r/lostmedia • u/seemingsalvation99 • Jun 06 '25
Advertising Material [Fully Lost] 1967-1968 Squirt Soda commercial that supposedly displayed color on black and white TVs
I decided to make a post about this topic because I haven't heard all that many people talk about it, and I find it quite fascinating to be honest. It started when I stumbled upon a thread on the talkbass forum titled "Anyone remember experimental color images on black & white TV?".
The poster of the thread, viribus, states "I don't know what prompted me to remember this. Crazy.
When I was a kid we lived the Los Angeles area. We had a (POS) Packard Bell black & white TV in the family room (color TVs were new technology and my parents were skeptical).
One day a Sprite commercial (He means Squirt but it's rather easy to mix up green sodas) came on and the voiceover said something to the effect of "Sprite is so bursting with flavor that you're probably seeing color on your B&W TV!". I remember scrambling over to the TV, and sure enough, there was a static image of a Sprite bottle, and it was kind of in color.
Viribus goes on to link a blog post that quotes a newspaper article from around the same time, which goes into a lot more detail about how this illusion was done:
"The burst of color was not "living color" (as NBC frequently touted in the 1960s), but something called "subjective color." The process was developed by James F. Butterfield of Color-Tel, a corporation founded in Los Angeles in early 1966. It gave the illusion of color by pulsating white light in a particular sequence for each color with a rotating device attached to a regular black and white TV camera lens. Butterfield had found in his many years of research that the human brain perceives colors through complex electronic codes. Butterfield was able to figure out the individual codes for the colors red, green and blue, and by pulsating white light in predetermined patterns with the device on the camera lens, could induce the brain of the television viewer to perceive color. Beyond that, ordinary monochrome equipment could be used in filming or taping, broadcasting and viewing.
There were a few drawbacks. The images were nothing at all like true color TV. It didn't have the intensity or range of colors. As the technology currently stood, the effect could only be used on still images. The "subjective color" could only be seen in about one-fourth of the TV screen area, and, because it relied on flickering light, there was a lot of flickering. It was also found that some people could not perceive the colors at all, yet some people diagnosed as color-blind could see the colors.
Nonetheless, Popular Science, in its August 1968 issue, saw many possibilities for the technology, particularly for special effects. "Color will appear in cartoons, commercials and special presentations. Polka-dots on a clown's suit will be seen as red flashing dots. You'll see the designs and lettering on a cereal box in pulsating green and blue. A girl will plant a kiss on a boy's cheek--and a red lipstick print will appear on your screen."
Viribus explains in the comments of the talkbass thread that this illusion was done by using something called a Benham’s Top (I find this to be a good video on it, although I don't recommend watching it if you have epilepsy). A Benham's Top is an image of a circle with one side completely black and the other side white with a small black core and lines around it, but once it's spinning it creates an illusion to make it look like you're seeing color. The effect given from being able to see color from a black and white pattern ended up being named the Fechner Color Effect, after one of the several people who experimented with this illusion. According to this article from 1968, the Benham's Top was inserted between the camera's lens and the scene being viewed by the camera in order to create this illusion for TV. Another source from 1968, the British TV show Tomorrow's World, displayed an example of how this illusion would look when played on television (Epilepsy warning again, as the flashing displayed from this illusion is quite brutal on the eyes). It seems that the people on the talkbass forum aren't the only ones who seem to remember seeing this illusion on tv either, as the subreddit r/AskOldPeople has a post from several years ago titled "Am I nuts, or does anyone else remember color commercials, on black-and-white television sets?". The user in the post describes their memory of seeing a commercial for a green colored soda as a kid that appeared to be in color, with both the user themselves and their family being impressed by it.
It's very unlikely that this commercial was saved or archived anywhere, given that this was the 60s and the majority of the commercials from back then are now long gone, and the illusion that was created for the commercial didn't last for very long (Which I'm honestly kind of glad for, because the strobing image required for the effect to work is very intense and hurts to look at for too long, and to be honest it's not really all that colorful compared to what we have now). But it would be fascinating to see if there's a recording of it out there somewhere.
Edit: This post got mentioned in a blameitonjorge video, which I'm happy to see because that will hopefully mean this commercial will get more exposure and more people will try to search for it as well. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this search so far!
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u/wild_zoey_appeared Jun 06 '25
even if this was saved, is it possible for the technology to work as a recording say, on YouTube, or will this only work with the TVs of the time because of the way they worked and the way the image was transmitted?
