Were the first seasons of 'Bewitched' filmed in colour?

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wilkinsservis

wilkinsservis

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My bf's mother gave us the complete first two seasons of 'Bewitched' on DVD for Christmas. I always thought they were black and white, in fact I seem to remember something about them "colourised" by some technical process some years ago. Imagine my surprise when the first two seasons played in "natural" colour? Does anyone know the story behind this?

Peter
 
I believe only the pilot episode was filmed in black and white. I Dream of Jeannie was filmed in black and white the first season.
 
Seasons 1 and 2, 1964 and 1965 were in Black and White
Seasons 3 thru 8, 1966 thru 1972 were in color.

Jeannie, 1965 b&w / 1966-1970 color.
 
Dirtybuck Is Right

ABC was the slowest of the "Big Three" networks in converting to color broadcasting (largely because it had the least amount of money to invest in the changeover). But during the 1965-66 season, NBC was virtually all-color in prime time(with the exception of the first season of "Jeannie" and an action series called "Convoy"). That same season, CBS ramped up its color broadcast efforts. "The Beverly Hillbillies;" "The Lucy Show;" "Ed Sullivan" and "Andy Griffith" were broadcast in tint that year, along with most of its new series.
By contrast, ABC did launch some new color programs ("Gidget," "Tammy," "OK Crackerby!"). But most of ABC's lineup--including "Bewitched," "Peyton Place," "Shindig" and others--were still broadcast in black and white. ABC--which nipped NBC for second place during the 1964-65 season--fell back to a distant third. ABC borrowed about $25 million from conglomerate ITT (which made an unsuccessful bid to buy the network) and converted its operations for color broadcasting. By the fall of 1966, all three television networks were totally color in prime time. That includes "Bewitched" and other returning series that had been filmed or taped in black and white.
And as Unimatic pointed out, the DVD versions of "Bewitched" have been available in either colorized form or traditional B&W.
 
"The Lucy Show" In Color

I would be remiss if I didn't point out another interesting color TV fact: "The Lucy Show" was filmed in black in white for its first season (1962-63). But Lucille Ball (who took over Desilu studios after Desi Arnaz sold her his share in the company) decided her sitcom would be filmed in color, starting in the fall of '63--its second season. CBS still refused to air "Lucy" in color, but Ball was thinking about the syndication market, and believed color would make the show's reruns easier to sell to local stations. She was right, and CBS didn't show the color "Lucy Show" episodes in color until the fall of 1965.
 
quite right, MikeS

Lucille Ball was always ahead of the technology curve. To avoid moving to NYC to do "I Love Lucy" live (with kinescope copies outside the Northeast), she and Desi developed the three camera film system shot in front of a live audience. This is why I Love Lucy reruns from the era have motion picture-like image quality, while shows such as The Honeymooners or Milton Berle are kinescopes, and look as if they were filmed underwater. Within several years, most of the industry was forced to follow Desilu's lead.

Lucy insisted on filming The Lucy Show in color after the initial 1962-63 B&W season, but seasons two and three were not broadcast in color. By season four, CBS was all-color in prime time. Because of her foresight, future generations were able to watch Lucy Show reruns of seasons two and three in color, even though the original broadcasts in 1963-65 were B&W.

Bewitched reruns of the first two seasons have been in B&W since the world began, so had they been filmed in color and broadcast in B&W (Lucy Show style), we would have seen color episodes long before computer colorization existed. Those B&W episodes really ARE in B&W.
 
ps on kinescopes

In 1951, when I Love Lucy began, only the Northeast and part of the Midwest were linked by coaxial cable. A live broadcast from New York could be viewed live along the Northeast Coast (i.e. Boston to Washington) and as far west as Chicago-St. Louis. The rest of the country received kinescope copies (a motion picture film of a studio monitor displaying the program), which were inferior in quality and subject to a processing delay (usually, areas outside the live transmission zone saw the episodes a week later).

