Eldergays: Tell us about color televison

Youngergays, tell me what it is like not having a brain.

In the 1960s it was a big deal when someone had color TV.

Of course we didn't have one but my friend did. They invited the whole family over to watch The Wizard of Oz in 1965. When Dorothy opened the door and everything was in color, everyone oohed and ahhed.

In 1967 we took a family road trip and one of the hotels had a color TV. Even though I was only10 and my sister was 7, my parents never had second thoughts about leaving us alone in the room while they went to dinner and then the lounge for cocktails and dancing, knowing we'd be glued to that color TV.

When my boyfriend and I got our first apartment in 1977 we could only afford a black and white TV. Color TVs were about $350, which was a lot since our rent for a one bedroom in San Francisco was $200

We got our first color tv in 1974. The kids shows, variety shows (Carol Burnett, Sonny & Cher, Flip Wilson), and game shows (Match Game, The Price is Right) were always a wild kaleidoscope of colors, which attracted gay little me. When my mom and dad got home, they'd banish us to the den where the black and white tv was, while they watched their Kojak, Columbo, and Rockford Files on the color tv.

We got ours in 1969

We got our first color TV in 1973. It was stolen in 1974. Then we suffered with an old B&W until 1976.

Personally, getting a VCR for Christmas in 1987 was a much bigger deal. Being able to record shows while at work (I worked nights) and watch porn rentals was very memorable.

The Electric Company - a show that taught me many, many interesting things.

I'm pretty sure we got our first one during in the 70s. We still had little portable black and white sets in our bedrooms, but everyone had to agree on what to watch on the color TV in the living room (meaning, Mom and Dad decided, and you could go along with the choice, or go to your room).

Born in 1969. Parents and grandparents all had 26" color TVs (like pretty much ALL living room TVs back then, they were brown faux-woodgrain consoles).

Black & white TVs existed... but they were only found in places like kitchens and bedrooms. When I was *really* little, we had a 19" black & white TV in the family room (my dad's TV, before my parents got married). They were NEVER anybody's "real" TV. Black & white reruns existed... but I had zero interest in them, in large part BECAUSE they were only black & white.

I got an Atari 2600 for Christmas in 1979... and a few days later, my parents got tired of having me throw tantrums when they wanted to watch TV in the living room (I hated playing games in black & white in the family room), so they moved the living room TV into the family room (to become the new "Atari" TV), and bought a new 26" TV for the living room (with digital tuning & remote control). By ~1982, all the TVs in the house (except the guest bedroom) were color.

Sometime around 1983 or 1984, my dad redid all the TV cables... originally, there was basically a single cable buried inside the walls by the builder that had a daisy-chained 1-to-2 splitter in each room. The original cable was piss poor for 12-channel all-VHF cable (the last 2 TVs in the chain were barely tolerable), and was totally unusable once our cable company expanded to 36 channels & my dad bought a cable-to-UHF block converter so he wouldn't have to pay for each TV (UHF was a lot more demanding than VHF). The new cables were homeruns from each room to the laundry room, where he had the block converter, amplifier, and 1-to-6 splitter.

26" console TVs were pretty much universal up until the 1990s. I think I saw my first NON-woodgrain-console 26 or 27" TV sometime around 1990 (which is also around the time 27" TVs first really appeared). 32" CRT TVs first appeared around 1993 or 1994... and LITERALLY weighed a ton. You needed a special stand for them, and they basically had to be moved with a hand-operated mini-forklift because they were so ungodly heavy. My parents bought one sometime around 1997, then replaced it sometime around 2001 with a 35" 1080i (CRT) HDTV.

Fast-forward to adulthood. I bought my first HDTV in 1999. It was a 32" 1080i CRT. DVDs looked better if you had a progressive-scan DVD player capable of 480p24 output via component video cable), but there wasn't much else you really COULD watch in "HD" back then. A D-VHS VCR was ungodly expensive & crippled by DRM into uselessness, an ATSC tuner LITERALLY cost more than the TV... and the only local TV station actually BROADCASTING in HD back in 1999 was WPBT (Miami's main PBS station). I think our NBC station started HD broadcasts around 2000, but it wasn't until at least 2002 or 2003 that all the main channels were HD.

