Monochrome Past

Albus Dumbledore in 1995 and 1945.

"This is the past, and the past is in black and white. Get it?"

— Bugs Bunny, child of a black-and-white cartoon, Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue

Ever since the advent of colour photography, the past has been depicted as in black and white, sepia tone or muted colors. Usually invoked for a Flashback or silent film homage. Sometimes made fun of by claiming that the real world was, in fact, black and white prior to the invention of color.

Gloriously averted by world's first non-artificial-color footage from 1927.

A Sub-Trope of Flashback Effects. See also Deliberately Monochrome, for when the entire work is this way, and Decade-Themed Filter, for when this filter evokes an era.

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Examples:

Advertising

• A GEICO commercial, presenting the scenario of Abraham Lincoln's wife asking him whether a dress makes her look fat, was done in heavy sepia with conspicuous film grain, as though it were filmed in the 1930s.

Anime & Manga

• Done in Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood during one Scar's flashbacks. They mix it with Splash of Color to contrast both the blue eyes of the Amestrian Soldiers invading Ishval and Winry's parents with the red eyes of the Ishvallans and Envy in disguise, just before he shoots the young girl to start the war.
  • Yoki's flashback to when the Elrics put an end to his scam in Youswell is shown in the style of a black-and-white newsreel, though the flashback switches to color as he relates his Humiliation Conga after he was kicked out of the military.
• Most of the flashbacks in Season 1 of Tower of God are various shades of sepia and brown.
• In season one of Hetalia: Axis Powers, when America thinks about the time England spent with him when he was growing up, the Flashback sequences are all shown in an old-fashioned sepia tone.
• Typically, in Kill la Kill, majority of the flashback sequences are shown in some sort of sepia, as shown here and here.
• In the Warrior Cats manga SkyClan and the Stranger's full-color rerelease, Sol's past is shown in washed-out sepia tones compared to the colorful rest of the book.

Asian Animation

• The Lamput episode "Origins" is a Whole Episode Flashback showing how Fat Doc and Slim Doc met as kids. The flashback parts are depicted in a deliberately muted color scheme, unlike the rest of the show which has typical cartoony, bright colors.

Comic Books

• Batwoman (Rebirth) uses black-and-white flashbacks, with the only colors being muted reds.
• The Smurfs comic book story "The Wild Smurf" uses a limited number of colors in the part depicting the origin of Wild Smurf.
• Whisper: Flashabacks to when Alexis Devinn lived under the roof of her step-father, Jiro Hatzumi, are sepia-toned.

Comic Strips

• Discussed in one Sunday Strip of Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin asks his dad why old photos are in black and white, and Dad explains that the world used to be in black and white before the 1930s ("and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too"). His dad Hand Waves the fact that old paintings use colors that supposedly didn't exist back then; as to why the photos didn't turn to color with everything else, the explanation that they're color photos of a black-and-white world.
• Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft use sepia tinted panels with clipped corners (to look like a photograph in an album) for flashbacks.
• A clever variant in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip story "Doctor Who and the Nightmare Game", an Affectionate Parody of Roy of the Rovers and other 1970s football comics: The flashbacks to how the Shakespeare Brothers took over Delchester United are in duotone, just like the strips being pastiched.

Fan Works

• A brief comment on the first Portal: The 4th Millennium Wiki, just preceding the timeline of 1910 to 1969:
  GL@DDA Magnet: I KNEW it. In this time the world was BLACK AND WHITE.
• From Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space.
  "Not another parallel reality!" cried Buster, as everything started to fade and turn monochrome.
  "Relax, Citizen Kincaid. This is merely a flashback scene."
• True to canon Kill la Kill AU tends to have the flashbacks in some kind of sepia.

Films — Animation

• Coco: Miguel's flashback of Ernesto becoming a star, and Héctor's flashbacks of Ernesto poisoning him to death and stealing his music and singing "Remember Me" to young Coco are rendered in old-fashioned sepia tone.

