Sep 14, 2022·edited Sep 14, 2022Liked by Mark Dykeman
Great post, Mark!
It's reminded me again of that brilliant snooker commentator, Ted Lowe, saying: "...and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green"!
I'll never forget when we got our first colour telly. We kept the black-and-white one too. One weekend Dad and my brother wanted to watch the 1938 Errol Flynn film 'The Adventures of Robin Hood' at the same time that Mum and I were going to watch something on the other side. We'd been going to toss a coin to determine who'd be watching which telly, until Dad said 'Robin Hood's in black and white anyway, so we'll watch it on that.'
Turns out it was an early Technicolor film... but we didn't find out until our shorter film was over and Mum switched the colour telly over to watch the end of Robin Hood. Oops! ;o)
I think I saw someone else comment on this, but even while we had color pretty early (aside - my single mom only had a b/w tv in our living room, but my grandfather gave me a little color tv for my bedroom and told my. mom "she should watch cartoons in color" - good grandpa, not a great dad h), we always had one of those little portable b/w tvs - that was longer than it was wide with a handle on the top - in the kitchen. Even when one of my stepdads had the picture-in-picture tv, we still had that little portable b/w guy in the kitchen.
Ah, the glorious days of black and white t.v....I remember them well. Growing up, I always had a small t.v. in my room and they were always black and white models so, like you, I spent a lot of time watching that way. Granted, I did have access to color but that was only if my parents weren't watching something. I can see your parent's point in not buying an expensive color model if you didn't get many channels, not that I would have seen that point in my younger days.
I hate saying things like "People these days don't know how good they have it", but people these days don't know how good (or should I say convenient?) they have it :)
Thanks for the memories, Mark! I grew up on B&W, 3 channels, and bunny ears. Probably got the first color TV around 1970.
As a parent of school-age kids (mid 1990s) we were late to the game of owning a computer with Internet. Prior to that I had recently gone back to college and was hand-printing my English papers. Despite having very legible handwriting, my instructor nicely asked if I could possibly type them. So, I obliged by using an electric typewriter at the local library. They had two machines in each of the sound-proof booths. I had to take my preschool daughter with me and she would happily type away on the other one.
Thankfully, the librarian didn't object and we finally got a home computer in time for the next semester. It made things a bit more difficult but my daughter remembers them as happy memories!
We had a small monochrome TV fixed under our kitchen cupboards that we watched while cooking, and I think a slightly larger model with the chunky dial in the basement. So I saw glimpses but my era was more a loud colour TV that doubled as an immovable piece of furniture.
It’s true, though, that the limited palette meant the photographer had to convey emotion and drama with contrast and shadow. How has writing a show changed as a result of colour, I wonder...for better and worse?
You might be just a couple years older than me, Mark, but the transition from black and white to color in our family was around the same time. I was pretty young, but I do remember it, especially the fact that my grandparents took longer to convert over to color. Our generation went through a pretty significant technological renaissance: color TV, cable, video games, Internet, etc., that all happened between my middle school and high school years. I don't yearn for B&W, but I do for the early days of arcades. That was a very fun and carefree time of life.
I always thought everybody else had cable and I didn't. I'd go over to other people's houses and they'd be talking about Salute your Shorts some other Nickelodeon show that I didn't have access to. I definitely felt left out.
What a lovely article. You can get a monochrome smartphone screen by choosing colour filters after pressing the home button three times on an iPhone. Reduces phone use by about 90%. The modern internet is surprisingly colour based.
We had a color television in the early 70s. I have watched a lot of different programs over the years in black and white. Two of my favorites are The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, USMC. Even to this day, I watch those over and over. I can't tell you how many times I have seen the same episodes but it just seems like they knew what they were doing back then.
Sep 18, 2022·edited Sep 18, 2022Liked by Mark Dykeman
An excellent post! I remember - vividly - watching Original Star Trek on a little black and white TV in my mom and dad's bedroom in our little apartment once we moved to North Carolina in the early, early 1970s. The fact it was b/w meant nothing - the stories were just as powerful (possibly more so, but that's a different discussion) and though we had a big (read: massive, wooden, clunky, don't-turn-it-back-on-soon-after-turning-it-off-because-the-tubes-will-break) colour TV downstairs, the b/w one was more private, more personal. I miss b/w in a weird way - and will definitely look at making my iPhone monochromatic (thanks Aoife!).
Love this throwback! It brought back a memory from my early teens when I lived almost as far Downeast as you can go in Maine before getting “over home” to Campobello. We rarely watched TV because we only got one channel, mostly in French layered with a lot of static. The jingle for Ganong’s chocolates haunts me still.
We had a black and white TV long after color was available. When I was a kid we watched The Wizard of Oz every year and Oz looked the same as Kansas. But I learned to appreciate the artistry of BW - old Hitchcock films in particular stand out.