(... continued from r8 ...)

In 2003, I bought a 65" DLP TV and subscribed to Voom, which was a satellite TV service like DirecTV & Dish whose entire reason for existence was to be HD. They had a dozen channels of their own, and worked in conjunction with an antenna to seamlessly integrate local broadcast channels (in HD, where the networks were broadcasting in HD) into the lineup. Unfortunately, they never launched DVR service (the boxes didn't have hard drives, but had a USB port for an external drive & had everything they needed besides software to BE a DVR).

Voom's HD channels were cool because they were the only HD channels you could get besides HDNet and any local broadcast channels, but they mostly just showed old & third-rate movies. Some of the more noteworthy channels:

* HDNews (motto: "If it wasn't filmed in HD, it didn't happen!"). Kind of a joke, because HD video cameras were still rare back then. Half of their stories were voice-over narration while panning over photographs (in HD, of course), and the other half were compelling news stories like, "The Mayor of San Diego visits the zoo!" (which were obviously filmed on 16mm film days earlier & scanned for broadcast).

* Moov -- showed trippy computer-generated videos (in HD, of course) all day. I actually liked this channel a lot, because it was arguably the most "HD" channel on there.

* Playboy Channel -- mostly cheesy straight porn, but my roommate subscribed to it. On other services, it was an expensive pay-per-view channel... but on Voom, you could get it 24/7 for something like $10 or $20/month (my roommate paid, so I didn't complain). It had a funny call-in show with a kind-of-hot guy and a blond chick where people would call in, ask them to do stuff, and they'd do it (but it got boring after a while, because they were limited in what they were actually ALLOWED to do. Every half hour or so, they'd wheel out a black curtain & allegedly do all of those forbidden things behind it for a minute or two (personally, I think that was REALLY their half-hour bathroom & water break, and the audio during it was pre-recorded).

One thing that WAS immensely cool about Voom... the bitrate of their non-HD channels (like MTV & MTV2) was ENORMOUSLY higher than the bitrate used by Comcast, to the point that a Voom! box connected to a NON-HDTV (via s-video cable) tuned to MTV basically had DVD-quality video. When Voom! went bankrupt and shut down, I had to settle for Comcast... and basically quit watching MTV & MTV2, because the pixellation on Comcast was SO BAD it made me feel like my eyes were going to bleed. Seriously, it was a night-and-day difference comparing normal cable channels on Voom! to the same channel on Comcast. Even back in ~2005, Comcast compressed the SHIT out of their non-HD channels.

[quote]Youngergays, tell me what it is like not having a brain.

I am 100% convinced all these "Elder gays tell us what it was like" are all written by one lonely elder gay. He probably has no one to talk to and this is his outlet to share his knowledge. I hope some actual gaylings get something from it though.

"Tell us about color televison"

It was 1939; Ethel Waters was the first black star to have her own television show.

(... continued, from r9 ...)

Oh, I almost forgot... Voom was nice enough to unlock their satellite boxes prior to shutting down, so they still worked afterwards as ATSC tuners... damn good ones, in fact. I actually pulled two of my old Voom! boxes out of the closet when I cut the cord last year, and I'm now using them as ATSC tuners for the two TVs I have that don't have ATSC tuners built in. Both work flawlessly.

Other than Voom!, the main way to watch HD video in the early 2000s was to connect a laptop to the VGA port or DVI port (HDMI didn't exist yet) on the TV (I actually went out and bought a dock for my laptop so I could use DVI).