Commercial videotape systems did not yet exist. So either you filmed it the Lucy way (brand new technology at the time) or you kinescoped it. By creating motion picture quality prints, Desilu unknowingly invented the rerun. As part of their deal with CBS, Desilu retained ownership of the films, and when the show became a hit, demand to see the older episodes grew way beyond anything Desilu imagined. At the time, public demand to view old episodes was a novel concept.

By 1952, a coast to coast coaxial cable had been built, allowing national live televiewing, but in the absence of videotape, the Desilu film method was still the best way of recording a program, so most shows converted to that format, supplanted much later by videotape.
 
In the beginning of the I Love Lucy show when Desi told the studio that he wanted the show on film, CBS balked. They said it was too expensice, so the Arnaz' supplied the film. This gave the ownership of the episodes. This made them very rich very quickly.

One would have thought that anyting with Lucy would have been filmed in color early on as they were always referencing her "Red Hair".
 
CBS were notorious tightwads back then. During the third season of Twilight Zone, they told Rod Serling his show would be videotaped instead of filmed. Serling complained loudly, but a total of six episodes (out of 156) were taped.

Viewing them today, it's easy to understand why Serling protested. Just awful. Videotape has zero presence and looks like someone's home movies.
 
The Battle For Color Broadcasting

In the late 1940's, CBS and RCA/NBC were engaged in a battle over which company's color broadcasting system would become the national standard. RCA/NBC pushed for a "dot-sequential" color system that was compatible with the black and white system of the day (allowing B&W set owners to see color shows in monochrome). CBS pushed for a "field-sequential" color wheel system, which was incompatible with black and white sets of the day, and requiring all UHF reception, forcing major outlays for both consumers and the industry. But CBS' system was superior in picture quality to the early RCA/NBC efforts, and the Federal Communications Commission adopted the CBS color system in 1950.
Trouble was, few other TV set makers (certainly not leader RCA) were willing to build CBS-compatible color sets. That forced CBS to buy a third-rate TV set maker to build CBS-compatible sets. It was an expensive flop (very few were willing to toss out their old B&W sets and buy a color receiver that picked up only CBS color shows). By late 1951, CBS "asked" the Truman administration to "order" that all color television production and broadcasts be stopped due to raw material needs for the Korean War. The order was granted; CBS ended up buying back all the color sets it had sold up to that time.
Meanwhile, David Sarnoff ordered RCA engineers to come up with a better compatible color system, and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the project. By 1953, the new RCA/NBC color system was evaluated by the FCC; it was far better than earlier efforts, supported by a vast majority of television set makers and didn't require B&W set owners to buy a new color set (or TV stations to buy new equipment). The FCC--in a rare reversal--made the RCA/NBC color system the new American broadcast standard.
It took about a decade for color set sales to increase enough for the networks to beef up their color program schedules, but it wasn't until 1972 that color TV set sales exceeded those of black and white for the first time in the US.
 
The Lucy Myth:

I have to say something that may raise a few peoples' ire, but it's the truth. As much of a technical genius as Desi Arnaz was, and as much as he did to raise the quality of sitcom filming, he did not invent the three-camera technique. It was used on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, too, beginning in 1950, a full year before Lucy's first episode was filmed. There may have been other uses of the technique before Lucy, but that's the earliest one I have proof of in the form of a filmed show on DVD. The Burns and Allen episodes I have are not as polished as Lucys, but they are three-camera film, not kinescopes, nonetheless.

From what I can tell, Desi's major contribution was that he understood - way before the networks did - that if a show was really good, people might well want to see it again in syndication. Since videotape was not a feasible technology until '56 or '57, that left film as the best medium to preserve a performance. I have been told that the Burns and Allen shows were filmed to accommodate the stars' schedules, not for re-run potential, but I have no proof of that yet.
 
