Color TV in the movies
 

Just for interest's sake, if you have a chance, take a view of The Sunny Side of the Street, made by Columbia in 1951, starring Frankie Laine. A good portion of the show supposedly takes place in the CBS television studios, where every set, large and small, plays in color. Obviously a big plug for the CBS system. Naturally, the sets are not CBS's mechanical field sequential sets, the images were all matted in film, but they were trying to sell the idea of color TV. You can catch the show on TCM or read about it on their site, www.tcm.com

They did the same thing to TVs in the movie "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?"

And also the livingroom TV owned by the Boyers in the movie "The Thrill of It All" though later on the set is used with a black and white picture at the advertising agency or soap company...

The 1951 Fox, Technicolor, feature "My Blue Heaven" also has many scenes that take place in a TV studio. While wide shots of a fictional variety show in production show RCA B&W cameras, all the TV studio monitor images are in color. This extends to shots of home receivers, and even a TV store with many sets on display show all of them displaying color images. These images were special effect insert color mattes.

I viewed the film on The Fox Movie Channel. Available on DVD.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/ima...6881510&sr=8-3

-Steve D.

I have a vague recollection of one of the Rock Hudson/Doris Day screwball comedies having a Roundie that was "on" & playing a color show...It was "matted" in, of course, but at least they went to the trouble of having a REAL color set...I was a Very Weird Kid, & noticed things like that...

Besides the discrepancy between 60 field/second video and 24 frame/sec film, there was the problem that the Technicolor process had an ASA speed rating of about 12 (it started at 5, and was improved over the years). No way a real color TV picture could survive the lighting levels needed on the set.

That would have be either the movies "Lover Come Back" or "Send Me No Flowers".

A third movie they did together "Pillow Talk" featured no Television Sets but lots of Telephones!

I was a weird kid too...

Here's a nutty one; from "Artists and Models" (1955), Jerry Lewis's character goes on a talk show as an example of what comic books do to people. Dino catches him on a "color tv" in a window display. So who can ID this nifty "color" set?

That's a strange arrangement for the controls - and none hidden

looks just like a b&w tv to me. is that not a magnavox logo on the set. steve

Of course it's a BW set! Look at the shape of the CRT. Just another Hollywood BS shot.
Kevin

How disappointing. Were real color sets really that scarce? I remember seeing this scene from that film many, many years ago, not realizing at the time it was a FRAUD.

Good call on the Magnavox logo. I agree the control panel layout looks a bit strange. A 24" B&W console?

-Steve D.

The control layout and knobs on that set also suggest Magnavox, early 1960s vintage. But a color picture on a b&w TV? This was several decades before TBS, WTBS, and Ted Turner's short-lived experiment with colorizing b&w TV shows, so a colorized program on that Magnavox is out of the question as well.

I wouldn't be surprised if the set being discussed here was in fact a 24" b&w console TV. There were 23" and 25" sets already, so Magnavox may well have stepped in and introduced a 24-inch set to fill in the gap.

Corina, Corina ctc 5
 

The movie Corina, Corina with Whoopy Goldberg and Ray Liotta uses a ctc 4 or 5 with black and white show playing

Wasn't there a Jerry Lewis movie where he worked in a tv repair shop?

That would be "It'$ Only Money" from 1962. Great scene early on where he is trying to install the biggest VHF antenna, Channel Master made on a house.

In his movie "Who's Minding the Store?" (1963) he works in a department store and goes into the TV section and all the TVs are Channel Master, at least the banner above them stated they were. As seen in other movies, all the TVs were mis-tuned...

I recorded a small portion of "Hook, Line & Stinker" once just to catch a scene where Jerry is watching a color TV. I only saw the back and couldn't tell for sure what it was, besides being a higher line console.

When was the last time anyone spotted a Channel Master TV set? Were they all imports?

Odds are that the TV set wasn't even turned on, and the image was pasted in in post-production. Movie film cameras operate at 24 frames a second, and that would cause a bad beat effect with a Tv set that was presenting an NTSC 60Hz image.

And it's likely that the people in post-production didn't even consider that it should have been black and white anyway, and with the sign proclaiming "Color TV" nobody was gonna argue.