Little-known (outside of HD geeks) fact: DVD players are theoretically capable of reading THREE and FOUR-layer DVDs... though 3-layer and 4-layer recordable media has never existed, and AFAIK, only a few 3-layer discs have ever been manufactured & were never sold to consumers. Microsoft planned to take advantage of this back in 2006 by trying to get DVD player manufacturers to add "WMV-HD" capabilities to their players (basically, adding Microsoft's VC-1 codec, and the ability to output 720p24, 720p30, 720p60, 1080p24, 1080p30, 1080i60, and 1080p60). The idea was that even a normal dual-layer DVD had enough capacity to store a 2-hour Hollywood movie at 720p24 with AC3 5.1 surround if it only had a single language per disc, and by introducing 3- and 4-layer manufactured discs (bumping storage capacity up to ~13gb and ~18gb), it would have delivered ~95% of Blu-Ray's capabilities for little more than the cost of a baseline DVD player (but without Blu-Ray's DRM, Java, and uncompressed audio capabilities). Needless to say, Microsoft's efforts REALLY freaked out the entire industry, especially in Japan... Toshiba, Sony, and Matsushita all had ENORMOUS amounts of money invested in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, and Microsoft had the potential to completely torpedo BOTH standards (by providing a "good enough" alternative that was cheap to incorporate into new DVD players, and would have sidestepped the whole Bluray-vs-HDDVD format war). Ultimately, Bluray and HD-DVD both caved in and agreed to make Microsoft's VC-1 codec mandatory for Bluray and HD-DVD players in return for Microsoft abandoning its attempt to establish a third alternative of its own.

I actually BOUGHT three of Microsoft's WMV-HD demo discs. I obviously never owned a player capable of handling them directly, but you could also play them using Windows Media Player on a laptop (connected via VGA or DVI). Unfortunately, Microsoft shut down their WMV-HD DRM servers around 2009, so the discs are now totally useless (and the reason why I'll never, EVER trust Microsoft again enough to pay real money for DRM'ed media... or at least, never pay more than I'd be willing to spend for a one-shot rental, on the assumption that anything I buy from them will become useless and unplayable within 5-10 years).

Color TV came in REAL wood cabinets. My grandmother had a french provincial style one in walnut. She later had a Toshiba put in the same cabinet at some expense. Our neighbours had one where you slide doors across the screen and there was a bar cupboard on either side. So it looked like a proper piece of furniture until you were ready to unveil the television. A credenza. Color was great and they played a lot of old movies that were made in color on the weekends. The Robe, 50s westerns and Lana Turner shit. I think there was a remote but maybe just a knob. UHF and VHF. I was never technical, a TV should look nice but never be the focal point of your room, ha. Cher looked great in 1975 though. Sparkly.

One enduring habit of my 26" console-TV childhood... I refuse to put my TV anyplace where the top of the screen is higher than my straight-ahead gaze. I *hate* people who put their TV up on a tall stand, and firmly believe there's an extra-toasty spot in hell for people who mount their TVs high on a wall above a fireplace (so you end up with a sore neck trying to watch it).

Seriously, people. Spend a week watching TV with the TV sitting on the goddamn floor (or at most, on top of a concrete block). You'll never be able to go back to watching TV on a high TV stand again. It's WAY more comfortable to look slightly downward than to look UP.

I think the OPs of these tiresome nostalgia threads are data miners to some extent, R10.

I'm with you on that, r14. 100%.

I also agree, R14!

The first color show I saw was the broadcast of "Cinderella" starring Leslie Ann Warren, which premiered on February 22, 1965. Our Great Aunt Sophie was the only family member with color tv, so the entire clan went to her house and watched. My parents got their first one perhaps two months later.

I think part of the reason why so many people put their TVs too high is because the FURNITURE used for TVs was fundamentally designed for hardware that no longer exists. TV stands started out in the 60s and 70s as a way to raise a 19" 4:3 aspect-ratio CRT to a comfortable viewing height, and put the top of the screen at approximately the same height that a 26" console TV's height would be.

In the 90s, we ditched consoles and started building 25-27" TVs the same way as we formerly built 19" TVs... in a chassis only slightly larger than the picture tube. People needed stands, but instead of manufacturers making stands that were 6-16" tall (to keep a 27" TV's top at the same height as the top of a 26" console TV from the 1970s), manufacturers took their designs for 19" TV stands, made them wider, and marketed them to EVERYONE, for ALL TVs.

