Saturday, January 3, 2015

This Has Not Been a Filmways Presentation, Darling





That there is a sound of my childhood, RIP Donna Douglas. She was never a crush of mine no matter how many times CBS put her in a one-piece bathing suit down by the cement pond, but that This Has Been a Filmways Presentation evokes waves of nostalgia. I've written before about how much the toggle from black & white television to color television when I was six or seven affected my, for lack of a better word, psyche. I do know that to this day seeing the spectacle of a black & white Get Smart beats the spectacle of a color Get Smart regardless of the actual quality of the individual episode. Last week, flipping channels in middle of night when I couldn't sleep, I stumbled on a World War Two in Color. The particular episode covered the days of Nazi Germany's highwater, after the conquest of France, before the invasion of the USSR, showed Wehrmacht marches and wild civilian celebrations of conquest in primary colors, not countless blacks, greys, and whites. My internal footage of World War Two is in black & white with Laurence Olivier narrating. I changed the channel.

Below is Eva Gabor's. UPDATE! At first I condemned Eva's for being in color, my assumption that Donna Douglas' was in black and white my imagination. Fine metaphors abound.



7 comments:

  1. Never thought this would've been the piece of news you latched onto. For a kid growing up in the sticks of NC, the BH's were sort of role models—luring us into the great Hollywood capitalist vision of the US.

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    1. Believe me, if this had been 99 or Laura Petrie instead of Ellie Mae I'd be far more distraught.

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  2. I right there with you on the toggle between B&W and color. I've been trying to work it into a comic book story, but it hasn't made it into a draft yet.

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    1. I've had an incredibly difficult time writing about this (which only points out how significant to me it is). Still haven't got it right.

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  3. You make me wonder how the grups' insistence on having a b&w until my mid-teens affected my psyche.

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    1. I get the allusion, Miri.

      I remember seeing a color TV for the first time, it was in an aunt and uncles wainscotted family room, I was five or six, it was the Flintstones, I don't remember which episode except that Gazoo was in it. It seemed a miracle.

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    2. An episode with the Great Gazoo seems like an appropriate introduction.

      While I didn't get to see much of anything from my childhood in color, the shades made it seem almost so. Even the distinction between the crew's shirts, for example, made them seem blue or gray. Though that lent nary a hint as to who would be sacrificed; I had to go on which actor I'd never seen before.

      This will always be my fave, color or no:
      http://youtu.be/tKMC8NnD4e8

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