On Air King

Actually, paulg, we are both right.
According to historians, CBS purchased Hytron Radio and Electronics Corporation; Air-King was the television manufacturing subsidiary of Hytron. But no matter how you spelled it, Hytron was a money-loser and eventually was abandoned by CBS. Even with CBS-branded black and white sets, Hytron simply could not compete with such established brands of the day as RCA, General Electric, Philco, Westinghouse and Admiral.
Regarding the information about color television set sales, the following came from both "TV Facts" by C. Steinberg [1980], and "2001 World Almanac":
In 1972, just over 17 million television sets of all types were sold in the United States. Of those, 8,845,000 were color sets versus 8,239,000 black and white units. The year before, monochrome sets outsold color by just over 300,000 units. And the margin continued to widen during the remainder of the 1970's and beyond.
Neither here nor there, as you say, but I just wanted to clarify where I obtained my facts.
 
another factor that slowed color television adoption in the

The early RCA color sets introduced in 1954 cost $1000, more like $10,000 equivalent today. Only the wealthy could afford them. By the mid-1960s, a 21 inch set ran about $500, about $2500 in today's money, so that price was ok for upper middle class families but not for the vast middle class.

My family's first color tv was won in a service club raffle. My father was a dentist, so our standard of living was higher than average middle class (yes, we had a KitchenAid dishwasher and a complete kitchen remodel in 1961-2...), but $500 was quite a chunk of change to drop for a tv set when most of the programming was still in B&W.

The first color set my parents PURCHASED (as opposed to holding the winning raffle ticket...) was when the raffle tv (a GE that didn't last very long) died about five years after we won it. My parents bought a 19 inch Hitachi tabletop model for about $329 in 1972. That set lasted until c. 1979, when it too died and was replaced by a Mitsubishi 19 inch color table top set. The Mitsubishi cost about $450 but that was less money than say $500 in 1965. This set lasted a respectable 15 years and had wonderful color.

As mentioned already in this thread, color sales did not overtake B&W sales until 1972, when a decent color set (our Hitachi) could be had for little more than $300, and at that point the % of households in the USA with color reception surpassed 50%. The early sets never had a chance for market penetration because they were too costly, and because the prime time schedule was not entirely in color until the mid to late 1960s.

Below is an interesting link to "The Lucy Show" introduction from its third season, 1964-65. As mentioned earlier, Lucy was filmed in color from 1963 (second season), but the original primetime episodes were not broadcast in color until 1965. As a result, seasons two and three (1963-65) were filmed in color, but Americans saw them for the first time in B&W. Desilu recognized the importance of residual fees from reruns and wanted color film for the future, even if their CBS network didn't want to invest in color technology to broadcast Lucy in color.

The opener is a montage of clips from seasons one and two. As a result, the film is a mix of color (season two) and B&W (season two). I don't know which season the Charlie Chaplin spook was shown, it could have been season two with B&W on purpose to impart a 1920s effect. However, I am certain that the stilts clip is from season one (have seen it in reruns in B&W only) and the balloons clips is from season two (I have it on DVD in color).

Note: Vivian Vance's character of Vivian Bagley was the FIRST divorced woman ever depicted on US television. The Lucy Carmichael character was a widow, but Vivian played a divorcee and made numerous sardonic references about her ex, presumably still living. This was a sensitive subject at the time and probably only someone with Vivian Vance's enormous popularity with the public could have pulled this off. Lucille Ball earlier was the very first pregnant woman shown on tv, and all of the pregnancy scripts had to be approved by a committee comprised of a Catholic priest, Protestant minister, and Jewish rabbi (this was Desilu's own precaution to gain approval with the network....CBS wanted her to take a season off.)



1-28-2009-11-08-49--PassatDoc.jpg
 
ps

I am too young to remember The Lucy Show early seasons in its original run, but the season three opener linked above was seen by American viewers entirely in B&W in evening primetime in 1964-65. Later syndicated rerun viewers such as myself saw the opener partly in color and partly in B&W, as the clips were originally filmed and then stitched together to make this opener. Some of the clips really WERE in B&W because they are from the first season filmed in B&W only (e.g. the stilts clip).

There is a separate season two opener that used color photographs (but no video) from the first season. That opener was likewise seen in B&W in its original run in 1963-64, but subsequent syndicated reruns showed the opener in color (no color video, just still photos).

