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Programs on film (like the first Startrek series) were sometimes printed on a special low contrast positive. The low dynamic range made it better for telecine pickup, with the contrast being restored by the telecine. There were many years of awful image lag in televised movies due to the lag in vidicon telecines. High quality flying spot scanners eliminated these problems. Getting good results with high-dynamic range movies (including night scenes) was still difficult, especially since most receivers had less than 100% DC restoration.
My latest video thrill was watching "The Incredibles" on DVD on a widescreen progressive scan rear projo. The night scenes on this DVD are transferred at theater level, not boosted to fill the TV dynamic range, and it is great to see the system do this correctly end-to-end. In the old days, those dark scenes would have been mostly unrecognizable mud, because the camera gamma correction could not extend down so far (partly due to noise, partly due to difficulty of setting black level so precisely). I'm guessing that the digital animation was rendered directly to TV format, so there was no optical transfer involved at all.
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