Films — Live-Action

• The prologue to Pineapple Express is this.
• Dead Again: The extensive flashbacks to the 1940s are in black and white.
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: Riddle's Pensieve Flashback is in black and white with Harry remaining in color.
• Inverted in the film version of Johnny Got His Gun, mainly because the present takes place in a hospital where the main character has no limbs and most of his face blown off. His memories are in color.
• The prologue to Space Cowboys is this, with a tint of blue.
• The flashbacks in American History X are in black and white, whereas the rest is in colour.
• The flashbacks of Give 'Em Hell, Malone are in black and white with a Splash of Color, such as the bloody hearts torn from people’s chests.
• The opening scene of The Whales of August, set some fifty years before the main story, is shot in sepia tones. The scene ends with a closeup of a buoy, which turns to color as the film transitions to the present-day story.
• Zig-Zagged in Film/Oppenheimer. The 1959 Secretary of Commerce Confirmation Hearing for Lewis Strauss, shot in black-and-white, lies in the farthest point of the movie's timeline, thereby making it a Flash Forward to everything else. The only later event is a very short colored sequence of Oppenheimer receiving the Enrico Fermi award. However, several of the monochrome sequences are later showed from the colored perspective or continued in color.
• Inverted in the time-travel romance The House in the Square (American title: I'll Never Forget You, or sometimes Man of Two Worlds), a film adaptation of the play Berkeley Square. The present-day (1953) is shown in black-and-white, while the main storyline (1784) is in color, giving an effect like The Wizard of Oz.
• In the Cut: The dream sequences that show how Frannie's parents met and fell in love are sepia-toned scenes of a couple ice-skating on a pond with snow falling around them. The sepia tones emphasize how much Frannie idealizes her parents' meet-cute. It is later revealed that Frannie's father left another woman for her mother, using the ring he was going to give to the other woman to propose to her. After marrying Frannie's mom, he would eventually leave her for another woman, going on to marry three other times.
• Inverted in The Dawns Here Are Quiet. The present-day 1942 story (a Russian Amazon Brigade unit) is filmed in black and white, but all the flashbacks of the various women in the squad are in color, possibly symbolizing how much better life was before the war.
• In God Told Me To, Pete interviews a man about the time he found Mrs. Phillips naked on the side of the road, insisting she'd been raped by aliens in the early '40s. His flashback is in black and white. Later, when he interviews his biological mother about the time the same thing happened to her in the early '50s, her flashback is in sepia.
• In Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, Aunt Roo flashes back to her daughter's death in sepia.
• Inverted in the music documentary film The Sparks Brothers with the modern day mostly in black-and-white, and archive footage in color.

Literature

• In Forced Perspectives and Stolen Skies by Tim Powers, some of the characters are able to see visions of the past. Being magical in nature, they include light spectra not usually visible to the human eye, including infrared light which the seers' brains interpret as a sort of coppery color — with the result that the visions are sepia-toned in-universe.
• At least two Goosebumps books ("The Haunted School" and "Streets of Panic Park") have had the protagonists travel to the past, which is rendered in an eerie black-and-white world.
• In Where's Wally? in Hollywood, "Shhh! This is a Silent Movie" depicts all the actors and sets in black and white, though the crews filming them are drawn in color.

