same on a color set. I was really bugged though to see Marineboy cartoons in color. I had imagined a blue costume and instead he had the gaudiest orangey-red one. Bah!
The ad I found for a Sylvania's Color Gibraltar console in 1969 showed a price of $399 which calculates to about $2,800 today. That's actually fairly cheap. Oher sets cost closer to $500 that year.
That sounds about right but the best part was my mother worked for a company that had it's own members only store and their merchandise was all sold at a discount. I eventually got my first stereo there.
So... closer to two thousand dollars maybe? Unlike your family, most families were paying full price for color televisions and in 1969-1970 these sets did cost about the equivalent of three thousand dollars today.
One of the first series we saw in color was PETTICOAT JUNCTION. The use of primary colors in that show was dazzling: And these images were from faded, syndicated prints!
They put the girls in bright dresses to distract you from the fact that two of the three actresses changed when the show started filming in color. I remember I Dream of Jeannie had a really bright color palette when they started filming in color. and The Big Valley had a lot of bright color too.
Ireland was late to colour television. 1974 I think. I think our family converted to colour in 1978. It was a great conversion as not only did we go to colour, we also went from 405 lines to 625 lines. I remember watching shows like The Rockford Files, Starsky and Hutch and The Muppet Show in colour for the first time in 1978.
1975! My dad got a big promotion, and suddenly we got our first new car (goodbye, 1966 Toronado tank) and a new Curtis Mathes piece of furniture to replace the 1958 table-top Zenith my parents had gotten as a wedding present. We were the last in our neighborhood to convert to color, as my father was an ardent opponent of television in general, and the new car (a Mazda rotary-engine wagon) drew more derision than admiration, but still, it was pleasant and sometimes surprising to see old syndicated shows in color (especially the George Reeves Superman show from the 50's). The first color broadcast I ever saw was on July 20, 1969 - we all got up ridiculously early and went across the street to the Clarks' house (he was a well-paid pathologist, though "doctor" was as sophisticated as I got at that age), where the adults had an alarmingly early cocktail party while we kids (toddlers and infants, mostly) amused ourselves. The network anchor narrating the lunar landing (Cronkite, I think?) came through in color; the picture from the moon was black and white, and there were NO MONSTERS. We kids found it boring and kept having to be wrangled away from the controls when we looked for something more interesting. In the 1990's, Sci-Fi Channel (they hadn't forgotten how to spell yet) started airing the Dark Shadows serial. I hadn't seen it since running home from the bus in first or second grade to see it on the old Zenith, and I eagerly taped its afternoon slot every day. One evening, I settled in with my substance-du-jour to enjoy the antics of Barnabas and his kin, and was horrified to discover that they'd decided to colorize it! It wasn't until I expressed my outrage to a friend that I learned that the color (nauseating, eye-watering color, at that) was an original component of the series after a certain point (of course it was - it ran until 1971). That series was definitely better served in shades of gray - plodding, Gothic horror creeping along at a daytime TV pace looks more comedic and less sinister with pastel 60's couture and no shadows.
It's strange. I watched The Flintstones daily at noon weekdays for years when I was a kid, most of those years on our black and white Fleetwood TV, and yet I have absolutely no memory of watching The Flintstones or any other programs (All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore, etc.) in black and white.
Yes, some people like cartoon colors but I sure don't remember colors that bright on any of my NTSC sets.
We never had a color TV when I was at home. I bought my own TV a couple years later, around 1985, and it too was B&W ($20 from a pawn shop). I think my brother got one for my mom in the late '80s, maybe? I finally bought a 13-inch color Sanyo around 1998--still have it in the bedroom, and with a converter box, it works fine!
Summer, 1968 was when my father brought into our suburban Chicago area home a brand new state-of-the art, solid state Panasonic 16” “Buckingham” color TV, our family’s first. One of the earliest things I can remember watching on it was the National Democratic Convention, held infamously, in downtown Chicago that year. Dad worked in a multistory office building located just off Michigan Avenue, so close to Grant Park you could see it out the side of his office window. He actually had to hunker down at his office one evening until early the next morning, due to the protestors, and the Chicago cops violent response. I remember watching that evening unfold on the new color TV with my Mom, brother and sister, while every couple of hours Dad would call home to update her on the scene below from his office window high up in the building.
In 1967, our family opted for one of RCA's "compact consolettes designed for modern living". We had the 19" Ontario GH-568. I'm pretty sure the only reason we could afford it was because my uncle ran an appliance store, and I'm sure he gave my dad a deal.
