Pigments of the Imagination

For one vivid day last week, the NBC peacock was the cynosure of every eye-fluttering peahen from the Bronx Botanical Gardens to Los Angeles' Griffith Park. On show after show, NBC's symbol of color television appeared, while announcers crowed about the network's Color Day, every show a bottled rainbow. For once the soap operas were literally purple, and even Huntley and Brinkley gave hues of the news.

Five years old, commercial color TV seems at last to have established some sort of beachhead on the American economy, with a long way still to go. Since CBS has all but dropped its color programing, NBC has developed the field essentially alone, with its parent company RCA manufacturing all the color picture tubes sold in the U.S. Until recently, color was a loss leader for RCA, but in his year-end report last month Board Chairman General David Sarnoff cozily if vaguely mentioned color profits "in seven figures," and said that RCA color "has achieved the status of a more than $100 million-a-year business." Some 600,000 color sets are now in use, and last year alone roughly 100,000 were sold.

Tinted Tour. But how good is it? Attracted by the drumbeats for last week's Color Day, thousands of the colorless sought out friends with color sets and had a look for themselves. What they saw gave evidence that color can be very good indeed. It cannot be substituted for a literate script--even the muted, tastefully done sets of From These Roots could not disguise the detergent flavor. But, with its still faintly unrealistic air, color does enliven the pseudo-realism of daytime drama, and did so for the fourth Purex Special for Women, which soap-operatically explored the fate of the modern spinster. Color also lent visual interest to such ordinary dry items as News of the Day, which included the first fully tinted tour of President Kennedy's redecorated office.

Color is most useful to variety shows and musicals, as was demonstrated by Remember How Great, a melodious catchall in which everything from Juliet Prowse to the Hermes Pan Dancers looked like pigments of the imagination. It seems least important to panel shows (Concentration had a special technical block, with its enormous Scoreboard photographed in black and white so that viewers could read the pattern). But even in this category, color provided an occasional extra touch, such as the garishness of the goods displayed by The Price Is Right and the geriatric authenticity of a little old lady with blue-tinted hair on the otherwise tastelessly colored Truth or Consequences.

A Borscht Sky. NBC once trumpeted its color programing with the argument (in an ad) that in a world without color, "pea soup would look exactly like borscht, and can you imagine London enshrouded in a borscht fog?" As if carried away with the notion, the network presented Dave Garroway's Today show against something magenta that could only have been a borscht sky. And at the other end of Color Day, The Jack Paar Show--which is tinted nightly and which in more than three years has remained immensely entertaining--seemed much the same, on or off-color; the main added interest lies in Paar's multihued wardrobe and in seeing how well female guests have had their hair dyed.

The net result of Color Day was good. The reception in most areas is sufficiently sharp, and color television seems to have solved its early problems of green faces and mechanical acne, although focusing still requires patience. The big difficulty is still cost. The cheapest sets go for $495, and salesmen quietly but firmly recommend the $69.95-a-year repair policy, handsomely printed in black on white.

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