Live-Action TV

• The 4400:
  • In "Mommy's Bosses", the Flashbacks to October 2004 are in sepia tone.
  • In "Try the Pie", the memories of Tom, Billy and Paul and Kathy Weir are shown in black and white.
• Angel has a comic flashback to 1950s Italy, lasting some three seconds or so, in black and white, with Spike and Drusilla looking like they were in an Italian modernist movie.
• The flashbacks in Any Day Now are done like this, albeit with a frequent Splash of Color for outfits, objects, etc.
• All flashbacks in Babylon 5.
• Inverted in Better Call Saul, where the chronologically latest scenes (specifically the ones set after Breaking Bad) are in monochrome. Originally this was to show Saul's misery at being forced to live in obscurity, but ends up sticking when the last four episodes are primarily set in the same time period.
• Every memory fragment recalled by the Amnesiac Hero of Blindspot is depicted as a monochrome flashback.
• Inverted in Season 2 of Breaking Bad, where several episodes open with a black-and-white Flash Forward where the only colour is a damaged pink teddy bear in some kind of accident scene, with each subsequent episode showing slightly more. In the season finale, the scene finally fades to colour because this is the episode where the present story converges with the prologue and fully shows the context.
• In one episode of Childrens Hospital, Dr. Maestro travels back to the 1940's, where everything is monochrome even to him. He refers to a nurse as a "black and white lady", only to have her ask him to hush up about her biracial lineage.
• Cold Case: If the flashback is set in a period where monochrome footage was widespread, the flashback will be monochrome. One episode subverts this, by beginning in full old-photo sepia and appearing to take place in the early 1800s. Then a car full of people pull up. It is 2006, in Amish country. Interestingly, these technique has also been used occasionally for time periods when monochrome was no longer the norm, such as The '90s.
• CSI: NY uses brown/sepia tones for especially significant flashbacks:
  • Mac recalls the 1983 Beirut Marine Barracks bombing during "Charge of This Post."
  • He has memories of his father's illness in "Blacklist."
  • More of those memories and scenes from the Holocaust are depicted in "Yarhzeit."
  • In "Flash Pop," scenes of a case from 1957 are shown in black & white and muted colors.
• Played for Laughs in the Doctor Who episode "The Crimson Horror". The episode already takes place in 1893 (and is a bit low in color like many past-set episodes). Partway into the story, the Doctor explains how things got to a certain point, and the flashback is shown in black-and-white with obvious film artifacts and comical old-timey music (all to portray events from within mere days before).
• In Eureka's season 4 time-travel episodes, the 1940s are sepia-toned.
• Heroes
  • Done for flashbacks in the episode "Company Man". With an excellent Lampshade Hanging/pun in the first such flashback:
  Bennet: I'm comfortable with morally gray.
  • And again in flashbacks during the Volume 4 episode "Cold Wars". Complete with a reprisal of above line.
• Hustle has an episode centered on the grandson of a legendary American grifter. It includes a number of flashbacks and Imagine Spots featuring the grandfather, played by Mickey as a Chaplinesque silent film hero.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022):
  • The two "Family Portrait" promos and the accompanying picture are sepia-toned to reflect that Louis, Lestat and Claudia posed for the photograph in the early 20th century.
  • In the climax of the Season 1 finale, there's a muted variation during the Once More, with Clarity sequence where the Flashback snippets are moderately desaturated.
• Legion: In "Chapter 22", when Charles Xavier experiences a PTSD episode where he relives his memory of nearly being killed by a Nazi soldier while he was in the British army during World War II, the whole scene is in black-and-white.
• Parodied in "Chapter Nine" of Jane the Virgin. A flashback to Petra's past in Prague starts out in monochrome, then changes to color when the narrator points out that it was only five or so years ago.
• Subverted in the opening of Lovecraft Country. Atticus—a Korean War veteran and science fiction fan—appears to be dreaming of his wartime experiences in the form of a 1950s war movie, but as Real Dreams are Weirder, things change from Monochrome to Color as he finds himself in a Flying Saucer invasion movie instead.
• The 1989 miniseries Mother Love (starring Diana Rigg) has black-and-white flashbacks.
• Downplayed in Person of Interest where scenes set in John Reese's past have a blueish hue.
• On The Pretender, flashbacks are all shown in black and white. Most are shown as Jarod watching DSA's (film records of everything he did at the Centre, some dating back to the early 1960s) on his laptop.
• St. Elsewhere: In "Time Heals, Part 1", all of the 1935 sequences are shown in black and white. The first 1935 scene in "Time Heals, Part 2" begins in black and white, but changes to full color when the six-year-old Donald Westphall sees Patrick O'Casey's blood on the floor as he is being brought into St. Eligius. From then onwards, each 1935 scene is in black and white for the first few seconds before changing to color.
• Supernatural: When Castiel sends Sam and Dean back to 1861, it's brown and sepia.
• Inverted in the Spanish series Tell Me Who I Am where the present day scenes are in monochrome while the past is in vivid color.
• Parodied in the Noir Episode of Warehouse 13; Pete thinks they must be in the past because everything's in black and white. Myka points out "No, it's not time travel. The 1940s were in colour, much like the rest of history."
• In the War of the Worlds (1988) episode "A Time to Reap", the scenes set in 1953 are in black and white — despite the fact that the 1953 film whose time they are visiting was originally filmed in color.
• The opening flashback scene of Toby's father being a gangster in 1952 in one of The West Wing Christmas episodes ("Noel").

Music Videos

• Fergie's "Glamorous" video has black-and-white flashbacks.

Toys

• Belief in this idea is why some fans of American Girl decided the BeForever rebrand was inaccurate. The historical characters got new, brighter colored meet outfits as part of the rebrand, and many fans believed clothing couldn't have been that brightly colored before the invention of colorfast dyes outside of clothing for the very rich. This misses the fact extant garments of the eras are faded because said colors were not colorfast or stored away from light; better preserved clothing shows bright colored clothing was always around and cloth merely faded over the years.

