Wednesday, March 31, 2004 | 8:49 a.m.
Imagine there is no color, only black and white.
Oz wouldn't have been quite so special for Dorothy.
IMacs would never have caught on.
The 64-pack of Crayons would be severely limited.
And the world as we know it would be one big film noir.
Fortunately, that's not the case.
But for many years black and white was the only option available to the new breed of TV viewers. That is, until RCA introduced the first color television set 50 years ago this month.
The CT-100 was the first color TV. It was big, expensive -- $1,000 for a set, half the price of a car -- and not too effective. The colors usually didn't match the subjects: rosy pinks for skin color, dark greens for swimming pools, light purple for skies.
In its first year only 5,000 CT-100s were sold.
Meanwhile CBS laboratories were developing a color TV system of their own.
"Back in '53 CBS had done some experimental stuff using a special disc color system. And RCA, which owned NBC, was pushing a color combination system," said Earle Marsh, co-author of "The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows: 1946-Present" ($27.95, Ballatine Books).
"At the time, the CBS system was inherently superior."
Unfortunately for CBS, Robert Sarnoff, head of NBC, had ties to the Federal Communications Commission. He lobbied the FCC to accept RCA's color system as the sole technology behind color TVs -- and won.
"That's one of the major reasons we ended up with the RCA system, rather than the system developed by CBS labs," Marsh said.
NBC became the first network to broadcast in color, with a special episode of "The Colgate Comedy Hour" in late November 1953.
More than a month later, on Jan. 1, 1954, the first national coast-to-coast colorcast occurred, with the broadcast of the "Tournament of Roses Parade" from Pasadena, Calif., to 21 network stations. But only 200 RCA experimental color television sets, the Model 5, were able to view the show.
After that the availability of color TV programming was spotty at best. In fact, Las Vegas didn't get its first color broadcast until May '56 on KLRJ Channel 2, an NBC affiliate.
The lack of color TV programming, however, wasn't enough to deter consumers from purchasing the technological advance.
In 1955, 20,000 color TV sets were sold. Two years later that number jumped to 150,000.
Perhaps the biggest broadcast in color was NBC's "Bonanza." The show premiered Sept. 12, 1959, marking the first time TV's popular Western genre was seen in color.
Growing up in the '50s, the 58-year-old Marsh recalls tuning in weekly to catch the latest exploits of the Cartwright clan on the scenic Ponderosa in living color.
"We had friends of family who had color TV sets. I remember vividly the pioneering map sequence burning away during the show's opening," he said. "The skin colors never looked like skin color ... color TV wasn't great back then."
Because of the still-improving color and cost, color television sales lagged behind their black-and-white cousins by a nearly 50-to-1 ratio.
It wasn't until 1960 that RCA turned a profit from sales of its color TVs after the millions spent on research and development.
By the early '60s, however, color sets began to make the transition from expensive novelty to affordable necessity.
Sensing the growing fondness for color television, in the fall of 1961 the popular "Walt Disney Presents" left its ABC home, where it was broadcast in black and white, to the more appealing world of color on NBC. The show was even retitled to reflect the upgrade: "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color."
With one or two exceptions, by 1964 NBC's entire prime-time lineup was broadcast in color. A year later CBS followed suit, with ABC joining the all-color club in 1966.
Daytime television eventually went all color by 1970.
Television has rarely been seen in black and white since.
"Unless networks were trying to do it for a specific effect -- like the famous documentary episode of 'M*A*S*H' -- they weren't broadcasting anything in black and white," Marsh said. "There was no real reason. It didn't cost significantly any more to broadcast in color than in black and white.
"Ironically, it might be more expensive to produce a show in black and white today than in color."
Black in the day
While color TV replaced black-and-white television, there were those who lamented the change to color TV, in much the same way many cinema purists were critical of sound coming to film.
While Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, doesn't regret the change, he said that black-and-white TV does offer a charm of its own.
"There certainly were some things about late-'40s and -'50s television that were just so beautiful in black and white," he said. "Programs like 'The Untouchables' in the '60s -- the beautiful film-noir look would have been terrible in color."
It was the same for "Dragnet," which originally was broadcast in black and white in the '50s. In 1969 the show returned to TV in color, only the results weren't so glorious.
"It wasn't the same show," Thompson said. "Black and white reflected the morality of what the shows were all about."
It's the same story for many other TV favorites, such as "Bewitched," "Beverly Hillbillies," "Gilligan's Island," "I Dream of Jeannie" and "The Andy Griffith Show" -- all of which began as black-and-white series only to transition to color later.
