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Wow! I got Color TV...

L

LKellerIII

"...RCA Victor Color TV.
I know what I been missin' now..."

This catchy tune from the RCA Victor Color TV commercial (circa early 1960s) - and a long-ago memory of the UPA style animation - has popped into my brain from time-to time over the last 48 years or so.

I should have known it could be found on You Tube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S60N2W5xzk

At the time, there were probably less than a dozen shows in color - on NBC (owned by RCA at the time), and local news on local NBC O&O stations.

I've heard that an RCA Victor 21" color set cost about $800 in 1960 - the '6th Anniversary of the RCA Color system, according to their advertising. That's roughly the equivalent to $5,700 now, according to an online inflation adjuster. No wonder my parents didn't have Color TV until 1969.
 
Seems 1969 was the year for my family, too. Must have been the year prices really came down! Before that I remember actually making friends based on if they had a color set. What a different era.
 
Within a couple of years you could get a 21" color console TV, a good brand (GE or Admiral) for about half the price. I remember when we got our first Admiral color set in 1963 it cost less than $400. I also remember color programs were still a sometime thing...NBC aired most of its nighttime and some of its daytime shows in color while ABC color shows were a sometime thing and CBS never seemed to have a color show.
 
HDTV seems like it went through similar growing pains as color TV. I'm too young to remember anything about the development of color TV but I still remember 10 years ago when HDTV's were priced similarly to color TV back in the 1950s/1960s (inflation adjusted). A HDTV set would easily go for at least $5000 and above at that time (late 1990s/early 2000s) and there was limited HD programming available. However now it's possible to get a 1080p HDTV with an ATSC tuner in it for less than $250 and HD programming is plentiful.
 
MR5229 said:
HDTV seems like it went through similar growing pains as color TV. I'm too young to remember anything about the development of color TV but I still remember 10 years ago when HDTV's were priced similarly to color TV back in the 1950s/1960s (inflation adjusted). A HDTV set would easily go for at least $5000 and above at that time (late 1990s/early 2000s) and there was limited HD programming available. However now it's possible to get a 1080p HDTV with an ATSC tuner in it for less than $250 and HD programming is plentiful.
Click to expand...

There are certainly some natural analogies between the development of HDTV and color, but it seems to me that color took even longer, and the prices didn't drop as fast. I am not a TV historian by any means, but when this subject has come up in the past, some true TV historians have chimed in with some fascinating info. Maybe they'll do so this time, too.

An earlier poster noted that prices came down quickly, and that his parents paid $400 for an Admiral set in 1963. But keep in mind that still equates to about $2,500 today - big money for most working families. The median family income in the early 1960s was probably around $10,000 per year. Of course, all electronics have come down in price (relative to income) since then, so that has to be taken into consideration.

My first few years on my own, I made do with those cheapo 12" black and white sets, then got a decent job at 23 in 1975 and bought my first color set - a 21" RCA (no "Victor" in the brand by then) for about $379 in a local discount house. That equates to about $1600 today, and was probably the most expensive item I had bought in my young adult life. And low tech compared to even the 1980s - monaural sound, no remote.

Another thing that I'd speculate delayed the transition to color for consumers was CBS. They were the last network to make the transition, and since they were the number 1 network in those days, many viewers probably decided to wait. My father waited until 1969, and he made a good living and could have afforded it. Of course, he waited until about 1972 to buy his first stereo hi-fi, so he wasn't exactly on the cutting edge of technology - even for those days.
 
I remember our first color TV, a Curtis Mathes 21" console that the family got in the summer of 1966. Dad figured there was enough color from local stations in Louisville and from the networks to make the investment worthwhile. He chose CM over RCA,
mainly because the chassis ran so much cooler than the blazin' hot RCA and GE sets.

In fact, on the plastic cases of some GE and RCA portables, you could take your finger and deform the plastic around the cooling louvers...the sets ran that hot when up to normal operating temperature!
 
The singer was Vaughn Monroe (under contract to RCA Victor).

RCA owned NBC and the rights to the "compatible color" system (they got royalties on all color TVs and all color broadcast equipment, whoever made it). They ran commercials trying to get people to buy color sets (expensive color sets) but there was very little color programming to watch. ABC and CBS did almost no color programming (just the rare special). NBC did some specials but regular color programming was limited to Howdy Doody, Meet The Press and the Tonight Show (studio shows).

Not until Bonanza and Disney's "Wonderful World of Color" in the early 60s did RCA/NBC really make a move to give people something, well, colorful to watch. Bonanza was set around Lake Tahoe with lots of sky, water and forests - not the dessert like most TV westerns. NBC first scheduled it 7:30 to 8:30 Saturday nights when a lot of stores were still open and shoppers could see the show in color on the floor demos. But it wasn't until the mid 60s when NBC went "full color" in prime time (except for I Dream of Jeannie the first season) and CBS went along (ABC did a year later) that sales of color TV's started to take off. No matter how many ads you run, without software, people don't buy hardware.
 
MattParker said:
The singer was Vaughn Monroe (under contract to RCA Victor).

