I didn’t start watching TV regularly until about age 7, when my grandfather had a B&W set. We lived in New York at the time and I remember us walking miles in the snow to his place just to watch TV. Color was available by then, Disney broadcast in color, but we didn’t know anyone who had a color set. I remember watching Ed Sullivan, The Friday Night Fights, Playhouse 90 and I Love Lucy. Lucy was a big deal because Desi was Cuban, we felt like we had arrived.

We got our first TV about the same time you got yours.

I saw Wizard of Oz in a theater before TV. It was released annually on some occasion, probably Christmas. The first segment has always been B&W up to the point that Dorothy lands in OZ and exits the house to a world of technicolor. When she returns home it goes back to B&W. Of course if you watch it on a B&W TV that transformation never happens.

The first color TV broadcast I saw was the World Series at a restaurant about 1959. I didn’t own a color TV until about 1966, so. I watched a lot of color broadcasts in B&W.

The first colorizing was horrible not much better than those ridiculous tinted screens that some used before color got affordable. They have gotten pretty good at it now and shows like WWII In Color (combo of rare color footage and colorized) are pretty damn good.

This is getting off topic, but not many recall how expensive TV (tubes and all) were in the 50s. The first TV I ever bought was an 19″ B&W portable from Sears in about 1959. I cost me about 150 bucks. That would be at least 1500 in today’s money.

My TV was considered a portable because it had a suitcase handle on top but it weighed at least 35/40 lbs. My family had TV with 3 channels (2 vhf and 1 UHF with terrible reception) from about 1952 on with an outside antenna that had to be manually rotated when the channels were changed.

Weird remembering that stuff.

As for dreams, I occasionally have a sense of vivid color in my dreams but usually they are without color or more accurately without any particular sense of color. I don’t think of it as dreaming in B&W, more like very subdued color.

Certainly it was faster, able to gather more detail in less time, a far better choice for candid shots. Kodachrome was beautiful but fussy. Slow, requiring a lot of light. Ektachrome, when it came along, was far better but the color was not as true or vivid as Kodachrome.

I guess my point is that in situations other than those completely controlled such as movie sets there was a lot to be said for B & W.

The original series Star Treks were all filmed in color but I never watched them when they were first broadcast. But when I see them now, I am always startled to see they are in color! I remember them as being B&W. I may have watched a few of them on B&W TVs when I worked overseas, but not all of them.

Your other remarks do make sense. I too have the special edition of Wizard of Oz and have also noticed the improvement in resolution and the color enhancements. But I still remember seeing the movie in B&W. I think I may be on to something.

In a possibly-related development, my dreams are always in vivid color. I understand most men dream in black and white.

“If you took all the girls I knew when I was single
brought them all together for one night
I know they’d never match my sweet imagination
Everything looks better in black and white.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtIA0BP-A7w

The Wizard of Oz was recorded on film in the expectation that the film copies would be run through a projector in a theatre. So, when the movie suddenly goes from monochrome to glorious colors, the projectors could be relied upon to keep on passing light through the film the same old way to produce the bright new colors.

TV came along, monochrome for the first couple of decades, and that was where I first saw the movie. I was informed later about the neat color thing, but until I eventually saw it in color on home video, I remembered a black and white movie.

Another technological factor that doesn’t get as much attention because it’s not as obvious is resolution. Up until this century, TV’s had terribly poor resolution, and that too affects your perception and memory of the content. Last year I bought a bluray of the digitally-remastered enhanced and blah blah blah version of Wizard, and I was astounded to see that the Scarecrow’s face was really a burlap bag instead of a brownish blob. I could see the fibers and the textures. And in every scene there were new details to explore. It took me hours to watch the film.

I’ve recently been streaming the old Mission: Impossible tv series. It aired starting in 1966, and so was produced for 525-line color TVs of the time. But luckily it was filmed, so that modern transfers can get full high-def resolution.

The fight scenes are a hoot: You can clearly see that they’re stunt doubles. They’re not even close. You first think “WTF were they thinking???”, but it’s not their fault. You’d never have noticed on those old TV sets. Sure the guy flying across the room in a blur with the dark hair is Marin Landau, because we just saw him in a continuity shot about to take one on the chin. But in bluray, it’s laughably obvious he’s not the one flying through the air.

So it goes. Mostly better.