When she started The Lucy Show in 1962, Vivian Vance had remarried and had relocated to Stamford, Connecticut. Her husband was a literary agent and needed to live near New York City. Appearing weekly on The Lucy Show meant a weekly commute to California for twenty-five weeks a year, made possible in part by the advent of nonstop jet flights between New York and Los Angeles (five hours coast to coast). The show rehearsed Monday-Wednesday and filmed on Wednesday evenings, so presumably she either took a late Thursday red eye flight to New York or else flew back east early Friday morning, only to return Sunday evening to Los Angeles. I would imagine Desilu had to cover first class airfare and hotels for her, unless she maintained an apartment near the studio.

Her contract also called for more glamorous costumes than she had worn in I Love Lucy (no longer the shabby landlady Ethel Mertz) and she was not required to stay 20 pounds overweight so as to appear older than Lucy; actually, she was a year or two younger than Lucy.

By season three, Vance grew tired of the weekly coast to coast commute and reduced the number of episodes in which she appeared. As a result, the season three opener has two versions, with and without the voiceover "co-starring Vivian Vance".

By season four, she had dropped out as a regular cast member and made only once or twice a year appearances to the show. The show premise in 1962-65 was of two single women sharing a house in Danfield, New York (coined from the actual nearby towns of Danbury and Ridgefield, Connecticut).

With the 1965 season, Lucy moved to California and began working in Mr Mooney's bank as his secretary, Mr Mooney having been coincidentally transferred from the Danfield National Bank to the Westfield National Bank of California.

In New York, Mr Mooney managed her trust fund and many of the episodes involved Lucy trying to get Mr Mooney to increase her allowance or draw from the trust fund. There were some "Lucy disasters" set in the Danfield bank lobby, but Lucy was a customer of the bank and not (yet) Mr. Mooney's secretary.

Starting with the 1965 season, Lucy's daughter Chris goes off the college, son Jerry is sent to military boarding school, and Lucy is now living alone in Los Angeles. She applies for and is hired by the Westfield Bank, and is assigned to be Mr Mooney's secretary, thus setting the stage for Mr Mooney shouting "MRS CARMICHAEL!!!" every time Lucy messes up in office. Vivian Bagley would appear once or twice per season, depicted as visiting from New York where she presumably still lived (no mention of her son Sherman).

The children (Candy Clark-Chris, Jimmy Garrett-Jerry, and Ralph Hart-Sherman Bagley) made only limited appearances on the program and were not included in every episode. I would not be surprised if ratings surveys showed that they did not add much to the show. People were used to a decade of Lucy and Ricky and Fred and Ethel and Little Ricky, so taking away the men and adding three unknown children sort of upset the apple cart for many viewers, and detracted from the humor.

The Lucy Show did well in ratings, but many critics felt it was a step down from I Love Lucy, and it never hit the prior show's meteoric popularity. (I remember watching I Love Lucy reruns as a kid but never watching The Lucy Show at night in prime time, it just wasn't as funny).
 
I just found the season two opener.....

In color, but using only color (colorized?) photos from season one. I am too young to have watched this in prime time, but the viewers who did see it saw it in B&W. The reruns I saw growing up showed the intro in color. This would have been the first year that Lucy was filmed in color but broadcast in black and white. The season three opener includes some color clips (balloons caper) from season two.

 
and last but not least, the "kaleidoscope" opening

Adopted in 1965, but often attached to syndicated versions (particularly on DVDs) of seasons two and three, even though the original openers were different and shown above. This is the opener with which viewers are most familiar, partly because it was the first opener actually to be broadcast in primetime color, and partly because it was later attached to season two and three episodes which originally had different openers.

I'm not certain why, but most DVD episodes seem to come from the last three seasons, 1968-68. Another change in the format was that The Lucy Show began to rely on celebrity appearances, which also occurred in the last three seasons of I Love Lucy (California, Europe, and New York) and on most of the episodes of Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (1957-60), which was a one hour version of the I Love Lucy format (characters were the same, and they continued to live in Westport, Connecticut, as they did at the end of I Love Lucy in 1957).

