You may have seen this before, but it's new to me and I thought it was funny. All the colors were chosen to show up well in B&W. TV lied to us!
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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If color film didn't exist at the time, how did they get that color photo?
Color pictures existed, but i assume projectors and tvs were still only able to display black and white
Which makes me wonder another thing, wasn't The wizard of Oz made in the 1930s? Lots of color in that movie. And the addams family was made in the 1950s or 1960s, right? Why no color if color tech available as demonstrated in wizard of Oz?
Color photography has existed since the late 1800s, and there were early color movie film processes basically for as long as movies existed. It's the quality and cost that eventually got to a point where movies in color became feasible. Color film came later, but you don't actually need it. Instead you can simply do take the same picture 3 times in B&W with a 3 different color filters (Red, Green, Blue) and then lay them over each other and you'll get a color image.
At the time, color TV was still pretty early. The NTSC standard for it was out for about a decade prior to the start of the show, and color TVs had been on sale for a while, but they were far more expensive than B&W (think about the price of early HD displays). So, for filming something like the Addams Family, you'd be tripling the filming cost for minimal gain, since you're trying to recreate the dark B&W look of the Addams Family comics anyways. There were also color TV shows at the time, but again, when most people were fine with B&W at this point, why bother with all the extra work and expense to mimic a desaturated and dark look when you can just do it in B&W?
I think they spent a lot of money on it in wizard of Oz (the characters outright reference the colour in the film) while TV shows were made cheap.
Money
Color film existed a lot earlier than most people think. It was just expensive and unreliable compared to black and white. Plus color TVs took a lot longer to adopt than adapt black and white broadcasts took to include color. The Wizard of Oz was a movie while The Adams Family was a show. They had different constraints.