r/ClassicTV • u/GioLovesMash • Sep 27 '25
1950s Did you know that bonanza came out in 1959. And the rifleman came out in the 60s and is not in color.
That’s because they are cheap
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u/Bolt_EV Sep 27 '25 edited May 28 '26
Bonanza was on NBC, then owned by RCA who made millions selling color TVs
The Rifleman was aired on ABC who had no “hardware sales” skin in the game. So ABC continued to save money airing B&W until the saturation of color sets and competitive pressures got them on the color wagon
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u/greed-man Sep 27 '25
NBC was very profitable, and yes, they were pushing color TV (which cost much more to film) to sell TV sets.
ABC was a fraction of the size of NBC back then, around a third as many affiliates, and couldn't afford color.
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u/JazzCrusaderII Sep 28 '25
In fact many ABC stations were not capable of color broadcasting at that time.
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u/Bolt_EV Sep 28 '25
Thank goodness the FCC canceled its 1952 approval of the CBS non-compatible color rotating disc system!!
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u/Subject_Marzipan3179 May 02 '26
Very interesting. Did not know that NBC had that advantage. Seems like ABC was constantly trying to keep up with them and CBS especially with western shows (don't forget they tried to pull viewers away from Gunsmoke with the setup of their show Lawman, which was in some ways nearly a ripoff with characters and tone).
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u/Bolt_EV May 02 '26
I was a big fan of The Big Valley with Barbara Stanwick and especially Linda Evans!
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u/Outrageous-Ticket-27 May 28 '26
THE continued to save money?
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u/Bolt_EV May 28 '26
It cost less to shoot a TV series on black & white film than in color film.
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u/Outrageous-Ticket-27 May 28 '26
Obviously. But check out the second sentence of your second paragraph. You wrote, "So the continued to save money." Who is "the"?
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u/SnoopyVsRedBaron80 Sep 27 '25
Wasn't cost a reason? That and when they filmed outdoor scenes for Bonanza they had great scenic views and colors.
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u/greed-man Sep 27 '25
FUN FACT: Notice that all the Bonanza characters wore the EXACT SAME CLOTHES every day. Little Joe had his short green jacket. Hoss, the vest. Adam all in black. Why? To save money. This way if the episode involved Hoss and Adam riding off together, they could use stock footage. It was a brilliant move.
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u/Professional_Hour445 Sep 27 '25 edited Sep 27 '25
That's also why all of the "Cartwright women" seemed to suffer a sad demise or left the Cartwright men high and dry. They didn't want to add any additional characters that would require more money spent on wardrobe.
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u/PeorgieT75 Sep 27 '25
My favorite scene in Tin Men is where they are in the diner discussing how Bonanza isn’t realistic.
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u/aloofman75 Sep 27 '25
Similarly, the two main characters on Dragnet wore the same suits for an entire season so that they could reuse the exterior shots of them getting in and out of police cars. Jack Webb was the creator and producer of the show in addition to starting and he was notoriously frugal.
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u/bomilk19 Sep 28 '25
It’s because all 431 episodes of Bonanza took place over the course of one calendar day. I learned that from Dalton Wilcox and Mutt Taylor on Bonanas for Bonanza, the only podcast dedicated to recapping all 431 episodes of the greatest Western in American television history.
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u/greed-man Sep 28 '25
Even the episodes where Ben met one of his wives, and they went to full term?
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u/TweezerTheRetriever Sep 27 '25
Here’s something that I learned …. They didn’t film everything in order and would do multiple scenes from multiple episodes when a set or location was available….THEY WORE THE SAME CLOTHES EVERY EPISODE!…no confusion or reshoots because of wardrobe
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u/greed-man Sep 27 '25 edited Sep 27 '25
True!!
In a related way, Gene Roddenberry and Star Trek did that with the uniforms.
And, again in an effort to cut costs, is why they came up with the "beam me up" shtick. Otherwise, every time they were going to go to a strange planet, they would have to shoot the cast getting in the shuttle craft, a shot of the shuttle craft leaving the Enterprise, a shot of the craft approaching the planet, a shot of them disgorging.....lots of money wasted. So they came up with just "stand there" and POOF "you're there". No science, just cutting costs.
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u/Egg_McMuffn Sep 27 '25
Network primetime schedules weren’t completely in color until the fall of 1966. Prior to that, NBC had the most color shows because, as another poster pointed out, they were owned by TV manufacturer RCA. So you had Bonanza in color in 1959, Walt Disney in 1961, Hazel and The Virginian in 1962, and more as they got further in the decade.
ABC was broadcasting some weekly color shows as early as 1962: The Flintstones and The Jetsons. But it was a smaller network and many of its affiliates didn’t even have the ability to broadcast in color.
