Black and White in Color

Watching a home-made copy of "Swingers" in which the film for some reason constantly switches from color to black and white. It struck me by how dated those parts of the movie appear, with even the multicolored lights of Vegas made simply bright and white. At the same time, I was thinking of color footage of the Nazis I'd seen on public television. It made the war appear much more real and fairly modern, which it is.
Black and white TV and movies look not only far away in time, but in another place, another world. Planet B&W, which you have no connection to and can't really relate to.
It's no coincidence that football was becoming the prime national sport right at the time that people started buying color sets. It was fast and colorful, and established a de facto new national holiday, the Super Bowl.
As a kid, of course, you thought that the past was very prim and proper, with everyone dressed well and never swearing. Thirty years ago was an eternity, and everything had changed due to the sexual and racial revolutions and looser moral standards of the 1960s. In contrast, kids now can find 1970s films and programs that are actually more explicit in many senses than now. In repeats it doesn't look or feel that old anymore, mostly because it is in color. Sometimes I'll watch a TV program and can't readily tell when it was filmed.
The post-modern condition, oddly, means that things never go away. Somewhere, always, TV and radio from much earlier eras are played over and over again. I often can't tell whether I actually saw public events or just the footage later. I swear I saw the fall of Saigon in 1975, when it actually happened, when I was nine, but I can't really be sure.
On the computer, things hang around forever on Google, with no differentiation in their initial presentation (in the text maybe more photos, video and sound now). I found a little newsletter on-line that I had done for the National Building Museum. In 1996.
A few things should stay black and white, like art films or anything by famous directors in which the use of black and white light is crucial to the film (Hitchcock, Truffaut, Goddard, Bunuel, Bergman, Fellini etc).
But ordinarily, I love colorized movies. They're history come alive, although the actors in far too many still talk in that overly scripted, unnatural, stilted way --Saaay, a wise-guy huuunh?