Still Driving a Model T?

The TV world was as filled with color as a forest in autumn. NBC showed a satisfying colorcast of the opera Carmen to hundreds of invited guests in Manhattan, and last week followed it with the first closed-circuit broadcast from New York to Hollywood, where a group of moviemen were unhappily impressed by the vivid picture and surprisingly fine texture of color TV. Dragnet began shooting its films in color, and Bob Hope issued a casting call for the "most colorgenic girls in America" to appear on his first color TV show. Industrial designers Lippincott & Margulies moved into the act by quickly telling sponsors how to pretty up their packages for color TV. Some tips: soft pastels, varicolored containers and copy-filled labels offer little eye interest; instead, sponsors should use two-tone or brightly contrasting colors with clean-cut and simple printing.

But not everyone was cheering in the streets. In Oklahoma City TV dealers held a mass meeting to protest the boast of station WKY-TV that it would be the first U.S. station, outside the networks, to carry color TV. The dealers complained that WKY's advertisement was misleading and would slow down the purchases of black & white TV sets. In Manhattan J. M. Smith, vice president of the Davega chain, admitted that business was generally slow and said that front-page stories about color TV had "helped kick it downstairs." Most TV manufacturers maintained a discreet and presumably busy silence, but the Magnavox Co. bought full-page ads in magazines and newspapers which asked: "Are You Waiting for Color Television?'' The copy of the ad went into a heavy reverse sell: "If you are the man who is driving an expensive foreign car and your wife owns a platinum mink . . . you will want to be the first in your set to own color television." Warning that color TV sets cannot be expected until the end of 1954, that they will have small screens and that they will cost "in the $1,000 class," Magnavox urged its readers not to sit around waiting for color because "you may find yourself in the position of the man driving a model T, awaiting the revolutionary improvement in automobiles."

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