Color Coded

My generation are the television cusp kids. The biggest changes and developments in television viewing have happened in our lifetime. Think about it: we went from three channels and endless hours of shouting out the window to direct our dads which way to turn the antennae, to a million channels and endless hours of watching anything we want on our kids’ XBox 360. Although the biggest leap was the one from grey-scale to color. Remember? When we were really young, most programs were still taped in black and white, which worked very nicely because no one had color sets anyway. But then things changed drastically. If you were lucky enough to have a color television, turning on the set was like Dorothy stepping into Oz. The networks scrambled to best the competition with their prismatic line-up. Programs even boasted of their technicolor triumphs in the opening credits. And the one I remember most is the bold banner proclaiming “In Living Color” across the bottom of the screen when “Batman” came on. Not having a color set, and not realizing it was the box rather than the broadcast that determined what I saw, I would feel my heart race each time the words unfurled. Only to be disappointed, of course, when what appeared were still black-and-white images. I rejoiced when the new television showed up and never took a single, vivid POW! for granted. In Ellen Stoll Walsh’s Mouse Paint, some mischievous rodents color-rock their monochromatic world. Now that’s living color.

http://www.amazon.com/Mouse-Paint-Ellen-Stoll-Walsh/dp/0152002650

http://www.teddarnoldbooks.com/ellen.html