How a duck, a Nazi and a themepark saved American color TV

My latest Guardian column, "Ducks, Nazis and Disney: well, that's one way to get a TV transition," tells the unlikely story of how a duck based on a rehabilitated Nazi rocket-scientist helped create the American color TV transition in the sixties:

There was one source of ready-made colour material that could have gone out over the airwaves: Hollywood had been shooting feature films and accompanying short subjects in colour for decades and had amassed a prodigious back-catalogue of material that might have jumpstarted the colour TV transition.

There was another problem, though: the studios hated TV, feared it, and would like to have seen it dead and dusted. It was the competition.

Until Walt Disney decided to build Disneyland, that is. The Walt Disney Company came through the second world war as a publicly listed firm, and Walt spent the next decade chafing against shareholder control and squabbling about spending with his brother Roy, the adult in their partnership. When Roy refused to open the company coffers to him for the $17m he needed to embark on a mad scheme called Disneyland, the company instead raised millions by opening their vaults to ABC, a broadcaster.

Ducks, Nazis and Disney: well, that's one way to get a TV transition

• [AnthonyC]

  From the link: “In it, Von Drake sits down at a piano keyboard whose keys have the “octave” of colour – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet (yes, it’s an octave with seven members!)”

  This upset me, since on the keyboard red appears twice. This is, in fact, quite correct given the musical analogy. CDEFGAB…C
  Do Rem Mi Fa Sol La Ti … Do

• [robcat2075]

  You misspelled the name in your article. It’s “von Drake” not “van Drake”.

  You’d have been more accurate to say “Coonskin caps, The Alamo, and Disney” since the Davey Crockett shows were way more significant for the success of the Disney color venture than Ludwig von Drake ever was. And probably a hundred other things.

• [Mike]

  There’s more to the transition story than that, however. The RCA color TV system was the second one to be approved by the FCC. An earlier color TV system had been designed and approved, but was not compatible with black and white sets at all. This system, naturally, didn’t get good adoptions from either consumers or broadcasters.

  The RCA system was also known as ‘compatible color.’ Backwards compatibility was key to the transition, as color TVs were relatively expensive, and didn’t become cheap until well into the ’70s. Our family saved up for a couple of years to get our color TV, we brought it home to watch the 1970 Miss America Pageant. Multiple TVs per household were still not common, either, but “portable” TVs (those without wooden cabinet) were starting to get a foothold. It was somewhat of a luxury to have multiple TVs, and only the wealthiest would have more than one color TV.

• [SomeGuy]

  OM @ 17

  My family was one of the first in our Chicago neighborhood to get a color tv in the early ’60s. (My dad won it for being top grossing salesman that year — he never would have spent $$ on such an extravagance). Besides the afore mentioned Disney and Bonanza among the most requested programs to be viewed in color was Flipper. I guess seeing Florida in all its verdant glory was a big deal to those Midwesterners.

• [_OM_]

  “NBC, not ABC isn’t it? Surely the peacock at the end gives it away a bit.”

  …Disney started the Disneyland TV series on ABC, who were so desperately in third place that they basically gave him any time slot he wanted even though it started off as a weekly infomercial for the Disneyland theme park. However, ABC’s affiliates had the lowest conversion rates towards the RCA NTSC color system, so in 1960 Walt told ABC either they kept up their end of the bargain and made sure that at least 50% of ABC’s affiliate stations started broadcasting network programs in color or he’d take his program to a network that would. At that time, that meant going to NBC because See-BS had…”issues” with the RCA system that would be best discussed on another thread. So in the fall of 1961, Disneyland moved to NBC as The Wonderful World of Color, and hand in hand with Bonanza helped sell about a hundred million more color TV sets than the industry expected in about half the time at that.

  Damn, makes me feel old when I remember discussing this with TV engineers over 40 years ago at just barely age 7…

• [Anonymous]

  Between the remote sensing and the cartography (mainly our study of colour usage) classes I’ve been taking, this is one of the most strangely interesting and thought-provoking videos I’ve seen in a long while.

• [Anonymous]

  Note that the movie segment has it quite wrong: if you made the “white” light out of red, green and blue, and if (somehow) you could get a decent prismatic effect out of a lens with no slit to constrain the light, what you’d get back out would be the red, green and blue you had to begin with, *not* a continuous spectrum. Oy gevalt.

• [strumpet windsock]

  I remember watching “Colonel Bleep” as a kid – in B/W even though we had a colour TV.

  It wasn’t until recently that I learned that show was the first colour cartoon ever made for TV:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Bleep

  I guess they ripped the colour out of it for some reason,

• [Narual]

  Wha? Von Drake is based on Von Mises, not Von Braun. And an octave *is* 7 notes, the 8th note is the first one starting the pattern again.