"Although, the question is, did color ruin those shows, or were they wearing down anyway?" he said.
In such cases and others, Thompson said networks used the technology to mask the increasing lack of creativity from the early days of television.
In the late '40s and early '50s, a costly television set was usually affordable to only the well-to-do. Networks chose programming to reflect their audience: "Pulitzer Prize Playhouse"; "Author Meets the Critics"; "Studio One," which presented teleplays by such notables as Gore Vidal, Rod Serling, Paul Monash and Reginald Rose, as well as weekly adaptions of works of Shakespeare.
As black-and-white TVs became more affordable, however, more middle-income families joined the growing television phenomenon. Consequently, networks broadcast more mainstream programs with a wider appeal to the increasing mass audience: "Gunsmoke," "Wagon Train," "The Rifleman," "Maverick," "Have Gun Will Travel" and "Cheyenne," among others.
"By the time color came around, television needed a boost," Thompson said. "Networks were relying on shows like formulaic westerns. Color compensated for the other innovations that got left behind at the end of the Golden Age of TV."
He said it wasn't until '84 -- three decades after the introduction of color TV -- that a network used the medium to its full potential, Thompson said.
" 'Miami Vice' came along that you had a TV show truly made for what color could do," Thompson said. "It was the bizarre palates of a '50s kitchen applied to a stylized new program.
" 'Miami Vice' was a colorful TV show."
Black and white is often symbolic of a simpler life and time, as evidenced by the uncomplicated and often naive plots of the shows of the time.
Writer-director Gary Ross addressed such a topic with his film "Pleasantville," in which a fictional black-and-white TV show of the '50s gradually becomes colorized as its residents step into the modern and difficult world.
"It's the most interesting essay on color television and is the metaphor for retelling the story of Adam and Eve eating the apple from the Tree of Knowledge," Thompson said. "The black-and-white television represents this Edenic state of innocence in that movie. It's these people who step away from the old traditions and become colorized."
Colorful future
Despite the black-and-white reruns on TV Land, it's difficult to imagine a world of colorless TV. After all, we live in a world were we're told a standard color TV isn't good enough, and that high definition is the future.
Nevertheless, the move from black and white to color didn't happen overnight.
According to Nielsen Media Research, the market penetration of color TV took place over decades.
In 1965, the first year of the study, only 7 percent of U.S. homes had a color TV. That figure jumped by more than 10 times that number in 1975, with 74 percent of all U.S. homes owning at least one color television.
By '85 the market penetration in the United States reached 91 percent and by '95 it was 99 percent.
Today the market penetration of color TV has reached 100 percent, meaning all U.S. homes with a TV have a color set.
Chuck Abbott, owner of Abbott's Audio & Video Store, 4601 W. Sahara Ave., said his store hasn't carried a black-and-white TV in two decades.
"Now I don't even know if you can buy them. I suppose you can at Wal-Mart for $49 if you wanted something cheap. I don't know," Abbott said. "The only time black and whites are ever used are in commercial applications for monitoring security cameras."
And just as black-and-white television slowly was replaced because of new technology, so is the analog -- or standard -- color set.
Since the mid-'90s high definition has emerged as the latest and greatest innovation to television. There are even some similarities to the change from black and white to color and the change from analog to high definition.
"The stark differences (from color to high definition) are even more than the switch from black and white to color. In reality, when they went from black and white to color it made the picture worse," he said. "Until recently black and white always had a better definition to it than color. It's just that color looked cooler."
And just as with color TV, high definition has been slow -- perhaps even slower -- to catch on with consumers.
Part of it is cost. At Abbott's a 27-inch, high-definition TV runs runs from $600 to $700, roughly three times as expensive as an analog set. And a 60-inch, plasma screen, high-definition television can cost as much as a car.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle facing high def, however, is the programming.
While networks scramble to meet Congress' deadline of providing a digital signal by Dec. 31, 2006, there are still many more analog-only shows on cable and network TV than high def.
"High definition has always looked great in stores. It's just there weren't any content providers, so when you took the set home there wasn't much to watch," Abbott said. "High definition cameras cost a lot, so it's very expensive on a massive scale. But we have a lot more (high-definition programming).
"Nobody today that we're dealing with doesn't want a high-definition TV."
Thompson, however, disagrees that high definition is a necessity for most consumers at this point, much like color TV was a luxury 50 years ago.
"All but the most dedicated videophile feels that they can wait and see what happens," he said. "Eventually high definition will come ... people will be reluctant to go back. It's just not something that people feel they need right now."
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