What are your favorite black & white shows?
The Honeymooners is my longstanding favorite. The Twilight Zone is another. Throughout my youth, WPIX would run 24 hour marathons of these two shows. I usually watched the whole thing.
I've recently started watching The Colgate Comedy Hour, which is amazing. I never knew Jerry Lewis was such a warm and respectable guy, or that he could be so funny. And he has a huge range beyond the "froin-LAVIN" schtick for which he is most famous. On top of that, the dance numbers are really spectacular, and that's coming from a guy who doesn't like all dance generally. Some of the genius also must come from Norman Lear--this was one of his early writing gigs.
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Forum » Retro T.V. & Movies » black & white TV
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Most likely I would say The Andy Griffith Show, Twilight Zone, and The Munsters.
EDIT: Also, Bewitched (which was black and white in the beginning of it's run.) You love this signature.
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Andy Griffith Show.
I Love Lucy and Leave it to Beaver are fun shows too. "Magic can happen to you."
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Mister Ed. I love that show.
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I can't say I have watched that many but "The Addams Family" must be my favorite.
The game doesn't start until you say YES.
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It seems a spambot bumped this thread, but I want to contribute my own answers anyways. Some of my favorite shows had black-and-white episodes in their early seasons, including Gilligan's Island, Bewitched, and I Dream of Jeannie. Besides those, I also enjoy The Munsters and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
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Alfred Hitchcock Presents was an anthology show with several stories. It had the famous Hitchcock silhouette and music Gounod - Funeral March of a Marionette and the line of, "Good Evening" with Hitchcock narrating. One I remember vividly watching as a kid while eating Domino's Pizza delivered with glass coke bottles was about an attempted prison escape where the inmate arranges with the prison undertaker to sneak into a coffin with the corpse and be buried in the prison cemetery outside the prison walls and then be dug up by the undertaker. All was going well and they managed to get into the coffin undetected and buried and while waiting to be dug up went through a range of emotions wondering what was taking so long and if they had been double crossed they turned to see who was dead they were lying with and it was the undertaker that was supposed to dig them up! Many of the stories were redone over the years as the show changed to The Alfred Hitchcock Hour with twice as long episodes and later Alfred Hitchcock Presents redone in color in 1985. Robert Redford was in an episode.
Boris Karloff's Thriller, that's right the original Frankenstein's monster narrated and sometimes starred in these macabre little tales of dread. Check it out you will be amazed at all the celebrity faces you recognize like William Shatner, Mary Tyler Moore, Dick York, etc. One of my favorites is called the The Devil's Ticket where a guy bamboozles the devil and wins his soul. He made a deal with the Devil to be the best artist but he had to agree to paint a self portrait. The catch is that each portrait he does has a piece of the soul of the person and that is why they are so life like and a perfect likeness. He can trade the soul of another in the form of a painting in exchange for his own soul that has been pawned to the devil. Twilight Zone Rod Serling's classic parade of the bizarre and strange Have Gun Will Travel was a western about a mercenary gunfighter called Paladin. If you have ever wondered what the song the four boys are singing in the movie Stand By Me, it is the theme song from this show. He had a chess knight on his holster and saved the day getting the bad guys while getting paid. and The Munsters |
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Early Doctor Who. The first two Doctors were in black and white.
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My family got our first color television in 1966. Until then every show I saw was in glorious black & white. Many of the shows from my childhood would look strange to me in color.
Like, "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis": |
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The Outer Limits
A collection of sci-fi tales and alien encounters, the Outer Limits is a second-rate Twilight Zone but that is in many ways more of a compliment than anything else. |
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echidna64 wrote : Right on the money echidna64. It wasn't until the 1970's that I found out what close friends Rod Serling and Joe Stefano had been for many years. But it goes waay beyond the two men. Joseph Stefano as the executive producer of Daystar Productions, ( Daystar was headquartered in the family kitchen, lol ), could call as friends a who's who of talent from movies, broadway, and television. Joe's connections inside MGM was amazing and he would often trade favors with the boys in the props department to spice up the Outer Limits visuals! Daystar Productions was a miracle factory. With only a few dollars available per episode, Joe Stefano and his crew put together some of the best television since the "Twilight Zone". The original "Outer Limits" was a shoestring operation - yet each episode was a masterwork of writers and actors bringing each story to life. Take the story of Mr. Lomax. Mr. Lomax is an alien, in human form, sent as part of an advance evasion squad from an unnamed alien planet. Once the alien advance force team has set in place hundreds of O.B.I.T. electronic surveillance machines, the stage has been set for us humans to bring our downfall upon ourselves - the aliens won't need to fire a single shot. |