When wall units gained popularity, TV-height got jacked up another 6-12 inches... initially, to make room for two shelves of VHS tapes below the TV, then to make room for two bookcase-height shelves below the TV (so the doors under the TV would match the height of the lower two shelves on the flanking bookcases.

32" TVs arrived, and shelf-height increased by another inch or two so the shelf supporting the TV could be made strong enough to support the massive weight of a CRT weighing more than a thousand pounds.

At this point, the evolution forked.

Fork #1: rear-projection TVs became popular with the arrival of HDTV (they existed before, but their picture quality generally sucked because classic NTSC and PAL were just too blurry, especially when watching content from VHS videotapes. Most of the TVs had NO NEED for a stand (because they had speakers below the screen, raising it up to a foot anyway), but stores WANTED to sell stands to people because they were a high-profit item (I mean, seriously... hundreds of dollars for what was usually 4-6 sheets of melamine-laminated particleboard and a pair of tempered-glass doors), so they got people to jack their 52-65" projection TVs up another 14-18" or more.

Fork #2: LCD TVs arrived, but people NOW had a 10 year old wall unit they'd paid hundreds or thousands of dollars to buy (and often, was impossibly heavy to move, and was frequently TOO TALL to fit through a door anyway, so moving it would have basically required its destruction), so they bought their new TV & stuck it in their old (excessively-tall) wall unit. Or you have people like my Grandmother, who bought a 42" LCD TV and STUCK IT ON TOP of her old 26" console TV(!!!). Eventually, many of these people upgrade to 52" or larger LCDs, and have to face the fact that it won't fit in their old wall unit (or whatever they had it sitting on)... and often, they succumb to pressure from sales staff to buy yet another new stand that's as tall as their previous one, even though their NEW TV is a good 2-3 FEET taller than the 19" TVs for which TV carts of that height were originally designed decades ago.

TLDR: most people have inappropriately-tall TV stands that exist because manufacturers are blindly making design decisions without ever asking WHY they're making those design decisions, and salespeople pressure people into buying those too-tall stands because they're high-profit items.

1972 wooden case with built in record player. Speakers were on the sides. It was joyous, even though we only received 5 channels - CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, and a local Madison station. The stations ended at night with that typical American anthem and BW signal.

The phase in of color broadcasting was noteworthy.

NBC announced every show that had moved to color.

It was thrilling when Bewitched, ABC, moved to color it was glorious.

The quality goes in before the name goes on.

Bonanza was the first network TV show broadcast in color. Which is why the Cartwrights wore those ridiculous, brightly-colored shirts.

R20, one thing that never ceases to amaze me is how shortsighted ALL of the networks were about the importance of color to the future syndication value of TV shows.

It blows my mind that ANY non-live prime-time show was still being shot & produced in black and white after 1965. By that point, everyone knew beyond doubt that color TV was inevitable, even if the exact availability date for any particular network affiliate was still up in the air... and the producers UNQUESTIONABLY knew that the future syndication value of black & white episodes would be severely harmed within a couple of years, even if it didn't literally happen during the next quarter or fiscal year.

Apparently, Desi Arnaz played chicken with network execs and lost... he wanted to shoot I Love Lucy on 35mm film in color, but demanded funding to shoot it on 35mm film in TECHNICOLOR, which he knew was a completely unreasonable demand (Technicolor was so expensive, it had NEVER been used for ANYTHING besides the biggest-budget Hollywood blockbusters from day one, and had NEVER been used for TV production). Network execs called his bluff, and told him he could only shoot in color if he used 16mm, which he regarded as an amateur format that was beneath his professional dignity (even though at the time, it was an extraordinarily generous and forward-thinking offer). In protest, he stuck with 35mm black & white... a decision he later admitted was the worst mistake he'd ever made.