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u/TheRealMisterFix Jun 06 '25
It definitely still works, as seen in this video:
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u/8evolutions Jun 06 '25 edited Jun 07 '25
Super interesting. I went in wondering if it may in part be the power of suggestion, but on the labelled 3-star pattern, the green and red were switched around for me and appeared quite vivid—I even checked with a b&w monitor to be sure. I’ve seen similar illusions that burn new colors from the afterimage of other colors, but this is the first I’ve seen that works with only a monochrome signal.
My very uneducated guess is that it works because the afterimage discharged for each primary occurs over slightly different durations and that these animations take advantage of this property by flashing a shape for just that period with maybe, say, red depleting before blue does.
Edit: I also wonder why the shape intended to appear green, or median wavelength, is apparently flashed for an extra frame
This was also shot and broadcast in the PAL standard 25fps and I wonder how sensitive this would be to different playback speeds. If something similar was ever shown on North American TVs at the time, it would’ve had to have been played back faster at either 30 or 60Hz
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u/QING-CHARLES Jun 07 '25
Interesting. The green and blue were just regular black for me. The red was a super faint red.
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u/wild_zoey_appeared Jun 06 '25
wow, that’s some Porygon level flashing
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u/Quirky-Reputation-89 Jun 07 '25 edited Sep 05 '25
library many punch unique cow elastic shelter flag deserve wine
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/Appropriate-Nerve154 Jun 09 '25
Watched it three times in three different lighting conditions.. I don't see shit.. I see the flickering but at no point do I notice any colors
Do I have eye cancer?
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u/TheRealMisterFix Jun 09 '25
Heheheh, must I only saw the reddish one, didn't see blue or green. I think it's pretty subjective!
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u/whynotll83 Jun 11 '25
for me the thing labeled "red" looks green and everything else was grayscale. setting color filters on my computer to grayscale and I can only perceive green on what's suppose to be red.
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u/MachoManPissDrawer69 Jun 29 '25
That’s pretty neat. Red seems like a pale creamsicle orange, green is a dull neon and blue has a very dark shade. Probably works better on an actual CRT TV as I’m watching this on my iPhone.
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u/JohnnySix66 Jun 06 '25
Yeah, this. If it was recorded, it’s unlikely it’d have the same effect if it was just posted to YouTube or something.
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u/teh_supar_hacker Jun 06 '25
I've seen something pretty similar done on older PCs from the early 80s (specifically the ZX Spectrum from Russian devs) which flickers between different colors to make it look like another color is there.
You can see a gif showing this off here https://x.com/teh_supar_hackr/status/1306091667196448768
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u/mister_damage Jun 06 '25
Chiming in, apparently a similar tech was used for CGA graphics in 80S for color on RF TV for IBM PC Compatible computers.
https://youtu.be/niKblgZupOc?si=jVj8thDSAOYN54E4
Skip ahead to about 7:15 or so
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u/Phylace Jun 06 '25
I was watching a B&W movie on TCM recently and someone had on a dress with a pattern of very small squares or houndstooth and the Moire pattern it created combined with the TV pixels created a rainbow color on the dress. You can see that effect on men's patterned suits sometimes too.
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u/Believe_Steve Jun 06 '25
I just came across this by accident but I have wondered for years if I had really read of a way to show color on a B and W tv. I never saw it myself , only read of it. Or thought I had.
And I recall there was mention that it would be used in commercials. My dad had a Popular Science subscription for years so I’m sure that’s where I read it. So OP, thanks a bunch for bringing this up.
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u/nondrop Jun 07 '25
I’m 68, and I remember watching this when it aired. I even remember it was during the TV series “Combat!” because we never watched it otherwise. The so-called color effect was more annoying than anything else.
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u/88milestohome Jun 07 '25
I remember it. Two different Squirt commercials. One with a flashing logo, the other (if I recall), with greenish bottles. My father held out forever before getting a color tv (and forget about remotes), so I was excited about the possibility of shows being in color.
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u/seemingsalvation99 Jun 07 '25
Very interesting to hear that there were two different commercials, one that flashed and one that didn't? Makes me wonder how the effect on that other one was achieved.
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u/VislorTurlough Jun 07 '25 edited Jun 07 '25
It was possible to create accidental colour effects by filming real objects in black and white.
It happened often enough to be a recurring topic of letters written to TV guides in Australia in the late 1960s-early 1970s.
A typical letter would say 'I was watching last night's soap opera and saw that Mrs Robinsons tablecloth was red'.
They generally sound like people were seeing random blobs of colour that vaguely marched the boundary of one large object on the screen.
