Were You Alive When the World Was Black and White?

31 Comments on Were You Alive When the World Was Black and White?

1. When did it go color?
   When Dorothy stepped out the door into the Land of Oz.
   Everybody knows that!

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2. I remember the first time I saw The Wizard of Oz on a color TV, and thinking what kind of sorcery is this?

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3. The last year of COMBAT went to color. Just wasn’t the same. I think the last season of The Fugitive also went color with the same result. B&W is grittier, a good cinematographer can do great things with lighting & shadows.

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4. Calvin and Hobbs
   https://wist.info/watterson-bill/72712/

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5. B&W has an intangible feel to it. Not warmer or cooler, just different. I think some of it is because movies and shows in B&W had to depend more on plot, dialog and imagination. For instance when somebody got shot, you didn’t see blood, guts and gore. In fact, you rarely saw a bullet hole in the shirt!
   Color, special effects and high definition have de-emphasized the requirement for those characteristics and rely more on shock.

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6. I hate the BW to color stuff. As if people’s teeth and whites of their eyes are supposed to be blue.

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7. In all the BW tv shows and movies, not ONE child (those who raised their hands) paid attention to the parts about the description of dresses, flowers, sunsets, jewelry, eyes and other stuff? How dumb are people now?

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8. Yes, I was there and saw it first hand. Also TV’s and radio’s all had tubes. Cars didn’t have seat belts. You got a problem with that????

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9. Grey Feather – I’m working on a WWII radio right now.

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10. Public education made them that way and this guy is a high school teacher. Ironic.

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11. Harry; I have piles of old radios 3 working uprights with wooden cabinets, crank record players, tube testers, oscilloscopes. My house is packed. I used to, a long time past, work in a TV shop part time. USAF Vet worked in crypto.

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12. Harry, I told my kids for years that there was no color in the world and it was all in b&w until the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy stepped out of the door into the land of Oz. And once upon a time when they were younger, they actually believed me. I love old b&w movies of all kinds; there was just something special about them. Our first TV which we got in 1958 when I was 5 was a Westinghouse tube b&w TV that took 5 minutes to warm up before it even showed a grainy b&w picture. And we didn’t get a color TV until 1968, and it had horrible reception with mostly muted greens and yellows and some browns.

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13. The Rexall drug store up the street from our house in the late 60’s still sold vacuum tubes for TV’s and radios where you could test them to see if they worked or not.

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14. Gosh, Grey Feather, how I would like to see your collection!

    Remember when TV stations went off the air and around 11:30 at night? They played the national anthem and then some stuff about FCC and all that. That was so neat! Also, I used to have a nightmare as a little boy about a giant television eating me. Black and white of course. 🤣

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15. I think the reason the remakes of “Twilight Zone” didn’t succeed was because they made them in color.

    Geoff, our Radio Shack had a tube tester right up until the company closed the stores (this century).

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16. Yes. We freely told jokes about Pollacks and others and we weren’t cast down to hell because of it. Society thrived in spite of it.

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17. I still have a functional tube tester that will accommodate the top B+ plate connection if anybody needs one. I grok hollow state circuits.

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18. All of the spy satellite imagery I looked at in the Air Force was black and white. It was that way on purpose. More detail could be seen in black and white than in color.

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19. Remember when Walgreens had an assortment of vacuum tubes on their shelf for repairing your tv or radio.

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20. Hey, Grey Feather, remember tube testers? Dad (never mom, of course) would unplug the TV (at least I think he unplugged it), took the back off of the set, and looked for a burned out tube. Took the tube down to the Rexall drug store and tested it on a tube tester. And then bought a new tube from the little cabinet of tubes. Dad would take it home, and almost invariably the set would work again. You can see listings for tube testers on eBay.

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21. Banjowilly, one of my favorite pollack jokes told to me by the very German heritage father of a friend of mine. Did you hear about the pollack who thought that asphalt meant that he had rectum trouble. And many more.

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22. I pretty much have the whole nine yards of equipment racked up as an AM FM, FM Stereo, Shortwave generators assembled as a test station. Audio analyzers, TX test set, rectum spanalyzers, tube testers, transistor testers, etc. I’ve been in this for so long I have back ups for back ups. Subminiature wire tubes, 4P, octal, loctal, 7p, 9p, Compactrons, etc. Ge, Si, FETs, resistors, caps etc. The list of stuff I’ve designed, built, repaired/rebuilt is long. It never gets old. Being retired is fun!

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23. I still have a B&K model 606 Dyna Jet tube tester. I use it to test the old metal can tube in my RCA model 88K 3 band console radio.
    Yeah, I’m old.

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24. We didn’t get a color TV until 1976 when we inherited one from a relative. I have been shocked more than once in adulthood to see some old reruns from my childhood, only to discover they were filmed in color. They don’t seem quite the same, lacking some charm and nostalgia for me.

    I don’t miss trying to adjust the rabbit ears though… especially when the picture improved only when I was holding it just so and my brother thought I should stand like that for the rest of the show…

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25. Everybody I used to know said cartoons were the best shows to watch at the beginning Color TV era

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26. I saw it on TV

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwhxeaVfk3s

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27. geoff the aardvark
    Also during the war the pollacks would throw hand grenades at the Germans and the Germans would pull the pin and throw them back

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28. I’m thinking the movie “Pleasantville” might have something to do with this.

    My parents didn’t get their first color TV until I was off to college, about 1976.

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29. Yeah, I remember even the NAAB&WP had to change their name.

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30. The United States has hit critical mass in the US educational system. This is what happens when children are educated by means of Marxist indoctrination. They really have no inclination to use critical thinking that should be instictive by the time they’re in high school.

    With all the advanced technology available to find out the truth, these kids instead don’t attempt to discover the difference between a vintage method of capturing images and reality.

    That guy in the video is right. The current generation can barely take care of themselves. How in the world are they going to be capable of civic duty and care for others depending on them. God help them and us.

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31. TV went all color in ’66, although the Peacock was almost all color in ’65.

    A year later, the season went from 39 episodes to 26 and, 2 years later, to 24.

    Color is very expensive.

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