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TV History: Christmastime and Color Television
When I was a kid, children’s books had holiday stories about getting in the family car and driving to Grandma’s farm. (Schoolbooks back then were usually old and worn, and the cars in the pictures had that lumpy round prewar look, so strange to “modern” kids of the Fifties). Amid the ducks and the horses and the sheep, they’d chop down a tree at dawn on Christmas morning and decorate it with candles and strings of popcorn. Then, after a big country breakfast, they’d go to church. More strange stuff: they had “ministers”, not priests, and they were addressed as “Doctor” or “Reverend”, not as “Father”. Weird place, the American countryside. We used to wonder if it really existed. Christmas was nothing like that where we lived.
This was the New York City of The Honeymooners era, of West Side Story. You see a bit of it in The Godfather. For the price of a subway token, you could visit Macy’s, Gimbels, the F.A.O. Schwartz toy store, the gigantic Lionel train layout at Madison Hardware on 23rd Street, and the big tree at Rockefeller Center, a convenient stroll from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. (Protestants had their own cathedral farther uptown, St. John the Divine.) New York was always a city of tiny apartments. Back then it was also a time of big families; I was the oldest of six boys. Everyone had lots of relatives nearby. Grandparents almost invariably had European accents of one kind or another (In my family, a thick Scottish burr; in my wife’s family, Yiddish). The city’s churches and synagogues were packed year round, but Easter/Passover and Christmas/Hanukkah took it to the highest level.
In the outside world, the Cuban Missile Crisis had just happened. Kennedy was regarded as “our” president—Catholic, that is—and his picture was up in nearly every barbershop. The newsletter of the Knights of Columbus always referred to the President as “Brother Knight, John”. Christmastime 1962 had no inkling of what Christmastime 1963 would be like.
(c) 1957 MAD Magazine, EC Publications
Just like now—in fact, much more even than now—Christmas specials made TV a must-see for families. And there was no better way to see the shows than to visit those rare relatives who had color TV, the better to see the glories of Christmas with Perry Como, Andy Williams, Walt Disney, and the Cartwright boys on Bonanza. One of my uncles in the Bronx had color, so we trooped up there annually to park the crowded streets, climb flights and flights of stairs and watch TV together. In 1962, the season’s big hit was Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, with music by actual Broadway composers (their next job was writing “People” for Barbra Streisand). Walt Disney called the producers the morning after NBC ran Magoo. Ol’ Walt was never noted for being particularly generous to rivals, but he told them they’d created something not just for their children, but for their children’s children’s children. Pretty big compliment coming from him.
Color television was magic then. People would stand in front of TV store windows, fascinated by even the commercials. But almost nobody actually had a set; out of roughly 80 million TVs sold, by 1962 color, on sale for eight years had slowly, painfully climbed to nearly a million; about 1 percent of the American market. Yet everyone loved it, and everyone wanted it. So why was it so rare? Because it was unbelievably expensive, roughly the cost of three “regular” black and white TVs. In 1954, it cost $1000, equivalent to a modest little $9,268 today. By 1962, it cost $495. (a mere $4,078 today). By 1970, most new sets were color, and people began replacing their black and white sets faster. Only a few years earlier, though, color TV was like jet travel; a futuristic luxury mostly reserved for the well to do.
The TV specials helped sell color sets. Magazines were full of ads showing family dads, all but smothered with affection for bringing home color for Christmas. NBC was owned by RCA, the mighty Radio Corporation of America, the strongest and richest electronics company in the world. RCA sank a fortune into developing color and was stuck with the solitary job of putting it over with the public. That’s why they paid a mint to pull Disney away from ABC and bring him to NBC. The fact that his show was named Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color tells you all you need to know about their motivations. Disney had only two sponsors, RCA (which owned the network) and Kodak, the other major American corporation that stood to make lots of money from widespread adoption of color.
As for us, we ended up being the first family on the block to get color, late in 1963. it was still expensive, but my dad had friends in the Teamsters Union that were able to provide sets that had somehow “fallen off a truck”, landing right on the serial numbers. My wife’s family never did get color until I gave my father-in-law a set in the mid-Eighties; they shared what Jonah Goldberg once described as “My people’s traditional resistance to unnecessary expenditure”. Pretty soon, black and white was restricted to closed circuit security cameras, and old re-runs. As time went by, most local TV stations wouldn’t even bother buying or running black and white shows.