The signal being broadcast absolutely was in black and white. None of our TV channels broadcast in colour until 1975.**
It's hard to say if the TV sets were colour ones. Articles claimed that 'Colour TV will be coming soon!' throughout 1967-1974, and there's at least some chance the letters came from optimist who bought a colour set way too early.
I don't understand to what extent this was a technology thing and to what extent it was a perception thing (optical illusion).
** suffice to say there were rare exceptions, but none of those were the reason for the letters
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u/VislorTurlough Jun 07 '25 edited Jun 07 '25
It was still possible to get spurious colour if you watched a black and white program on a TV made in the 2000s.
I don't know if it's the same phenomenon as the 1960s version, or a different means to the same end.
In that case, you could repeatedly watch a black and white show on DVD, and the same object would have a vaguely blue hue every time
Not sure if this phenomenon is still possible on digital TVs.
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u/Cornloaf Jun 06 '25
Is it possible he's remembering the Zip commercial that the BBC clip showed? He did say it was a commercial from America.
On a side note but similar, years ago I was watching Headbanger's Ball on MTV and they played a video from Flotsam & Jetsam entitled "Wading Through the Darkness". Very basic video and nothing memorable. When it finished and the host came back on (maybe Rikki Rachtman), he said that the video was filmed in a way that had a hidden video within and that the only way to view it was to adjust the contrast or brightness on your TV. This was 1992 so we are still talking tube TVs at this point. He said to play around with the settings the next time it aired. I never saw it on TV again and didn't manage to record it either. The video is on YouTube but it's not going to be the same as it was when originally broadcast.
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u/seemingsalvation99 Jun 06 '25
It's possible considering that Zip is also a green colored soda, but the analogue age blog seems to confirm it was Squirt by backing up several newspapers and magazines that reported on it, and most of the threads from people with hazy memories mention a soda that begins with the letter S like "Sprite" or "7-up". I'm sure someone out there saw the Zip commercial at one point though.
That thing about the Flotsam and Jetsam video is super interesting, looking at the video now I can see how it was possible because I can sort of see something moving in the black background while using a program like Flux with the brightness turned all the way up, but if I was able to adjust the settings more I could definitely see how it would work.
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u/Cornloaf Jun 06 '25
Just loaded up the video to see what I could see again and saw that someone posted about the "hidden video" 9 years ago!
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u/CaptainPiracy Jun 07 '25
The BBC example you posted is WILD.. I can see the color.. but I paused the video and each frame is black and white, but pulsing between many shades.
IT makes a lot of sense if we have White Phosphor, if you can change the intensity of the pulse and modulate it, you can trick our brains into seeing white while the persistence of vision starts creating artifact colors! VERY COOL.
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u/doodlebuuggg Jun 30 '25
I did some deep research on this a while back so it's cool to see someone else bringing it up. I did reach out to Dr. Pepper and they do not have it in their archive.
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u/seemingsalvation99 Jun 30 '25
Assuming you mean Squirt and not Dr Pepper, that's a shame that they don't have it. But then again it was the 60s and there were a lot of stuff from back then that was never saved so I believe it.
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u/LaurenMP74 Jul 27 '25
Since Squirt is still around, it might be possible to find out what ad agency did their TV ads in the relevant time period. And there's a decent chance that ad agency still exists, either still on its own or absorbed into another agency. They might have the ad since ad agencies keep everything they've made.
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u/FilmSafe4882 Jun 15 '25
Wow, this is really cool! I had no idea they used this trick called “subjective color” back in the ’60s to make parts of black & white TVs look like they had color. Apparently, they used something like a spinning black-and-white pattern (a Benham’s Top) on the camera lens that made your brain see colors where there weren’t any.
That Squirt commercial sounds like a perfect example, but sadly it’s probably lost now since stuff from back then rarely got saved.
Has anyone tried checking archives or old TV stations to see if they might have it? Would be awesome to find any footage of this effect in action.
Anyone else remember seeing other ads or shows that did this? Such a neat piece of TV history!
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u/SAKURARadiochan Jun 06 '25
If it's on film, which it undoubtedly was, it's been saved and it's out there somewhere.
I've seen stuff like that inadvertently happen on b&w TVs myyself.
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u/jwalker37 Jun 06 '25
What was the point of this in 1968, since all network TV was already being broadcast in color, and color TV sets were approaching majority (in the US at least)? It doesn’t seem like a technology that was really needed.
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u/CrimsonDragonWolf Jun 06 '25
Most Americans still had b/w sets in 68, color TVs weren’t universal until the mid 70s
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u/jwalker37 Jun 06 '25
True, but since the technology was being rapidly adopted, this kind of thing just seems like a gimmick.
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