It just occurred to me that people with some forms of color-blindness must have one heckuva frustrating time with this issue, wondering what we're talking about.
*waves hand*
I am red/green colourblind. Over the years, I've had to teach myself the art of telling my greens and reds apart. They are on opposite sides of the colour wheel and should be totally complementary. To my eye, lime green and orange are identical.
I used to get confused by blue and purple, and even brown and black, until I was about eight. It wasn't confirmed I was colourblind till I was twelve. and even then, I never underwent tests because, as they said, there is no cure. (We did have a documentary once that showed an artist "curing" the colourblind by teaching them to mix oil paints, so it is probably lucky that I've always been an artist myself.)
As a little kid, I could also see green on a b/w TV! I have very distinct memories of Fred Flintstone mowing
green grass in the 60s. I didn't know I was colourblind at the time, so assumed the grey tone on b/w cartoons was green. This was a decade before Australia got colour TV, and it just looked just like grass to me! I recently blogged about it here:
http://therinofandor.blogspot.com/2008/07/confessions-of-colourblind-man-now-i.html
For decades, I've looked at photos of Kirk in his supposedly-avocado flesh shirt (that always looked mustard/gold to me) that people would glance at and say, "Green, of course". I understood the articles about the colour really being green, but showing up gold under studio lighting and TV transmission, but now I can
see the difference. I've trained my brain to recognize it. And with the upgrades to HD of TOS, I am delighted I can now see the difference on TV as well. But, as I said earlier, there are still times during a scene where the greenness can become gold.
I have an ancient TV that renders blue as pink. So sorry, folks, TOS-era dress uniforms (at least those on Spock and McCoy) are PINK.
Hehehehe. (Remember the old days when you called a serviceman to your home -
to change the picture tube!) I recall chatting to some Americans when Australia was introducing colour TV in 1975. Our colour TV system was to be called PAL. There's a joking reason why the US system was called NTSC - supposedly "Never Twice the Same Colour".
I also recall someone saying that early US TV's had trouble with yellow, and I was very worried that my then-favourite TV character, Robin the Boy Wonder, would end up with a pinkish cape when I finally saw him on TV. I mean, in the gum cards I was buying (photos from the Adam West/Burt Ward feature film version), the cape was such a
vivid yellow! Mind you, at that time, my friends and I had no idea there was a feature film version, and wondered why we never saw the "episode" featured on the cards. But that's another story.
But back to TOS. The major green/mustard uniform problem was connected with the original velour costumes Theiss had made. After that the new fabric had to be specialty-dyed, and the command shirts used in Seasons Two and Three were nowhere near as avocado flesh green as the velour, IIRC. So when studying differences, the first thirteen or so episodes of Season One are the ones to concentrate on.
-- RR
