Watching Black & White Movies/Shows

[REoL]

I don't know about you, but ever since I could remember, if I was watching a Black and White show, movie, or TV (We still had those things when I was a kid, mostly as secondary sets), I always, over a few minutes time, wind up mentally colorizing what I'm watching. Of course, it comes along faster if I know what the colors are, and I'm using a Black and White TV.
Do you perform mental colorization, or does everything stay grayscale?

[Nomad]

I don't really pay much attention. Black and white movies/television are more centered around plot and character development than visuals anyway.

[Doom_Dude]

I watch the show / film and don't do any color translations. Sounds pretty pointless.

[Mystic]

I agree with nomad and DD, I just watch and enjoy.

[FATAL]

Black and White creates a completely different atmosphere, allowing much more dramatic lighting, for example. Nope, no converting here, either.

[REoL]

Originally Posted by Doom_Dude

I watch the show / film and don't do any color translations. Sounds pretty pointless.

I think you misunderstand why I do it. It just happens. Like you, I'm watching for plot and action, the colorizing just happens without effort, or real thought. I catch myself doing it.
Funny thing is, most of the time, I find out I'm usually right about the colors, but not always.
Before I saw color photos of "The Honeymooners" set, I always thought the walls were a light gray, but were actually peach. Was right about all the other colors, except for Alice's hair (thought it was brown, it was a dark red).

To sum it up, it's a subconcious effort. Just happens.

[Nomad]

Maybe you just don't have the capacity to enjoy them for what they are. Too stuck on high definition. :P

[Aliotroph?]

I find I might mentally colourize half of it. For example, all the uniform colours in Star Trek stick in my head if I watch it in b/w. For most stuff it doesn't matter. If something I'm watching isn't in colour it's made that way and they took the look well into account.

As for those movies having more dramatic lighting, it's mostly true when compared to old colour stuff. That's because they technicolor process they used to use for colour film involved gluing together different overlays that had been through a three-way beam splitter in the camera. If the scene wasn't bright you didn't get much of a picture.

For me the lack of colours usually never sticks out. What I notice is all the implausible stage lighting on TV. It's like a badly-lit game map.

[Giftmacher]

What's a black and white movie?

[REoL]

Originally Posted by Nomad

Maybe you just don't have the capacity to enjoy them for what they are. Too stuck on high definition. :P

Since the '70's? How did you think of that, BEFORE YOU WERE BORN?! AMAZING!!!

Originally Posted by Aliotroph?

I find I might mentally colourize half of it. For example, all the uniform colours in Star Trek stick in my head if I watch it in b/w. For most stuff it doesn't matter. If something I'm watching isn't in colour it's made that way and they took the look well into account.

In more "recent" pictures, that can be true (from the mid '50's, onward), it's mostly what was available, or as somewhat said, just a bit too complicated in ways to bother with color.

Speaking of HD (Nomad), my Father was telling me back when he was a kid in the early '50's, the big thing was color TV, and people would stand at department store windows, just to watch anything that happens to be in color. Kind of how things were several years ago when HD was coming about in the marketplace.
He also told me there used tro be these fake "color TV converter kits", which was a plastic overlay you'd put over black and white TV's. They had a green stripe on the bottom, and a blue strip on the top, clear in the middle. Cheap color TV!
In actuality, that's how color was first done on arcade games, albeit using celophane overlays. A lot of games faking colors this way used to have the CRTs in dark boxes you'd have to look into to see the picture, and to hide the overlays. Space Invaders used a 2-way mirror with a moon/space backlit scene behind the mirror, and reflects the CRT from below, again, hiding the CRT to hide the overlay visability. Wasn't done so well there. Some tank sim game, and a Tron game, did it well (the dark box method).

[Nomad]

Originally Posted by REoL

Since the '70's? How did you think of that, BEFORE YOU WERE BORN?! AMAZING!!!

You were born to masturbate to HD.

[Doom_Dude]

Originally Posted by REoL

I think you misunderstand why I do it. It just happens. Like you, I'm watching for plot and action, the colorizing just happens without effort, or real thought. I catch myself doing it.

Oh ok. I thought it might just be one of your REoL hobbies.

[ace]

My brain automagically colorizes stuff too, though almost moreso in retrospect--that is, memories of the black and white movie/show sometimes end up in color. I wouldn't say it "makes things more interesting," though. It's entirely involuntary.

Hard to describe such phenomena.

[Nomad]

I remember hearing some theory a while back that we all dream in black and white, and we "recolor" our dreams during retrospect.