RCA owned NBC and the rights to the "compatible color" system (they got royalties on all color TVs and all color broadcast equipment, whoever made it). They ran commercials trying to get people to buy color sets (expensive color sets) but there was very little color programming to watch. ABC and CBS did almost no color programming (just the rare special). NBC did some specials but regular color programming was limited to Howdy Doody, Meet The Press and the Tonight Show (studio shows).

Not until Bonanza and Disney's "Wonderful World of Color" in the early 60s did RCA/NBC really make a move to give people something, well, colorful to watch. Bonanza was set around Lake Tahoe with lots of sky, water and forests - not the dessert like most TV westerns. NBC first scheduled it 7:30 to 8:30 Saturday nights when a lot of stores were still open and shoppers could see the show in color on the floor demos. But it wasn't until the mid 60s when NBC went "full color" in prime time (except for I Dream of Jeannie the first season) and CBS went along (ABC did a year later) that sales of color TV's started to take off. No matter how many ads you run, without software, people don't buy hardware.
Click to expand...

Good info - squares with my memory. A note about Bonanza however. I noticed in later years (reruns of the show) that the studio and stage technology hadn't really caught up to the color era. While most action shots were filmed outdoors, many of the static and talky scenes (like the exterior of the Cartwright house) were shot inside sound-stages. In reality, the blue ceiling and lighting of the sound stage looked nothing like the blue sky of Tahoe or the natural light - anywhere for that matter. My guess is - it would have been more convincing in black and white.
 
Lkeller said:
Good info - squares with my memory. A note about Bonanza however. I noticed in later years (reruns of the show) that the studio and stage technology hadn't really caught up to the color era. While most action shots were filmed outdoors, many of the static and talky scenes (like the exterior of the Cartwright house) were shot inside sound-stages. In reality, the blue ceiling and lighting of the sound stage looked nothing like the blue sky of Tahoe or the natural light - anywhere for that matter. My guess is - it would have been more convincing in black and white.
Click to expand...

I was not a fan of Bonanza partly due to the "soapy" aspects of the scripts and partly because the stage shots were so poor. Several westerns shared that problem but none were of first-run caliber, and in color, as was Bonanza.
 
My grandfather....who died in 1979....never bought a color TV because he said he didn't want to have to watch men wearing lipstick!

He wasn't cheap or anything. Nah! ;D
 
cyberdad said:
My grandfather....who died in 1979....never bought a color TV because he said he didn't want to have to watch men wearing lipstick!
Click to expand...

Wasn't Berle off TV by then? ;D
 
My family's first color set was a SONY Trinitron... 1972 I believe... and was a promise made by my father that we'd have it, if only I agreed to go to summer camp :D

I recall receiving a letter while AT camp with my mother saying how much they were enjoying it! (without me) :'(
 
Silkie said:
Grandma won our Zenith color TV in a strip club raffle.
Click to expand...
Grandmaw was in a strip club? Don't tell grandpaw. He thought she just went out to get some cigarettes.
 
Our first set was a Zenith which my Dad bought for my mom's birthday back in 1960. It as great because Boston had two stations that broadcast locally in color, WHDH-TV channel 5 and WBZ-TV channel 4, although channel 5 was first in 1957. We had the local Bozo Show with Frank Avruch and Boomtown with Rex Trailer, plus the studio segmebnts of our local news was in color. News film was still black and white for a few more years. Unfortunately, no videotape from these early years exist today. Both channels have changed ownership since then and much of their early archives is eeither in private hands or gone all together.
 
This previous post prompts a question...exactly where (if known, given security concerns) are the NBC, ABC, CBS, Mutual Radio and FOX videotape and audiotape archives?
 
My dad was definitely one of those guys of the "why on earth would you ever need anything other than black and white?"
persuasion. Cracks started to develop in this front in 1970, when my grandparents who lived nearby bought a color set.
My brother and I immediately started to pester them every chance we got to come over and watch Saturday morning cartoons,
Sesame Street, holiday specials, etc. in color. After four years of munchkins pestering his in-laws to come over and use their
color set he finally broke down and bought one from Sears. Set it up in the family room shortly before The Grinch Who Stole
Christmas made it's annual CBS run and surprised us all.

Part of his thinking lied in the fact that he had a background in electronics and was pretty handy in fixing
radios and televisions. He had acquired eight or nine non-working black and white TV sets which sat in our
basement. He felt that with all that material to work with he'd never have to spend another dime on television
again. To his great disappointment though he eventually learned that there was not one interchangeable part
in any of them.
 
In, my household growing up the catch phrase was "We'll get color TV when it is perfected." -uttered by my father repeatedly. My mother would make remarks about how wouldn't this look nice in color but they seemed to go over the old man's head. The rectangle screens in the mid 60's seemed to break the ice, as well as the nets converting over to full color. Still, it wasn't til I was almost killed on a motorcycle, that I took the money from the insurance company settlement and bought my parents a Zenith color TV. By that time I was pretty much out of the house.
 
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