The numerous celebrity appearances in the final three seasons may explain their apparently higher appeal to collectors who buy the DVDs.

Here is an episode with Joan Crawford



and Vivian Vance is clearly identified as being with Lucy "on vacation", which proves it is from the last three seasons.

 
One of the worst winters in decades together

with a difficult pregnancy meant my mom was spending a lot of time at home in 1963 - she couldn't drive the pass to her university and I do recall more school cancellations than in the rest of my studies, together.

So when the B&W TV my folks were given by their in-laws back in the mid-50's died, they replaced it with an Admiral color TV.

Biggest piece of stinking shit you ever saw. First color TV in our neighborhood, but also resulted in me (five/six years old) getting to know the TV repairman well enough that he took to showing me details about TV circuitry. By the 1964, even six year old me knew how to phone his shop and be told to check the horizontal hold, etc. to just be sure before he came out...

Lucy and Star Trek and Bewitched and Johnny Quest were staples of those days. Color was used very consciously in these productions and their values were much higher than the trash we got in the 1970's and well into the 1990's. TV didn't really start to be well written again until about 15 years ago. Wonder why - so much technological advance, such opportunities...but take a look at Starsky and Hutch or the Mod Squad (two shows I love) - yikes! Or the Brady Bunch (which was only worth watching for the tight pants Mr. Brady wore...)

Lucy also introduced three-camera technique to TV...an enormously expensive and difficult undertaking in the 1950's, but it gave her a the range to do complex comedy. She may have been a bitch to shame Joan Crawford, but we have her to thank for a lot of what made and makes TV good.
 
guest stars on Lucy

I think Desilu figured out early on that having big name guest stars were a sure fire ratings booster. Maybe they had to pay big fees for these stars to appear, but they got some of the biggest names at the time, even Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton (see link below for their appearance on "Here's Lucy" c.1970). Most people in those days got their schedule information from TV Guide or the weekly tv schedule provided by the local paper, and often guest stars were listed. In addition, networks often ran ads during the week pimping an upcoming celebrity appearance on various programs.

I agree our GE set was a piece of crap, it worked ok for about a year and then started having problems. My parents probably spent more on repairs than the set cost would have cost new (though of course they won it on a $1 raffle ticket).

I believe it was donated by a local dealer, perhaps a member of the local Lions Club to which my father belonged, and who knows, maybe it was a refurb or return. My mother had been notified of our "win" while my father and I were at a hockey game, and had driven to the dealer during the game to pick up the set. They loaded it into the tailgate of her station wagon and she drove home, waiting for the men to arrive to lug it into the house.

I remember having an original registration and owner's manual in a plastic sack, but all of the original packaging had been removed from the set and the cart to facilitate loading it into the car. My mother recalls driving to the dealer and the tv was sitting on its cart, all unpacked and ready to be loaded into the car. So it's possible this was a return or a refurb. I'd hate to think all GE's were this bad, but who knows. Most of the people who bought tv's chose Zenith or RCA in the mid 1960s.

The 1972 Hitachi color tv was losing its color by mid 1979, indicating I would presume a bad picture tube, but at least the set gave seven years of good service before bowing out. No repairs whatsoever. The successor Mitsubishi slugged on from 1979 to 1995, when it was replaced by a 25" Magnavox that works to this very day.

The tv sits in a built in teak wall cabinet that they had installed after moving into the then-new house in 1972. The opening is rectangular, which matched the shape of tv's at that time. The only reason they didn't go beyond 19" in the Mitsubishi was the cost ($750 for 21" vs. $500 for a 19"), though a 21" set would have fit in the space. There was room for VCRs in an adjacent cabinet.

Later, when the Mitsubishi died, the height of the tv became an issue, as most were now square, and the largest set that would fit the height of the wall cabinet was a 25" Magnavox. We actually had to shop with a tape measure. However, since the new boxy tv's were not as long, it was now possible to add a VCR and DVD in the same cabinet rather than running wires between the cabinets.