As a kid, I never thought I’d see a world where everyone had color TV, but fewer and fewer people went to Mass on Christmas morning.
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Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
I always felt like my family was the last family in America to get a color tv. I remember my grandpa had a plastic screen taped on his tv screen. Blue at the top 1/3, green at the bottom 1/3, and milky something or another in the middle 1/3. Seems silly now.
I’m several years behind you and lived in Washington DC duringmthe sixties. It wasn’t until the 70s that we got a color TV and discovered how the world went from black and white to color in The Wizard of Oz.
Great memories and a great post!
Yep, I remember those. It worked great for golf tournaments.
I remember that picture! As I recall, I looked at it a lot. And I didn’t really know why. Maybe I took my cue from the eyes of the guys in the grey audience.
Many thanks, Clavius! Here’s one of Washington’s contributions to TV history–President Eisenhower inaugurating color broadcasting at WRC-TV in 1958.
I realize that all this sounds technical and dry-as-dust to some, but take a look at the difference when they push the button at about 1:21 minutes in, and it switches to color. Eisenhower is no longer familiar to us, but he seems so vivid, almost modern. Because he’s in color, like we’re now used to.
Sometime in the late sixties. It’s hard to tell for sure, because so much of what we watched was reruns of shows that were black and white. I still remember the NBC peacock from back then in gray scale as well as I do in color.
Thanks, as ever, Gary! I love Mr. Magoo’s magical, musical Carol. As a kid, I thought the Cockney accented “[h]earty jokes” line (in ‘We’re Reprehensible!”) was ‘artichokes’. :-D A running gag between Mom P. and me ever after…Ah, memories! By the way, watching Midnight Mass from Rome (whether in B&W or in color) at home, as a newsworthy event, highlighted my Christmases. :-)
Grandpa had a color TV. That meant Cubs games in color, or maybe golf — yeah, probably golf. Then after supper, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color. Sometimes there would be a movie. I saw The Wizard of Oz on Grandpa’s TV.
No, thank you Nanda, as ever, for reading!
Speaking of h’s…The British were astonished that working class people would scrimp and save just to have television. They joked that the kinds of people who dropped their “aitches” were putting them on their rooftops (and if this gag makes no sense, think of what a Fifties TV aerial looked like).
My family was also hooked on Midnight Mass from Rome. Followed it religiously, you might say!
The same exact phenomenon you saw with satellite TV dishes outside of crappy trailers. Do you spend a marginal increase in pay on getting a better home, or a better lifestyle in the same home?
Here’s a charming bit of Fifties color, only two minutes long (It’s the head and tail credits). The bright, bouncy optimism and brassy pride of that era…that’s what I remember. I love the line up of Chrysler brands, the lady’s mink stole and the man with a fedora.
Something slightly adult I wouldn’t have noticed or understood at the time: his obvious joy in presenting Barrie Chase, Astaire’s protege. She was indeed a wonderful dancer. She was also a lovely woman in her twenties; Astaire was her mentor and patron, the finest one you could have in American dance. He’s in love. You only need eyes to see it. And she’s smiling–with rueful embarrassment?–with some sort of look that says to the viewer, “I know why I’m here, and so do you”.
Remember how all the outdoor establishing shots for sitcoms would have big, new cars out front. Like My Three Sons… pretty sure that was a GM show.
Chevrolet.
The shows all used to have that routine credit at the end: “Automobiles furnished by Ford Motor Company/General Motors/Chrysler Corporation”.
Think you know the beatniks? You probably think they’re the same as the hippies, a social phenomenon of about ten to fifteen years later. But they weren’t. Here’s Jack Kerouac, “King of the Beats”, on Steve Allen’s TV show in 1959.
In the Rockford Files, Rockford drove a Pontiac Firebird, the good guys drove GM cars, and you could tell the bad guys, because they drove Fords. At least that’s how I remember it.
You still see that kind of thing now. Every car in the show just happens to be a different model of Ford.
Something about color hues of that video reminds me of the time I first saw a color television broadcast, in spring 1966. But I don’t know enough about color systems to explain any better than that.
We didn’t get our first color set until 1967, but were hooked up to the new Manhattan Cable Television in ’68, in part because while there was always signal interference in Manhattan with ‘ghosting’ (especially as the signal bounced off the jets flying over the Empire State Building on the way to landing at LaGuardia), in black & white the double images and fades were annoying, but tolerable. Once you started seeing the same things in color, it just made the image unwatchable (there also was the problem that while the antenna settings were about the same for Ch. 2, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13, for some reason WNBC’s signal marched to a different drummer, and you had to get up and reposition the rabbit ears every time you wanted to watch something on Ch. 4).
Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol still works today, because outside of the opening and closing framing as a Broadway play, the rest of the special shows remarkable fidelity to Dickens work, while fitting all the songs around the original dialogue (plus Magoo as originally created back in 1949 was a pretty stubborn and crotchety old guy, who was softened over the years by UPA in order to make him more marketable. Putting him and Jim Backus’ voice in the role of Scrooge was really a return to the character’s original roots of being a miserable SOB who just happened to be nearsighted).
I remember in the mid-seventies, shortly after we were married, my husband and I agonized for weeks over whether or not to spend the $300 to buy our first color TV. We did. Then came a microwave, and a VCR. Then a baby. And a house….
WRC had color broadcast capability before then, but this was the first time color videotape had been used — everything before this was either on film or live (the first regular color TV broadcast turns 65 years old next week — the Christmas 1953 episode of Dragnet on NBC. Unfortunately, the only copies of the episode currently circulating are the ones in B&W).
Thanks. That was good to see. Kerouac was a good reader of his own stuff, it appears.
The Twilight Zone would not be as compelling as it is if it were in color. IIRC, Hitchcock filmed Psycho in B&W too. There is something Brechtian* about B&W that makes one not only aware that what one is watching is a fiction but also promotes participative thought into what is going on. Color seems to be the opiate that lures the screen watcher into complacency.
The Wizard of Oz is a good example of this. The film starts in B&W with the peril of the tornado which has one thinking about what needs to be done next. Then, it switches into color and one falls emotionally into the fantastic fantasy of everything that ensues.
I do not think color corrupts the other visual arts; but, do blame TV as the primary cause for the eventual end of Western Civilization.
* a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action before him or her, but should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of the action on the stage
In MAD’s version of ABC’s “The FBI” (not a bad show, BTW, and unjustly ignored because of its square-ness), the agents all had names like “Sergeant Pinto Pony”, “Captain Maverick Mustang” and “Special Agent L.T.D. Thunderbird”.
You’re right. You’ve got good eyes; the color gamut, the colors that electronic photography can represent, has expanded over the years. You’re looking at it when it was a medium-sized, kidney-shaped subset of the whole graph of human visual color range, so in those days they made a virtue of it, doing a beautiful job within a deliberately limited gamut of colors. Now the tilted triangle of electronic color reproduction exceeds human limits.
My wife and I bought our first color set, used, in 1977. It had a gorgeous picture but for years I tested and replaced its vacuum tubes. Then a VCR. Then a baby. Then a microwave, six months later. Then a house. Nearly the same sequence!
We got our first color TV, a Zenith, in July 1969. How can I be so sure? We watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon…in glorious black and white.
For once I have something to add to this series.
When they originally made the Simpsons in the late eighties they had Moe’s Tavern run a black and white TV set to indicate it was a dive bar. Then they kept it black and white because the outdatedness got funnier each season afterwards.
“Color TV on the air, at 65” was an alternative title of this post, but it sounded so…old. I’ve been reading about pioneer independent TV producer Frederick Ziv, the “father of syndication”. He had an early (and alas, for ten years un-economical) conviction that shooting his off-network shows in color would increase their value in the future. He was right, and it finally paid off, but he had to wait for his payoff. The Cisco Kid is strange looking now on YouTube because it’s clearly a very early filmed show, but it’s in color anyway.
”Mutual, I’m sure.”
Alright, she didn’t go to college. She didn’t go to Smith.
“Go to Smith? She couldn’t even spell it!”
That was 1954. To say Astaire “introduced” Chase in 1958 is a bit of a stretch.
When “An Evening With Fred Astaire” was rescued from obscurity by a re-air early in the life of the Disney Channel (January 1989) the engineers at the UCLA Film and Television Archive took a year to recreate the circuitry to play back the tape. This was some of the earliest of color video tape and no machines existed to play it back.
Not all Christmas specials held great promise. When CBS executives first saw A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965 they were all appalled. The “Bible thing” made them nervous. And who in the hell approved a jazz trio for the music? Coca-Cola, the show’s sponsor, was advised to prepare for the worst.
See where it says, “POW…POWER…BRAINPOWER”? Shouldn’t you adapt this as your avatar? You know, “truth in advertising” and all that?