I'm far too young to have grown up with black and white, but I did watch some old TV shows with my family thanks to DVDs, which I'm old enough to have grown up with. Beverly Hillbillies, the Get Smart pilot, and first season of Gilligan's Island were my black and white experiences. So I got to see the era where TV transitioned to color and a Green Acres episode had to include text on screen for people with black and white TVs after a joke involving color, all well after it actually happened.
For me black and white is like pixel graphics in video games, a sign of either age or that it's designed around somebody else's nostalgia/ worship of the past (usually while failing to actually match the heights of what was made when it was the only option). I remember with the first few episodes of WandaVision some people were saying it missed out on some things people had down in the monochrome era, like the importance of using specific shades of color.
Thanks for your recollections Mark! While I grew up in the 90s and early 00s, monochrome TV was still definitely a part of every household in Lithuania. It was common for people to have a TV set in EVERY room, and kitchens were usually equipped with small monochrome TV sets. I remember there was a trick, where you could play with the picture (stretch it for example) by placing a magnet close to the screen. It did permanently damage color TVs though. So the TV in my room had a weird spot, a product of me dicking around with magnets.
The piece of old-school tech I remember fondly is the filmstrip projector. We had an old one produced in the Soviet Union. You would put a strip with an illustrated fairytale (basically like a comic) in, and have it displayed on a small screen or wall. You would then turn a little knob to see the next strip. The lamp would heat up pretty quickly, and the warmth emanated would only add to the experience.
My first video camera was a Hi8 camcorder, and I quickly learned that black and white could hide a TON of cheap production value and low resolution. Hide? Black and white could bring out a lot with less production value and resolution! I got really into looking at black and white photography for inspiration.
Now I find it very, very difficult to use black and white, if I'm filming or photographing in color. It feels unearned -- either a 'fix' for bad color, which makes a dull black and white look, or the black and white isn't used in any special way that couldn't also be done in color.
One reason I'm a little skeptical when I see a modern movie shot in black and white, is what the monochrome does for it. I have no patience for "This is set in the 50s, so we're shooting black and white like 50s television" if it's not also shot on 1950s television equipment. "New for old" looks as bad as "day for night." This is also connected with the problematic concepts of "film" "video" and "cinematic" "looks" in photograph editing and color grading.
What you say about what monochrome does to an image is spot on: it alters the textures, contrast ratios, separation, ambience. A good color grade brings those things in to make a point, so should monochrome edits. It turns out that black and white is barbell style editing: it brings a lot of opportunity to otherwise cheap imagery, but everything of competent quality should be color until black and white comes back around again as an expert-level choice.
Great post, Mark!
It's reminded me again of that brilliant snooker commentator, Ted Lowe, saying: "...and for those of you who are watching in black and white, the pink is next to the green"!
I'll never forget when we got our first colour telly. We kept the black-and-white one too. One weekend Dad and my brother wanted to watch the 1938 Errol Flynn film 'The Adventures of Robin Hood' at the same time that Mum and I were going to watch something on the other side. We'd been going to toss a coin to determine who'd be watching which telly, until Dad said 'Robin Hood's in black and white anyway, so we'll watch it on that.'
Turns out it was an early Technicolor film... but we didn't find out until our shorter film was over and Mum switched the colour telly over to watch the end of Robin Hood. Oops! ;o)
I think I saw someone else comment on this, but even while we had color pretty early (aside - my single mom only had a b/w tv in our living room, but my grandfather gave me a little color tv for my bedroom and told my. mom "she should watch cartoons in color" - good grandpa, not a great dad h), we always had one of those little portable b/w tvs - that was longer than it was wide with a handle on the top - in the kitchen. Even when one of my stepdads had the picture-in-picture tv, we still had that little portable b/w guy in the kitchen.
Ah, the glorious days of black and white t.v....I remember them well. Growing up, I always had a small t.v. in my room and they were always black and white models so, like you, I spent a lot of time watching that way. Granted, I did have access to color but that was only if my parents weren't watching something. I can see your parent's point in not buying an expensive color model if you didn't get many channels, not that I would have seen that point in my younger days.
I hate saying things like "People these days don't know how good they have it", but people these days don't know how good (or should I say convenient?) they have it :)
Thanks for the memories, Mark! I grew up on B&W, 3 channels, and bunny ears. Probably got the first color TV around 1970.
As a parent of school-age kids (mid 1990s) we were late to the game of owning a computer with Internet. Prior to that I had recently gone back to college and was hand-printing my English papers. Despite having very legible handwriting, my instructor nicely asked if I could possibly type them. So, I obliged by using an electric typewriter at the local library. They had two machines in each of the sound-proof booths. I had to take my preschool daughter with me and she would happily type away on the other one.
Thankfully, the librarian didn't object and we finally got a home computer in time for the next semester. It made things a bit more difficult but my daughter remembers them as happy memories!
We had a small monochrome TV fixed under our kitchen cupboards that we watched while cooking, and I think a slightly larger model with the chunky dial in the basement. So I saw glimpses but my era was more a loud colour TV that doubled as an immovable piece of furniture.