Now, oddly enough, tv's are once again rectangular, and whatever HDTV they buy to replace the Magnavox will most likely fill the entire rectangular space with a picture screen. What had been obsolete (for a boxy tv) is now perfect for the newest generation of technology.

 
> the Brady Bunch (which was only worth watching for the tight pants Mr. Brady wore...)

Good to know I wasn't the only one with a crush on Robert Reed. At least until he and his sons showed up with permed hair.

The other color show I loved was Batman. That whole Bruce Wayne/Boy Wonder thing was very appealing to me.
 
Panthera:

"Lucy also introduced three-camera technique to TV"

As I said in a previous post, the three-camera technique was not invented by Lucy, Desi, or anyone at Desilu. What they did do was raise the level of the technique to a degree that was awesome by the standards of that time. The three-camera episodes of Burns and Allen I mentioned in my earlier post look positively gruesome compared to a Desilu sitcom; they are cheaply made and they look it. The lighting is rudimentary, costuming is downright bad for supporting players (though Gracie Allen wears some smashing Don Loper outfits, Bea Benadaret looks like she's carrying an inner tube under her blouse), and sets are of the $1.98 variety, with obvious painted backdrops to be seen outside every window of the set. It was as if no one connected with Burns and Allen ever bothered to turn on a TV set and actually find out how the result looked to home viewers.

At Desilu, technical standards were the result of Lucy and Desi's experience in feature film. Lucy in particular had had a contract with M-G-M, where excellence was demanded - and paid for - in every particular of film-making. Desilu's accomplishment was to bring as much of that standard as possible to the weekly grind of sitcom-making.

Two Desilu people in particular helped make a huge difference in how Desilu shows looked on TV. One was cinematographer Karl Freund, who was one of the top M-G-M cameramen of the Classic Era; he photographed two of Garbo's biggest pictures. Desi hired him at far less than his motion-picture salary (union scale, actually), because Desi got Freund interested in the technical challenge of making TV look good. Freund's major contribution was a "grid" system of lighting that distributed light evenly over the entire set, so actors could move freely and look good while they were doing it (there were also "fill" lights under the camera to shine some light upward onto actors' faces during closer shots; such lighting erases wrinkles).

The other person was costume designer Elois Jenssen, who really, really "got" television in a way that most costume people didn't. Lucy's wardrobe was carefully designed and tested to be certain it looked good on the grainy, high-contrast screens of the day, and Jenssen also made certain that no other costuming competed with Lucy's; the viewer never "loses" Lucy, no matter how fast and wacky the action.

Desilu also spent money on feature-quality titles at a time when most TV shows made do with crudely lettered cards or the rudimentary electronic superimpositions possible at the time. Desilu's Make Room for Daddy went to the length of superimposing each actor's name over their moving image during the title sequence - something that was not cheap to do in 1953, when that series began.

Desi also spent more money on sound, music, film processing, sets and makeup than most producers. Lucy's age when I Love Lucy began filming (40) meant that she needed the best efforts of every department at Desilu to look good; the standards of another company might have sunk I Love Lucy before it got off the ground. If you're into old TV shows, you can always tell a Desilu show from any other company's - the image is brighter and contrastier, the sound is clear as a bell, the costuming, hair and makeup are as good as anything seen in feature film, and the titles are first-rate.
 
Would this apply to Star Trek too?

It was made by Desilu in it's first year, before Desilu was absorbed by Paramount (would it be Viacom now?). Even today it seems that the color in the original Star Trek looks better than in some other shows from the era.

Lost in Space was another show I remember and when it first came out in black and white, it is kind of scary. The next year, they changed it not only to color, but the writing became kind of "silly". The reason - Not just scaring little kids, but in 1966, ABC put Batman on at the same time, in color, and I guess the writers for LIS had to do something different to compete with Batman. So you could say Batman made LIS kind of goofy.

In "The Making of Star Trek", Gene Roddenberry told how he was trying to pitch Star Trek to CBS executives and was turned down becuase they already had another science fiction family show - Lost in Space.
 
I'm Not As Familiar...

