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Originally Posted by vinljnkie
I'm pretty sure Dark Shadows was originally entirely shot in color. The reason there are black and white episodes is due to the original tapes being erased and reused leaving only black and white kinescope copies remaining. The earliest episodes are all kinescope then as the show progresses and color videotape copies are found color episodes start intermittently showing up. There is one episode that is missing out of the entire series because the videotape went missing immediately after it was broadcast. I believe there is an audio recording of it combined with still images that was created to fill in this missing episode. I've seen the whole series all the way through at least 3 times.
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According to Wikipedia...
"Originally, it was aired in black-and-white, but the show went into color starting with the August 14, 1967 installment transmission."
I've also read that at first ABC only had one color VTR and Dark Shadows had to share it with ABC News, but I can't confirm any of that. It was posted on YouTube under some of the Dark Shadows bloopers. They said the reason so many mistakes made it into the show was because they only had the equipment for a limited time and couldn't do many retakes. If you haven't seen those bloopers, they're worth watching. The one where David Selby rips a sword from the wall and the other sword comes crashing down on a glass lamp is priceless.
My nearest Decades station is several hundred miles away in New Bern, so no dice for me. I saw it off and on when it was on SciFi many years ago. I watched the show when it was originally aired after I came home from school, but only from 1969 on, after we got a new color TV with an outside rotating antenna and we could finally pick up UHF. The local ABC station didn't air Dark Shadows, so it was like watching something forbidden! My sister and I were hooked and I especially remember the shows with Kate Jackson as Daphne.