The title of Keenan Ivory Wayans’ groundbreaking sketch show, “In Living Color,” has a double meaning. Most notably, the series featured a cast made up almost entirely of black comedians, including Wayans, his siblings Damon Wayans and Kim Wayans, Kim Coles, T’Keyah Crystal Keymáh, David Alan Grier and Tommy Davidson. Jamie Foxx joined the cast later, and Marlon and Shawn Wayans appeared sporadically. The only white performers in the cast were Jim Carrey (credited as James Carrey) and Kelly Coffield. Compared to the largely Caucasian show “Saturday Night Live,” Wayans’ show was, he said, brightly colored.
The phrase “in bright color,” however, will be familiar to those familiar with television history. In the 1950s, most popular consumer CRT televisions were still only capable of displaying a grayscale image. Although color image delivery was a technology that had been around for decades, the type of electronic scanning required to make it work was not feasible and did not work very well. It would not be until 1953 that NTSC analog color TV signals became easier and cheaper to produce, and it would not be until the mid-1960s that color televisions would be sold in large numbers in the United States.
Any television fan who watched NBC in the late 1950s and early 1960s will remember this change. Indeed, NBC began boasting that its shows were in color, deliberately giving FOMO to anyone who still had a black-and-white television. NBC even adopted its famous peacock logo at the time to emphasize that a rainbow of colors awaited anyone who opted for a color television. For NBC’s bumpers, the station aired an animation of its peacock, and an announcer said the next broadcast was “in living color.”
In the 1960s, NBC boasted that its broadcasts were “in vibrant color.”
Specifically, the bumpers read: “The following program is brought to you in vivid color, on NBC. » NBC actually began using the peacock as early as 1957, first seen before an episode of “Your Hit Parade,” but most homes still did not have color televisions at that time. The Peacock would become much more popular in the 1960s (as would color televisions), eventually nicknamed the Laramie Peacock, after the 1962 Western series “Laramie”. NBC announcer Brandt took over the chant. During the remainder of the 1960s, the peacock evolved rapidly. The expression “in living color,” however, remained.
Color TVs started outselling black-and-white TVs in the mid-1970s. Some ’80s kids probably remember watching their favorite movies on black-and-white TVs. They lasted a long time.
The reason NBC beat the other networks on color TVs was that at the time, NBC was owned by RCA, the electronics giant. RCA produced color televisions and was able to use NBC – and the peacock logo – as a way to promote its new television products. Yes, it is an insidious form of vertical integration. The phrase “in living color” (as opposed to dead old black and white) became a buzzword in pop culture, and it was used as long as the Laramie Peacock. The logo was retired in 1975; At that time, it was inappropriate to boast that your parades were in color. They all were.
The Peacock returned in 1986 and NBC has used it ever since. Indeed, NBC’s streaming service was called Peacock after this logo.
It was a producer’s idea to use NBC’s phrase for the title of In Living Color.
In 2019, the Hollywood Reporter published an oral history of “In Living Color,” and the origins of its title became clear. According to Tamara Rawitt, one of the producers and writers of the series, it was her idea. She stated, quite proudly, that “I actually came up with the title for ‘In Living Color,’ writing it from the legendary NBC slogan.”
The phrase “In Living Color” suddenly took on a positive connotation in terms of race. No longer were they broadcast TV signals or RCA’s insidious marketing phrases. It was about diversity. Corporate language was repurposed to serve artistic means. It was a welcome change. And “In Living Color” delivered on its promise. It’s hard to overstate the show’s importance in the early 1990s. A super-hot, super-funny hit series with an almost all-black cast was new, and Wayans moved television forward. Famously, “In Living Color” featured several dance numbers each episode performed by their in-house dancers, The Fly Girls. Rosie Perez served as the show’s head choreographer and Jennifer Lopez was part of the troupe during the show’s fourth and fifth seasons.
“In Living Color” ran for five seasons and went off the air in 1994. By then, however, many of its cast members had become movie stars (Damon and Marlon Wayans in particular, as well as Jamie Foxx and Jim Carrey). In 2012, there was an attempt to revive “In Living Color” with an all-new cast and all-new Fly Girls, but that show was canceled before it could come to fruition. I guess a series can only be revolutionary once.