...With Desilu's "late" period (just before the sale to Paramount) as I am with its founding, but standards there seem to have been pretty high throughout the company's history. The Lucy Show episodes that were in colour are very well-done technically, though I'm not nearly as fond of Lucy's work in them as I am of her work in I Love Lucy. Lucy Ricardo is sublime work, fully the equal of Chaplin's Little Tramp. Lucys Carmichael and Carter are just sitcom characters.

The only problem with the early Star Trek episodes that I'm aware of is that they were filmed at a standard compatible with the resolution of a late '60s colour TV, which wasn't very high. Today, with DVD and high-resolution TV's, you can see things that didn't show in 1968, like nail heads in the plywood sets. Unfortunate, that, but I don't think anyone involved in filming the series ever envisioned today's standards of resolution, or that the show would become a classic. In its day, Star Trek had a very rough ride with NBC, often in danger of being cancelled.
 
Lucy in color

Actually Desi wanted to film the 1957 I love Lucy in color but decided it was too costly.Their marriage was in shambles and they really didnt know how long they would be on TV.The earlier Red Skeltons on CBS where in color in 1956,but filmed in BW.The reason they were so late with color RCA held the patents and Palen the Pres of CBS didnt want to payup to them,after they won the FCC approval for their color system,so many shows were probably fimed in color and broadcast in BW in the late 50s and early 60s,after NBC went all color 65and 66 season at night there were afraid of losing viewers and started going color.I remember a 1961 or 62 commercial at Christmas on CBS with a little bird and it was color.Check old 1950 life mags RCA electronic color is on the cover,Ill see if I can find mine as to what month and day it was.Bobby
 
We were late to color TV too and my dad was also a dentist..

We did not get one until 1974, and the next year, was when we first got cable in our community, because really, we could only get one station KDKA, for CBS, well at all. Other people had color TVs, but you had to have an outdoor antenna (expensive) and it seemed that every time I saw a color TV at Horne's (now Macy's)Walter Cronkite always seemed to be purple! It seemed that the Black and white sets were easier to adjust to an acceptable picture, until the 80s came along and I guess by that time, the companies figured out to build effective color telvision.

Star Trek was a good show, but we couldn't get it originally, and it never sent the chills down my spine that Lost in Space did. Star Trek was a work situation and LIS was a family drama. Also, I wondered if it helped that on LIS, Jonathan Harris was a Shakesperean actor who was very dramatic. Dr. Smith made that show.

If anyone knows: Do the Desilu studios still exist? I would think they would be part of Paramount/Viacom by now.

On another note, is is just me, or is there a difference between a Shakesperean actor and a regular actor? For example, on LIS it seems the other men were regular actors but Dr. Smith - with all his drama - Was a Shakesperean actor. Or is this just me?
 
Shakespearean Actors

Yes, there is a difference, quite a large one between actors that can play roles in Shakespearean plays, and those who cannot. It all comes down to training and of course talent.

In the UK, one finds Shakespearean actors moving between stage, film and television. Quite a few actors seen on our favourite PBS programs such as Dame Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, and Patrica Routledge (Hycinth Bucket), are Shakespearean actors. Samantha Stephens's father the warlock "Maurice" was played by Maurice Evans, a Shakespearan trained actor, hence his "ham" performances.

Then you have actors like film stars such as Lauren Bacall, Cary Grant, and the lot, who while great in their craft, one is not likely to see them doing Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet.

At one point in history, stage actors distanded doing "films" and "Hollywood", however as the medium grew, and more importantly offered vast sums,things changed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shakespearean_actors
 
Sandy,

Thanks for the correction. I thought to have read somewhere it was her idea to bring it into TV. It is true, tho' - Desilu productions were just plain good.

You can tell the difference between a properly trained actor (think Hugh Laurie) and a guy who was chosen for his chest (think nearly all sit-com hunks). Or the BOTW in so many American shows of the '80s and '90s where there was a concern that all those male-bonding moments would give the wrong impression (The Sentinel being the best example). Can anybody remember any of the hunks or blondes once their, er, chests began to sag?
 

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