Which, I do not believe. I have had dreams that were focused on a certain color before.

[Aliotroph?]

I saw in one of those "science" books for kids that most people dream in b/w and some dream in colour. I remember most of my dreams and they're all in vibrant colour, often far more saturated and intense than real environments. One of my friends admitted he had a colour dream "once" so maybe there' some truth to all that.

I can't imagine a fake colorizing overlay looking any good on a TV except for the most static displays.

The "tank sim" REoL is thinking of is Battlezone. It doesn't use a regular CRT, though. It has one of those vector displays where the software drives the electron gun to draw on the screen (like an oscilloscope). Effective resolution would be something like 1024x768 with no video memory, but with nasty flicker if it drew too many things per frame. Atari's faulty software led to the premature death of most of those machines so they're hard to find. IIRC, the HUD at the top of the screen was red on the overlay and the rest was green.

It's interesting to watch the difference in shows where they did some episodes in b/w and later ones in colour (Lost in Space comes to mind). Or even better, the first pilot of Star Trek, "The Cage," had a colour and b/w print. They thought for years the colour one was gone so they stitched remaining colour footage into the b/w version for a video release. It's neat to see the differences in appearance as the scenes switch into colour and then switch back. If you look it up on the net you'll mostly likely find only colour clips. They ended up finding a colour copy at some point in the 90s I think.

[Doom_Dude]

Originally Posted by Nomad

I remember hearing some theory a while back that we all dream in black and white, and we "recolor" our dreams during retrospect.

Which, I do not believe. I have had dreams that were focused on a certain color before.

I don't believe that either. I don't see any reason why we would dream in black and white... that makes no sense to me. Maybe some people do but I highly doubt its the norm.

It's weird when they colorize an old black and white movie and its quite obvious they did that...

[Aliotroph?]

Yeah, because the whole scene is in two colours.

[Doom_Dude]

It looks they faked it too much and guessed half the colors wrong.

[REoL]

Originally Posted by Aliotroph?

I saw in one of those "science" books for kids that most people dream in b/w and some dream in colour. I remember most of my dreams and they're all in vibrant colour, often far more saturated and intense than real environments. One of my friends admitted he had a colour dream "once" so maybe there' some truth to all that.

I don't remember any in B&W, all were in color. the wirdest being any small tunnels, usually wound up being multicolored moving streaks and blobs, like trying to make a very bad Woodstock music video, without the music. Sometimes Pink Floyd music is in the background. Weird.

I can't imagine a fake colorizing overlay looking any good on a TV except for the most static displays.

I aggree, but in the '50's, that was a big thing. The Honeymooners took place in an apartment, with a blue sky, and green floors.

The "tank sim" REoL is thinking of is Battlezone.

THAT was it! Thanks!

It doesn't use a regular CRT, though. It has one of those vector displays where the software drives the electron gun to draw on the screen (like an oscilloscope). Effective resolution would be something like 1024x768 with no video memory, but with nasty flicker if it drew too many things per frame. Atari's faulty software led to the premature death of most of those machines so they're hard to find. IIRC, the HUD at the top of the screen was red on the overlay and the rest was green.

Star Wars was one game like this, but it was capable of color (eight, incliding black). There were lots of others, too, like Asteroids.

It's interesting to watch the difference in shows where they did some episodes in b/w and later ones in colour (Lost in Space comes to mind). Or even better, the first pilot of Star Trek, "The Cage," had a colour and b/w print.

Gilligan's Island was one show in B&W, ultimately shown in color. There's a few others, but I can't think of any, besides "I Dream of Jeanie." (????)

They thought for years the colour one was gone so they stitched remaining colour footage into the b/w version for a video release. It's neat to see the differences in appearance as the scenes switch into colour and then switch back. If you look it up on the net you'll mostly likely find only colour clips. They ended up finding a colour copy at some point in the 90s I think.

At least the preservation is there. Less use, more intact.

[Aliotroph?]

I'm sure the only use that happens now is digital copies. I wonder if they did a remaster with new special effects like the rest of the series. I should look. I found those remastered ones to be weird.

You forgot Tempest and Red Baron in your list of games. I think we're missing quite a few. There was one about shooting the shields off this central thing. Or maybe that was just a Vectrex game. I forget. Hehe, the Vectrex came with overlays too, as did this.

As for dreams, I remember two b/w nightmares from when I was about 4. One was being stuck in a room with my mom and all she had to defend us against a monster was her purse. Another was about falling down an elevator into a sewer. I always figured the b/w was for the scariness and dramatic lighting. Both those dreams looked like cheap horror movies.