Man, there are few things I enjoy more than old color baseball movies. I mean, really old. Well into the 1960s, baseball remained mostly a black-and-white affair on television, and in newsreels. So today when we see baseball films -- or for that matter, photos -- from before the '60s, they're usually in black-and-white ... Which leads to the not-unreasonable perception that the world in those days was black-and-white. You know, except for Oz. Which hardly counts.
Except we know it's not true. Intellectually, we know that when Ted Williams came up in 1939, he was in color. We know that all those huge signs on the outfield walls were brightly colored. Still, it's hard to shake the feeling that the world really was somehow different ... Which is why I love the occasional reminder that it wasn't. For example, this color film from the 1939 World Series:
No, it's not the greatest. And black-and-white film can look pretty fantastic (although not usually the baseball films). I just can't enough of this stuff, though. If I've ever got a wall that's a video screen, like at Bill Gates' house, most of the time it'll just show 1940s and '50s baseball in color, around the clock.