I read somewhere that the producer of "I Dream of Jeanie" also tried hard to shoot in color starting with season 1... first, he offered to shoot in 16mm color and pay the $400/episode cost difference out of his own pocket, but was refused because network execs worried about quality degradation (special effects editing required 35mm film, and there were concerns about the quality loss from shooting on 16mm, then making a 35mm print to do the special-effects production since it would introduce an additional generation of duplication quality loss). He then asked to be allowed to shoot the "bottle" scenes in color, but the "out of bottle" scenes in black & white (kind of like how they used both color and black & white in the Wizard of Oz), but had that proposal refused, too.

We got our first color set around 1966-67. My mother recalled recently that it was around Christmas time, so I'm guessing Christmas 1966. Walnut console, almost as big as a Chevy Impala (or so it seemed) with sliding doors that opened to reveal the screen. I can remember getting so excited when the NBC Peacock would would appear with the "Special presentation in Living Color" caption (or something to that effect), because I knew I was about to see something wonderful. I can also remember watching "The Wizard of Oz", as others here have also mentioned, and thinking how cool it was when the color segment started, and the standard sitcoms of the day -- "Bewitched", "Lucy" (strange to think that, though much had been made of Lucy's red hair, no one had actually seen it, prior to color TV), etc. I remember watching "Gunsmoke" with my father, and my "Ed Sullivan" on Sunday nights.

My parents didn’t watch a lot of television. They still had the same black & white Zenith from about 1962 up until after my father’s death in 1978, when my mother finally got a new one, which was color.

I was long out of the house by that time and had purchased my own television.

I'm only 44, and I remember our first color television. My parents didn't have a lot of money, and they weren't much into TV, so it was a small black-and-white TV for us until 1980. Even though I was pre-kindergarten in the late 70s, I remember being bummed that we didn't have color. I don't recall feeling wonder when we finally got color, though. I am guessing I must have gotten glimpses over at relatives.

Gawd, r8, r9 you are DULL as SHIT!

Are you Tony Kushner?

People like r27 are the reason we're still stuck with interlaced video.

Now, R27, be nice. Miss R8, R9, et al. is just trying out the first draft of her comprehensive history of audiovisual entertainment at 1738 Maple Street, Bumfuck, Nebraska. Major publishing houses are competing for publishing rights.

R23 16mm hasn't held up well at all. All the ITC shows were shot on 35 mm until Jason King . Jason King starring DL icon,Peter Wyngarde looks like utter shit now I Love Lucy looks better in black and white than Jason King does in color.

I was born in 1970, and I believe until 1975 we had a black and white television set. I remember it being a BIG deal the day the color television arrived. But at age 5, I could see no difference! Maybe if they'd been put side by side. But yeah, for me it was no big deal, but to my parents, it was heaven.

R30 were the MTM shows shot on 16mm? For year and years, all the prints looked like shit. Faded colors, blurry, weird sound- just terrible.

Then, at some point in the last 15 years, someone remastered them, and must have spent a fortune cleaning them up. They look better than they ever have now.

I'd always wondered why reruns of shows like Happy Days looked fine, while all the '70s MTM shows (MTM, Rhoda, Bob Newhart) looked close to unairable.

R30, I think it partly depends upon whether the show's final print was made on 16mm & archived as-is after showing, or whether the FINAL print was subsequently archived to Technicolor or Kodachrome.

Back in the 1960s, EVERYONE knew that normal reversal film like Ektachrome had literally no future as an archival medium, because it was KNOWN to be unstable... when stored badly, Ektachrome could show visible degradation within months... when stored under IDEAL conditions, Ektachrome would STILL visibly degrade within a few years. Kodachrome was totally unsuitable for SHOOTING motion pictures (it was just too slow to capture anything with 1/60th second shutter speed unless it was a relatively static scene that was lit up like a stadium), but if you ALREADY HAVE a final print of the film, you can copy it frame by frame as slowly as necessary to get the exposure right. And Kodachrome generally has proven to be very stable when stored properly (like, 100+ years before visible degradation).