It’s true, though, that the limited palette meant the photographer had to convey emotion and drama with contrast and shadow. How has writing a show changed as a result of colour, I wonder...for better and worse?
You might be just a couple years older than me, Mark, but the transition from black and white to color in our family was around the same time. I was pretty young, but I do remember it, especially the fact that my grandparents took longer to convert over to color. Our generation went through a pretty significant technological renaissance: color TV, cable, video games, Internet, etc., that all happened between my middle school and high school years. I don't yearn for B&W, but I do for the early days of arcades. That was a very fun and carefree time of life.
I always thought everybody else had cable and I didn't. I'd go over to other people's houses and they'd be talking about Salute your Shorts some other Nickelodeon show that I didn't have access to. I definitely felt left out.
What a lovely article. You can get a monochrome smartphone screen by choosing colour filters after pressing the home button three times on an iPhone. Reduces phone use by about 90%. The modern internet is surprisingly colour based.
We had a color television in the early 70s. I have watched a lot of different programs over the years in black and white. Two of my favorites are The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, USMC. Even to this day, I watch those over and over. I can't tell you how many times I have seen the same episodes but it just seems like they knew what they were doing back then.
An excellent post! I remember - vividly - watching Original Star Trek on a little black and white TV in my mom and dad's bedroom in our little apartment once we moved to North Carolina in the early, early 1970s. The fact it was b/w meant nothing - the stories were just as powerful (possibly more so, but that's a different discussion) and though we had a big (read: massive, wooden, clunky, don't-turn-it-back-on-soon-after-turning-it-off-because-the-tubes-will-break) colour TV downstairs, the b/w one was more private, more personal. I miss b/w in a weird way - and will definitely look at making my iPhone monochromatic (thanks Aoife!).
Love this throwback! It brought back a memory from my early teens when I lived almost as far Downeast as you can go in Maine before getting “over home” to Campobello. We rarely watched TV because we only got one channel, mostly in French layered with a lot of static. The jingle for Ganong’s chocolates haunts me still.
We had a black and white TV long after color was available. When I was a kid we watched The Wizard of Oz every year and Oz looked the same as Kansas. But I learned to appreciate the artistry of BW - old Hitchcock films in particular stand out.
I remember our first colo(u)r television back in India. It was a Sony CRT model and I was so happy. It had a remote and everything!
I'm far too young to have grown up with black and white, but I did watch some old TV shows with my family thanks to DVDs, which I'm old enough to have grown up with. Beverly Hillbillies, the Get Smart pilot, and first season of Gilligan's Island were my black and white experiences. So I got to see the era where TV transitioned to color and a Green Acres episode had to include text on screen for people with black and white TVs after a joke involving color, all well after it actually happened.
For me black and white is like pixel graphics in video games, a sign of either age or that it's designed around somebody else's nostalgia/ worship of the past (usually while failing to actually match the heights of what was made when it was the only option). I remember with the first few episodes of WandaVision some people were saying it missed out on some things people had down in the monochrome era, like the importance of using specific shades of color.
Thanks for your recollections Mark! While I grew up in the 90s and early 00s, monochrome TV was still definitely a part of every household in Lithuania. It was common for people to have a TV set in EVERY room, and kitchens were usually equipped with small monochrome TV sets. I remember there was a trick, where you could play with the picture (stretch it for example) by placing a magnet close to the screen. It did permanently damage color TVs though. So the TV in my room had a weird spot, a product of me dicking around with magnets.
The piece of old-school tech I remember fondly is the filmstrip projector. We had an old one produced in the Soviet Union. You would put a strip with an illustrated fairytale (basically like a comic) in, and have it displayed on a small screen or wall. You would then turn a little knob to see the next strip. The lamp would heat up pretty quickly, and the warmth emanated would only add to the experience.
My first video camera was a Hi8 camcorder, and I quickly learned that black and white could hide a TON of cheap production value and low resolution. Hide? Black and white could bring out a lot with less production value and resolution! I got really into looking at black and white photography for inspiration.
Now I find it very, very difficult to use black and white, if I'm filming or photographing in color. It feels unearned -- either a 'fix' for bad color, which makes a dull black and white look, or the black and white isn't used in any special way that couldn't also be done in color.
One reason I'm a little skeptical when I see a modern movie shot in black and white, is what the monochrome does for it. I have no patience for "This is set in the 50s, so we're shooting black and white like 50s television" if it's not also shot on 1950s television equipment. "New for old" looks as bad as "day for night." This is also connected with the problematic concepts of "film" "video" and "cinematic" "looks" in photograph editing and color grading.
What you say about what monochrome does to an image is spot on: it alters the textures, contrast ratios, separation, ambience. A good color grade brings those things in to make a point, so should monochrome edits. It turns out that black and white is barbell style editing: it brings a lot of opportunity to otherwise cheap imagery, but everything of competent quality should be color until black and white comes back around again as an expert-level choice.