That Burns and Allen episode is always in B&W in syndication. Too bad, because on one of the CBS anniversary shows, they showed a pristine color clip of it. The lone color episode of Perry Mason finally made it into the syndication rotation after years of behind withheld, so you’d think Sony could do the same for Burns and Allen.
Disney was also able to repurpose the five Davey Crockett episodes into two color movies, fueling it as a cultural phenomenon. People who did not have televisions could see it in theaters and people who already saw it on television could see it in color for the first time.
Re: The Lucy Show it's interesting watching those early color seasons as the sets are painted/dressed for B&W as CBS wasn't airing them in color. In color the sets are very drab (gray walls, etc) but pop in B&W.
@djwein - Note that C.B.S promotional film is pre-1956. I would think any T.V show from before 1956 would have been shot on film because video tape recorders were not yet available. Somewhat remarkable that C.B.S was transmitting color shows before video recorders.
CBS had Color TV before RCA did. But there was a catch 22. CBS used a mechanical color wheel for their system. It was not compatible with existing black and white TV sets. And was only used for special programs. RCA's 1954 launch of Compatible Color TV could be watched in black and white on existing TV sets.
The field sequential color system was also lower definition than the then existing black and white television standard, had an effective frame rate of only 24 frames per second and when it came to live broadcasts, also had the problem of color breakup of moving objects.
My point is that anything pre-1956, regardless, must have been shot on film as videotape recorders had not yet been commercially available.
ANDY'S GANG was apparently shot in color but mostly distributed in B&W. I was in shock a few years ago when I stumbled on a color episode. Froggy's Magic Twanger was especially pluckable in color!
The original Ampex VTR was monochrome. RCA, with it’s investment in color broadcasting, engineered a way to record in color by 1958.
Try 1958-1959 for Color Videotape on 2" Quadruplex recorders. This is when Ampex and RCA pooled their patents. Ampex provided Quad video recorder technology patents, RCA provided Color TV patents.
Lew Grade was involved with a lot of UK made shows also to be seen on U.S. tv. Richard Greene starring in The Adventures of Robin Hood was an early success. He backed all the Gerry Anderson puppet shows. Secret Agent Man/Danger Man and The Avengers switched to being made in colour at some point, and those Avengers are the ones re-run most in the U.S. so that Americans often aren't familiar with the Honor Blackman era of the show at all. I've only recently been able to see the B&W My Three Sons (pre-Ernie and with William Frawley) having grown up with only the color episodes. I don't think I ever saw the B&W I Dream Of Jeannie first season until much much later as well.
You're missing the point though. No one went back and refilmed those animated shows for color. The Flintstones in particular was designed and filmed in color from the get-go, even if they were broadcast only in black and white by ABC. It would actually cost more to do that than to shoot it in color in the first place. It was the same philosophy as "The Adventures of Superman", Hanna-Barbera were thinking ahead towards eventual syndication and the inevitable all-color TV future. So even if they weren't shown in color originally, they were ready when color became commonplace. Smart move too.
I was watching the Andy Griffith show the other day on METV and after it the Beverly Hillbillies came on . It was a color episode but I noticed the intro prologue explaining how they got to Beverly Hills was exactly the same as when the show was on in black and white the first year or two. So, apparently they had filmed the intro section in color even though the show was broadcast in black and white at first.
I could swear there was some subtle difference between the B&W intro and the color one. Just watched them back to back on youtube. They are not the same. Similar yes, but many differences..
You may be right, I’m no Beverly Hillbillies expert. I’ll fave to check then out at some point. P.S. Yep, you’re right! When I watched them back to back they are similar but the differences are obvious. The biggest being when Jed runs in the house he has his coat on and in the other one his coat is off. Without paying attention though, they did a pretty good job of replicating the original intro with the color one .
A bit off topic, but I've read there was a colour technicians' strike in England in the early '70s. It effected Upstairs-Downstairs, A Family At War and other programs in production; so that they started out in colour, then for a few episodes they are B&W, then back to colour again! The subsequent DVD releases bear this out (In the U.S. PBS ran a truncated first series of Upstairs-Downstairs sans the B&W episodes). I think the pilot for Are You Being Served? might've been B&W for that same reason. There were production people wanting a pay rise for shooting in colour saying it was more work somehow than in B&W, so while the negotiations were ongoing things were made only in B&W!
Frederick Ziv was a visionary when it came to filming 1950s first-run syndicated programming in color (e.g. The Cisco Kid.) Even so, he had financial limitations to deal with, especially as off-network syndication started cutting into revenues by the mid-1950s. His Science Fiction Theatre show was produced in color in its first season, then went to black-and-white as its production budget was cut.
The other reason you don't often see the Honor Blackman years of The Avengers is that all that exists anymore are kinescopes. Video quality is watchable, but it will never look as good as the Diana Rigg episodes.
I don't think it was "withheld" per se -- I think they just forgot about it and mistakes were made. Hanlon's Razor is alive and well at the major Hollywood studios: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Yeah, Ampex and RCA were very compectitive, but Ampex was shocked when RCA beat them to the punch with color recording in 1958. They realized that for the good of the TV business, it was better that they just cross-license each other on the patents so that their videotapes could be completely compatible. For a long time, RCA machines were called "TTRs" (television tape recorders), and I've been told that the reason is that Amplex claimed a trademark on the word "VTR" (videotape recorder). At some point in the late 1960s, RCA did finally start calling their machines VTRs. From my perspective (going back to working in TV in 1972), the RCA machines always were cheap and crappy, kind of the "budget-priced" gear that was never as good as Ampex. Somebody could write a pretty good book on the intense competition between NBC and CBS on TV color, and RCA and Ampex on the video recorder.
Possibly, but the syndicated value of the program is so negligible by this point that it wouldn't pay to do so. Sometimes there's a business case for colorization, like the first B&W seasons of Bewitched and Gilligan's Island.
