Mid-Sixties Transition to Color TV

When I was a child, my family always had a black and white television set. As a matter of fact, I didn't begin to regularly watch color television at home until the year 1986! So it was relatively later on in my life when I discovered a phenomenon that occurred on television in the mid-sixties: the transformation to color programming.

Some series, like The Honeymooners or The Twilight Zone, were all done in black and white. Such series ended their runs before 1964-1965, which seem to be the years of the general transformation to color regarding programming. So shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and the original Star Trek series, which started in 1964 and 1966 respectively, had all of their episodes in color. But there were many series that began in black and white and ended in color. And I noticed something curious about some of them.

When I think of classic television comedy series like The Beverly Hillbillies, Andy Griffith, and Bewitched, I almost always prefer the black and white period vastly over the color period. With Andy Griffith, the explanation is simple: coincidentally, the time of transition to color also marked the time when co-star Don Knotts, who played the crucial comic character of Barney Fife, left the series to try his hand at the movies. Neither The Beverly Hillbillies and Bewitched faced such an immediate change, though. But the quality of their shows suffered anyway. With The Beverly Hillbillies, more and more scripts were written with the idea of ridiculing the backwoods Clampetts (especially Jethro) instead of satirizing the pretentious high society of Beverly Hills, which was the original driving force behind the series' appeal. In Bewitched, I think something different happened: the plots became too predictable: Darrin would be with Samantha at the beginning of a show, Endora (the mother-in-law witch) would show up, Darrin would insult her, she would put a spell on Darrin, he would do "funny" things, and then the spell would be lifted at the end. So funny that I forgot to laugh.

Whenever I see one of these series on TV and it's in color, I instinctively switch the channel to something else. This phenomenon may have engendered a little anti-color-television prejudice on my part, as I still tend to look askance at the Rod Sterling-inspired color series Night Gallery and exalt his earlier black and white Twilight Zone. But Night Gallery has some pretty good episodes, and some of the Twilight Zone episodes are downright pathetic!