REMEMBERING WHEN: First time ever seeing colour TV
By Keith Schell
It was November 1967. I was seven years old and in town after school one day for a little girl’s birthday party.
The birthday party was rolling along in the basement recreation room, with music, cake, punch, and assorted kids’ games like pin-the-tail on the donkey. A good time was being had by all.
When suddenly, I had to go to the bathroom.
Their bathroom was upstairs on the ground floor, so I went upstairs and found and used it. When I was finished, I had to go past their living room to get back downstairs.
But something I saw in their living room caught my attention and stopped me dead in my tracks:
THEIR FAMILY HAD A COLOUR TV!
I had never seen colour TV before in my entire young life! At that time, colour TV was still new-fangled technology and was still in the introductory stages to the consuming public. In relation to the average wage back then, new and emerging technologies like colour TV were incredibly expensive and still out of the range of affordability for most people of the time. We certainly couldn’t afford one. All we had at our house at the time was an old black and white TV that we bought second-hand from my Dad’s brother. And on top of that, us living out in the country so far, we only got one lonely channel (CBC) on that blurry old black and white TV.
Their colour TV was the most amazing thing I had ever seen in my young life! I was enthralled by the bright and vibrant colours displayed on the screen.
Furthermore, what was actually being shown on the TV screen at that particular moment was both puzzling and absolutely mesmerizing to me.
I watched in utter fascination as a couple of guys, one wearing a yellow shirt and the other with funny eyebrows and pointed ears and wearing a blue shirt, were using a little metal tube to talk to a giant blob of multi-coloured sparkling light.
Open-mouthed, I was riveted to the spot. What I saw on their TV that day in glorious colour was so amazing I couldn’t look away.
Eventually, I was called back downstairs to the birthday party. I practically had to tear myself away from what I was seeing on their TV to go back downstairs.
The party for that little girl was a nice time and we all had fun. Eventually my Dad came and picked me up from the party and took me home.
But what I had seen on their colour TV that day had made such a profound impression on me that I never forgot it.
Fast forward to 1974. After much pleading (mostly from me), that year we could finally afford to buy our very own colour TV! And in 1975 we got a TV tower with an aerial rotor that used a dial controller wired up inside the house to mechanically rotate the aerial so we could actually get three or four TV channels on a clear day! TV-wise, our family was finally coming into the 20th century.
One day, as I was happily exploring our little handful of new TV channels, I discovered that one of our new channels, CTV, was carrying a syndicated science fiction TV show at that time that I had never seen or even heard of before. It was on every weekday at 5 pm, and the name of this new show was ‘Star Trek.’
Once I started watching that show on our new colour TV, I was absolutely hooked! The sophisticated storylines, interesting characters, and the outstanding special effects for the time were absolutely mesmerizing. I instantly became a ‘Trekkie’ for life.
When I was watching Star Trek in 1975, the episode I was watching on one particular day suddenly seemed very familiar to me.
There, on the screen, were a couple of guys, one wearing a yellow shirt and the other with funny eyebrows and pointed ears and wearing a blue shirt. They were using a little metal tube to talk to a giant blob of multi-coloured sparkling light.
And then it suddenly hit me: This was what I had seen on the colour TV at that little girl’s birthday party back in 1967!
Unbeknownst to me at that time, I had been witness to a small part of television history at that little girl’s birthday party in 1967: I had seen part of the first run of the ninth episode ‘‘Metamorphosis” of the second season of a bold new science fiction television series back then called ‘Star Trek’.
(This was the episode where Kirk and Spock were trying to persuade a giant blob of light, female in nature and named ‘The Companion’ that she couldn’t love a human man named Zefram Cochrane who had been stranded on her little asteroid. I know how it sounds, but this was actually a classic ‘Star Trek’ love story!)
And as that Star Trek episode was being shown in our living room that day in 1975, in my mind, I was carried back to that little girl’s birthday party in 1967, absolutely fascinated by the dazzling colours and special effects unfolding on their TV screen and unable to tear myself away.
Over the many years since then, I have seen that one particular Star Trek episode numerous times and ‘the bloom is now off the rose,’ so to speak.
With a multitude of networks, hundreds of specialty channels and incredible CGI effects commonplace in almost every new video release nowadays, today’s kids couldn’t possibly understand just how amazing and ground-breaking the rudimentary special effects in the original ‘Star Trek’ series were on the emerging technology of colour TV back in the day.
But people of my generation will understand. And it was a joy to grow up in a simpler time when new and even more wondrous things than colour TV always seemed to be coming just around the corner!