Likewise, Technicolor was prohibitively expensive for SHOOTING a TV show, but was quite popular as a format for ARCHIVING your final print with long-term stability (some directors, particularly George Lucas, went so far as to shoot with regular film, but archive EVERYTHING to Technicolor, which is part of the reason why he COULD keep going back and revising Star Wars (episodes 4-6) over and over again, decades after their original release. He actually HAD long-term stable copies of literally every scrap of film shot while making it (those old copies George Lucas had archived to Technicolor are also the reason why recent movies in the Star Wars line have been able to keep pulling seemingly-new footage from the original movies out of the blue). In fact, Technicolor didn't finally fall out of widespread use for archiving final prints until digital workflows finally replaced it once and for all (only to themselves suffer from media-related bit rot that's been as bad as -- or WORSE than -- the long-term stability of Kodachrome & Technicolor).

Anyway, I'd argue that a 1960s TV show that was shot on 16mm color & had its final print archived with Technicolor would probably look better to modern audiences in HD than the same show shot on 32mm black & white film... but you're absolutely right that a 40 year old 16mm non-Kodachrome/Technicolor print would look visibly worse today than a 40 year old 32mm black & white print.

Incidentally, the whole "shoot on regular, archive with Technicolor" thing is part of the reason why movies from the 1970s looked significantly worse than movies from the 1980s when seen on VHS in the 1980s, but LASERDISC (and later, DVD) copies of the same films were comparable in quality.

When VHS pre-recorded movies became popular in the 1980s, most of the first-generation tapes ended up getting mastered from theater prints because the studios didn't want to risk bringing their archived prints out of storage... and by the early 1980s, those early-1970s theater prints had degraded pretty badly compared to more recent theater prints.

Because Laserdisc owners were a lot more demanding, most Laserdiscs WERE mastered from the Technicolor prints... and by the time DVDs appeared, nearly ALL of them were mastered from Technicolor prints (partly because by that point, any remaining theater prints of 1970s movies were so badly degraded, it would have cost more to color-correct those degraded prints prior to transfer than it cost to just bring the Technicolor prints out of storage and use THEM).

Perfect illustration: the original Star Trek TV series. It was shot on 35mm color negative film, but mastered and archived using Technicolor, which is a major reason why its prints have aged well compared to most other shows from that era. They still required tweaking and remastering to meet modern standards, but when your final print is Technicolor, you have a lot of headroom to tweak and improve upon it later compared to cheaper formats... kind of like how a DVD of a 24fps film encoded using the maximum-allowed 8,000kbps bitrate with long GOPs (using both bidirectional and predictive frames) can look almost HD-quality when played with an upsampling DVD player, but a 480i60 TV show encoded using 4,000-6,000kbps CBR is going to look like shit on a native-1080p60 LCD REGARDLESS of whether or not the player does upsampling. The more source bits you have, the better the upsampling algorithm can predict what was supposed to have been there... take away too many bits, and the player is making almost random guesses.

These obsessive techical posts are boring beyond belief. You're too much for colour TV.

My grandparents bought a color TV in 1959. I remember that all the family had gathered at there house to watch Bonanza in color. After Bonanza, my grandfather proudly asked what everyone thought. Stuttering Uncle Walter answered 'I guess it's OK, but who ever saw a horse with a b b b b b blue ass?'

37 here! Sorry, I meant to say gathered at their house.

I’m actually loving the obsessively technical posts. Just about 5% are over my head. Reminds me of the audio and visual threads over at Steve Hoffmann forums.

I have enjoyed them as well R39, and perhaps a bit more is over my head. It's part and parcel of so-called DL snark. Many are threatened by others' esoteric or technical knowledge, and they show their insecurity by their cuntish remarks.

[quote]Bonanza was the first network TV show broadcast in color. Which is why the Cartwrights wore those ridiculous, brightly-colored shirts.

Not true. There were a number of weekly shows broadcast in color years before Bonanza.

Perry Como in 1956. Dinah Shore, The Lone Ranger, Superman etc.

Our neighbors got color TV in 1959. I remember seeing Bonanza and a broadcast of the Danny Kaye film, "Court Jester".

I remember that we sat with the lights off to get the full effect of the color image.

Perry Como