I love old movies, and watch as many as I can on TV when they show them on TCM or other classic film channels. Many of these films I’ve seen before, others I’m just getting around to watching for the first time.

Often, when I’m watching a film I’ve seen before, I’m surprised to see it broadcast in color. I very often recall it as having been in black and white when I saw it before. Now I know some old flicks have been colorized, but its an expensive process and usually reserved for classic, excellent old movies that deserve the treatment. For example, the original “A Christmas Carol” with Alastair Sim, has been colorized. But this is a rarely used process, most old B&W films remain panchromatic.

Also, I suppose I’ve seen some of these old films before on TV, a long time ago when color TV was still rare (yes, I’m old enough to remember that ancient time). Still, this doesn’t explain the large number of old films I’ve watched that surprise me when they are in color, because I only remember them in B&W. And it’s not just movies, sometimes I see re-runs of old TV shows that shock me because of their vivid color. I remember them in black and white.

Maybe this is just an idiosyncrasy on my part, but if other folks have also experienced this phenomenon, perhaps it is a clue as to how our memory works. Maybe we save storage space in our brain by keeping old video in monochrome, instead of full RGB. I know back when memory was expensive, we often used to store or transmit archival imagery as one-banded, gray-level data, so each pixel would fit in one 8 bit word, one byte per pixel instead of three.