• [Anonymous]

  “a duck based on a rehabilitated Nazi rocket-scientist helped create the American color TV transition in the sixties”

  …or the work of some VERY clever RCA scientists and engineers cramming the color signal in to the B&W bandwidth.

• [_OM_]

  …You know, having been declared an official Honorary Jew a few years back for helping get rid of a couple of neo-Nazi, anti-NASA usenet trolls, I still think that the revisionists are doing Wernher Von Braun a really unjust turn by continually describing him as a Nazi every time his name is mentioned. The circumstances are well understood as to just how much of a Nazi he was, as well as the necessary act of self-preservation that forced him to don that uniform no more than twice during his forced membership in the Nazi Party. To be totally frank, there wasn’t a damn thing he could have done to save the workers in Work Camp Dora, and had he tried he would have been shot and some other, more despicable if even less talented psychopath would have been put in his place.

  …And to take this one step further, out of all the ex-Nazis who escaped retribution from the Nuremberg courts and their successors, WvB and the Germans collected under Operation Paperclip were, arguably, the *only* ones who could be considered as having done the most to make up for any crimes they may have committed. Thanks to the stupidity and shortsightedness of the US military and the government(*) in the years during and after Robert Goddard was developing liquid-fuel rocket technology on US soil, without WvB and his team we would have been more than a decade catching up with the Soviet missile program, which used their own set of captured Nazis from Peenemunde to gain the advantage they demonstrated in October of 1957.

  (*) Worst schmuck of the lot was then Secretary of Defense and former General Motors head Charlie Wilson, who was burned in effigy in Huntsville, AB, the night the Russians launched Sputnik I, because his deliberate delays allowed the Russians to launch the first satellite. Several space historians have made pilgrimages to his gravesite over the years, just to piss on it. I one day plan to make this same trip.

• [KeithIrwin]

  The odd bit about the octave isn’t that it has seven notes (something which all octaves have). It’s that the word “indigo” never shows up in the song. There are seven colors shown, but only six of them are ever mentioned in the song. Neither violet or indigo are mentioned by name, although they do use “purple”, which presumably stands in for one or the other, probably violet.

• [ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive]

  The animation of Von Drake in this piece looks like it might be Milt Kahl. The control of perspective as the character leans into the camera is amazing.

  But the most amazing thing is the almost complete lack of entertainment value in this clip. Even the song sucks. Whenever someone tells you that story is the most important thing in an animated film, point at Disney cartoons like this one that are able to hold your attention solely with the sheer skill of cartoon drawing.

• [ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive]

  Since Disney had been working closely with Von Braun on the Man In Space, Man and the Moon, and Mars and Beyond programs just a few years earlier, I think it’s highly likely that Von Braun was one of the principle inspirations for Von Drake, not Von Mises.

  Disney and Von Braun Photo

• [LYNDON]

  Although, to extend the pedantry, there isn’t actually purple or violent on a rainbow, and indigo is blue. AFAIK someone once decided seven was a good number for rainbow colours. Rainbows don’t loop back to red.

  A corollary: one reason it doesn’t work as an octave is because when the colours loop back to where it started rather than an order higher.

• [Anonymous]

  NBC, not ABC isn’t it? Surely the peacock at the end gives it away a bit.

  Also, I can’t let a reference to our famous German rocket scientist escape without posting this:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio

  Yes, there’s a reason why you’ll only find “Von Braun Strasse” in the American occupation sector.

• [jhhl]

  If you REALLY want to get pedantic, there isn’t an octave’s worth of color that human eyes can perceive: Red, the lowest frequency , runs roughly 430-480 THz, and Violet, 670-750 THz*. An octave above red is in the ultraviolet, or, an octave below violet is in the infra red.

  And von Drake also hearkens back to huge numbers of comical German Scientist Stereotypes, mostly snuffed out in the first world war when it became hard to laugh at a vaudeville German and even the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha family had to change its name in 1917 for similar reasons.

  *Wikipedia

• [Anonymous]

  Is this a Chuck Jones animated piece? It looks like his style, but I didn’t think he did any work for Disney.

• [Anonymous]

  Rainbows DO loop back to red, in their 2nd and 3rd etc. orders. It is just that you often can’t see them. Double rainbows are rare and I have never seen a triple rainbow.

  With diffraction “rainbows”, it is easier to see multiple orders.

• [David]

  That duck makes me want to listen to Tom Lehrer.

• [Anonymous]

  And of course this opened up the business of modern cross-promotion. The TV show promoted the parks and the films, etc.