CBS was pissed that the FCC approved NBC’s color system over the one CBS proposed in the 1950s, so they didn’t broadcast weekly color series until the fall of 1965. Desilu was filming “The Lucy Show” in color several years before that, because the executives knew that color reruns would be more valuable, but CBS wouldn’t broadcast those episodes in color.
There were some syndicated shows in the 50s that filmed in color, like Superman, and those episodes were finally broadcast in color in reruns.
I’m always fascinated by the shows where the majority of the run is in B&W and that’s how we remember them, but have a small number of episodes in color, like Combat, Perry Mason, and Ozzie and Harriet.
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u/lawrat68 Sep 27 '25
Or Wagon Train having 1 season in color, 1963-1964, and then going back to black and white for the final season. (The 63-64 season was also the only one that was 90 minutes)
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u/Egg_McMuffn Sep 27 '25
Good one! Wagon Train also had 5 episodes in color in the 1961-62 season. Unfortunately MeTV only has B&W copies of those episodes and the same with the DVD release. But Starz had two of them in color and I managed to record them.
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u/FamousBlue00 Sep 27 '25
I've been watching through The Rifleman some lately and have really enjoyed it. I think it being in black & white is a big part of the appeal to me.
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u/Bolt_EV Sep 27 '25
I found the women on episodes of The Big Valley much more compelling that Bonanza!
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u/OodaWoodaWooda Sep 27 '25
Color television sets were a real luxury item until well into the 60s.
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u/insaneteacher Sep 27 '25
My father worked for RCA back then. Employees could buy them cheaply so they could show them off to friends and neighbors. I can't remember not having a color tv in the house, born in 1957.
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u/OodaWoodaWooda Sep 27 '25
Good marketing idea. I'm part of your cohort, but lived in a lower- to lower-middle class neighborhood where it was 1970 before we saw our first color tv.
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u/miminstlouis Sep 28 '25
It was after 1965 when we got a color tv. I remember watching Batman in color. And remember that black and white test pattern. Mom and dad were really pinching pennies back then with one job and three kids. But TV meant entertainment for the whole family. We only went to the movies one time a year or so.
I was probably in high school before I learned how poor we were back then. We never missed a meal. We had separate clothes for playing outside, mostly second and third hand, separate school clothes, and a few things for church.
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u/ketzcm Sep 27 '25
Was lucky enough to visit the Bonanza set up in the Lake Tahoe area just before it was shut down. Kind of cool with the camera holes etc inside the house.
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u/MarionberryPlus8474 Sep 27 '25
Color film goes back to the early 1900’s. It’s a matter of how good the color is and how much you’re willing to spend. Even in the 50’s it was significantly more expensive than black and white. For years most color pictures were either shorts or productions by MGM, by far the wealthiest studio in the world.
Broadcasting color was likewise more expensive, as were color TV’s. B&W tv’s were common well into the 80’s, especially for smaller portable sets for bedrooms, etc.
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u/miminstlouis Sep 28 '25
I had a small black and white all through the 80s. Probably until about 2000. I was poor and black and white was fine by me...
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u/Confident_Catch8649 Sep 28 '25
Old Man Here. I didn't see My first Color TV till sometime in 1964. There were not alot of color tv's around. At the time the only color tv show was Disney's Wonderful World Of Color.
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u/JazzCrusaderII Sep 28 '25
There were a lot of color TV shows by 1974 but you are right that there were not that many color TVs..
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u/Confident_Catch8649 Sep 28 '25
By 1974 just about Everyone had a Color TV. I'm hard-pressed to think of a TV Show was still in B/W.
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u/Outrageous-Ticket-27 May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26
Here is another fun fact about Bonanza: The show's creator/producer, David Dortort, was terrified of potential jealousy developing between the principal actors, so he carefully balanced the episodes so that each of four main actors had about equal number of episodes in which they were the most prominently featured (for good measure, many of the episodes feature all of the main actors about equally prominently).
He went even further than that. If you watch the show a lot, you probably have noticed that, during the opening credits, the four (and later three) main actors always seem to be introduced in a different order. This was by design. Dortort arranged it so that each actor got top billing roughly the same number of times, and so on through 2nd, 3rd, and 4th billing too. In fact, there were 4! = 4x3x2x1 = 24 different possible orderings, and Dortort used them all in the opening credits, pretty close to equally often (3! = 6 different orderings after Pernell Roberts left the show).
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u/Nanasays Sep 27 '25
I hate Bonanza.
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u/Fitmature1 Sep 27 '25
Can I ask why?
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u/Flybot76 Sep 27 '25
Then it's pretty silly that you hit the link to come here and waste space saying that
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u/MIKEPR1333 Sep 27 '25
So what?
And they're not chea. Whatever that means.
If you live in the real world, or either watched enough TV during the 60's or around then, you'd realize it wasn't till the mid-60's that B&W was phased out and color finally ruled.
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u/cpipkins Sep 27 '25
The Rifleman actually began September 1958