Blame the Color TV, Revisited

This is an updated version of a post I did back in 2012.

Does anyone remember watching a black and white TV? I do. My dad had this TV that was older than I was. It also, quite literally, took a minute to warm up before it showed its black and white view of the world.

I remember seeing the old Spiderman cartoons. You know, the one that started airing in the late 1960s but probably reran infinitum during the 1970s. I remember when I saw it on TV. A Color TV.

Like many shows in that era, the show opens with the phrase “in color” to let everyone know the show could be seen in color. Naive me, I thought when I saw it on my dad’s Black and White TV, it would say “In Black and White” instead. That seemed perfectly rational to my little mind.

My kids, of course, have never watched a black and white TV. Since we’ve gone all digital, they won’t ever see one. They might see something in Black and White if they watch a really old movie or TV show. Or some more recent television program that goes Black and White for effect.

There is something to be said for watching a program in black and white on a crappy-ass 14 inch TV with a mono speaker on an antenna. You got some sort of picture, if you were lucky, but your mind had to fill in a lot of the details. Certainly with the TV shows of the day, you had to.

Recently I started watching old episodes of The Twilight Zone. All 165 original episodes were filmed in black and white as TV shows of that era were. The special effects were practically non-existent by today’s standards but the stories were quality. They hold up pretty well more than half a century later, such as this seminal episode entitled “To Serve Man”:

These days, programs are in full 1080p with Dolby 5.1 digital surround sound. You can see every pimple and wrinkle on the actors face–and let’s face it, they’re all actors. Even the newscasters. Especially the newscasters. And the people on so-called “reality” TV shows. It leaves little to the imagination, exposing the amorality of our collective humanity for all to see.

And, quite honestly, I think we’re worse off for it. Even moreso than I did when I wrote the first version of this post in 2012.