I have been happily gathering information for my next post about black and white movies - this one about monster movies of the 50's. What a shock! Some of the movies I wanted to discuss, such as The Blob, were actually color movies. Was my memory so faulty?
No. It's because we had only black and white TV at 613 Parry St. until 1965. While the movies may have been in color, I saw them in black and white. So now I'm researching my list of movies to find out which were originally b+w and which color.
So who among you knows what the above graphic is and under what conditions would you have seen it?
3 comments:
Heh - not a clue!
TV test pattern used to calibrate the cameras in studio. Usually you would have seen something like this at the beginning or the end of the broadcast day. But that's just a guess.
Leave it to Sheila, the broadcasting major, to come up with the right answer. She's too young to remember when local TV stations didn't broadcast all night. After their last program, typically a B movie, they would play the Star-Spangled Banner and then show the test pattern. The test pattern was accompanied by a headache-producing tone, so you never wanted to wake up on the couch to that piercing sound.
I was never awake early enough to know if they showed it at the beginning of the broadcasting day.
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