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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.
Published in General
Stereo systems, like motorcycles, did sometimes impress women, but generally not nearly as much as we hoped and rarely more than 1/100th as much as the advertising and the guy in the showroom hinted.
I’ve always thought “The Plunderer’s March” would make a great theme song for the Ricochet PIT!
In New York, it was kinda weird that the mighty Yankees broadcast in black and white, while the (generally) lowly Mets were in color from the very first game, which I watched. April, 1964 was a good time to be alive.
There used to be a strong opinion among film critics that black and white was more artistic. To be honest, I never bought that. But there’s no question that it is different, not just color deficient, but a different viewing experience. Part of what made the original (for example) The Twilight Zone so effective was the level of abstraction that black and white gave it.
By the way, did I say, great stories? Great stories, EJ. The “Bible thing” always seems to make people nervous.
Ah, the days of “Marvelous” Marv Thoneberry.
Q: What did Marv Throneberry and Michael Jackson have in common?
A: The wearing of one glove on one hand for no discernible reason.
Thanks, once again, Gary! I needed this…Thanks for the correct title, too. It’s definitely a worthy theme for the PIT. :-)
They were both crazy pedophiles, except for Throneberry.
The thing I thought was dumb was that the Firebirds used for the show weren’t the same model year! Even within a single episode you might see a chase where Rockford is driving a gold Firebird that had 2 round headlights (1976 and earlier) then the car has 4 rectangular headlights (1977 and later), then back to 2 round lights again. I loved the Rockford Files but was annoyed by that inconsistency.
We didn’t get color until 1977. My father kept waiting because next years models would always be better.
Starsky and Hutch didn’t get that big red Torino with a white lightning-flash until Ford was just about to stop making it.
Rockford was made by Universal, the most penny pinching outfit in TV production, so I suspect the issue there was they were re-using stock shots they’d made earlier.
What ever happen to frugal?
Thrifty, parsimonious, economical…or so damn cheap.
Just read this and it is a classic! Love the NY Honeymooners version. In a little suburb of Pgh, where I grew up, one neighbor got a color TV – they invited all the kids in the neighborhood over to watch cartoons in color – it was worth it! I can’t remember when we got a color TV, but I remember my favorite holiday special was hands down Andy Williams. My sister and I watched it every year and it happened to be on when my aunt went up three doors to my other aunt, and my sister and I would get out the decorations and put up the tree to surprise her. It was wonderful. To this day, Andy Williams crooning Christmas carols takes me back to being a kid. The best part were the shows on 13 channels – comedy – I’d fall asleep listening to my folks laughing at late night comedy.
How simple life was – we had a milkman who delivered Christmas candy in cardboard drums, bugles, and Santas, and chocolate milk so thick, a straw would stand up. I still have the paper mache Santa head decoration that was on top one of the deliveries.
We had the whole week off for Christmas and a tree and candy canes in the classroom. Shocking – everyone has a giant screen color TV today, but TV stinks now and no candy canes or trees allowed at school!
Aside from making fun of the new Color TV ads, Mad also lampooned the hi-fi aficionados in 1958.
Thanks, Gary.
It’s funny, I grew up mostly overseas, mostly third/developing world, so TV wasn’t an option, mostly. But once a year the family would return to the States on leave. I can remember in the 70s being awed every time we came back. I didn’t see the small, incremental growth over a year; I saw everything at once. It was usually pretty awe-inspiring.
Thanks. Your post brought back a lot of good keyhole, snapshot memories.
Time for a post on the ubiquitous terror of TV- the horrors of the CRT, striking fear into the hearts of every owner of a set. The picture faded gradually, and you staved off disaster for a brief period with a “booster” (an in-line transformer that increased the voltage on the electron gun a bit to temporarily brighten the dying picture tube). But that inevitable moment always arrived when you needed a new picture tube. Pay the mortgage or fix the TV?
Found out a guy at my church collects and deals in these things:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc
It’s basically a super high-density disc stamped like a record, but for playing video. RCA bankrupted itself trying to push it out at the same time as the VHS revolution.
RCA’s CED lost out two ways: the Philips/MCA laserdisc won the disc battle, then videotape reduced laserdisc to a small “luxury” market.
Either of the disc formats could have been winners if they’d actually appeared in stores in the late Sixties or early Seventies. They were cheaper to mass manufacture than tapes and the players were much cheaper: $200 or so instead of $1000. After all, in audio, cheap phonograph records consistently outsold more expensive tapes. It was guessed that video would be much the same. If disc had most of a decade to get established before videotape really hit the home market, that might have happened.
But by the time disc came out it was obvious that tape was just around the corner. (Polaroid’s Polavision instant movies had the same problem–it got to the market too late). One reason audio tape and video tape had different paths was time shifting. People did not set up tape recorders to capture an evening radio program for later listening. With VHS, time shifting was its main use.
The push on audio tape was car stereos. Without that, it might never have been done. IMO.
True. Open reel 1/4 audio tape never really caught on as a pre-recorded format, and around 1972 Ampex and other companies finally gave up on it. Just as you say, it was cars that spurred the 8-track cartridge and the mini-cassette. But it was Dolby that made cassettes sound good enough for home stereos, starting around then.
Portable cassette players had terrible sound until the mid-Seventies, when they improved a lot (the iconic ghetto blaster is an example of the new improved type). The final cassette upgrade was the Walkman era, made possible by microelectronic speed control that kept pitch from going all watery.