Video Games

• This fan-trailer for the Touhou Project fangame The Genius Of Sappheiros
• Atelier Totori: The Adventurer of Arland: At the start of the second day, when flashing back to Totori's lessons with her teacher, My Name Is ???, it's presented in a charcoal drawing artstyle in light and dark browns and white.
• Devil May Cry 5: When the characters recall the flashback events (such as the hooded assailant arriving in Nero's garage on April and the battle against Urizen on May 15), the cutscene briefly uses a sepia tone filter to distinguish the past from the present.
• Flashbacks from the Pensieve in the Harry Potter video games are like this.
• The hero's recovered memories in Sanitarium are shown as either black-and-white or sepia-toned grainy-textured films.
• Weirdly inverted in Vagrant Story. Most of the game takes place in a Deliberately Monochrome setting (mostly brown). When Ashley flashes back to his past, he sees a gorgeous blue sky and a green grassy hill.
• Parodied in Vault 112's Tranquility Lane Lotus-Eater Machine in Fallout 3, which simulates a 1950's style cul de sac neighborhood.
• Plok has a dream flashback where you play as Grand Pappy Plok, with grayscale graphics, silent film-style text, and piano music.
• The flashback sequences in XIII are monochrome.
• In Super Smash Bros. Brawl, flashbacks in the Adventure mode cutscenes are black and white.
• Flashbacks in Chibi-Robo! are in sepia. Additionally, when the title robot and his sidekick go back in time, everything is sepia except for them. Lampshaded by the sidekick, who says that they must be in the past since everything's all sepia.
• The flashback mission in Modern Warfare, although set in 1996, has its graphics desaturated to grayish-sepia tones with a grainy filter.
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has this effect in the Temple of Time entry hall.
• In Kingdom Hearts II, Timeless River is monochrome to mimic the style of the Classic Disney Shorts.
• In Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil, a flashback showing Leorina's Start of Darkness is presented in sepia.
• Mickey Mania, whose levels are based on Mickey Mouse cartoons dating from 1928 to 1990, begins with a Steamboat Willie level. It starts off in black and white (except for Mickey himself), but patches of color are added into the scenery as the level progresses.
• Used literally in Paladin's Quest when travelling back to the past Lennus, which is monochrome for the entire time you're there.
• Super Metroid's intro has monochrome flashbacks to the endings of Metroid and Metroid II: Return of Samus, the latter of which actually was monochrome due to being on the Game Boy.
• Flashback scenes in Another Code are like this with kind of an old time photograph feel.
• In Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind, events the player hears about but does not directly participate in are shown with a monochrome. For example, when the god Elmal appears to your clan the illustration is in full color, but when you hear of him visiting another clan, the illustration is entirely in shades of yellow.
• Shadow of Destiny has you travel to various periods of the past and each one has a different kind of monochrome color. The 1500s era is in sepia tone while the early 1900s is in gray.
• Subverted in Limbus Company's Canto IV. Unlike the other chapters, Yi Sang's flashbacks are presented through a sepia tone. This is then revealed to be what the actual area looked like during that time period. T Corp's District, where the League of Nine was based during that time period, uses an unknown power to drain out the colors from not just their surroundings, but from all the lower and middle class, with color only being provided to the most wealthy and privileged people.

Visual Novels

• Flashbacks in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney always do this (except in cases 1-4 of the first game). The one in case 3-4 is even shown with lines running down it like errors on an old film reel. The fifth case is different because it was not in the original release of the first game.
• Shiki's memories in Tsukihime are often in black and white; in one case to deliberately hide the fact that the girl in the window was Kohaku and the girl that was outside was Hisui. The girls are identical twins other than their eye color.

Web Animation

• The "Old-Timey" world from Homestar Runner.
• In The Grossery Gang webseries, the old days of the Yucky Mart are portrayed in black-and-white, complete with characters going Pie-Eyed and wearing White Gloves to further push the reference.
• The Stump: In "The Homeroom Menace", a flashback at Lyle's Old School is in black and white.

Webcomics

• Darths & Droids uses sepia tone for flashbacks.
• Girl Genius uses sepia tones for flashback sequences.
• In Goblins, once the comic starts to be colored, grayscale is used as a Flashback Effect.
• I Love Yoo: Most of the flashbacks are either completely black and white or in muted colors.
• Last Res0rt invokes it in a single panel as a memory invoked by Veled to show that Cypress's nerve tends to run in the family... for better or worse.
• The Order of the Stick's prequel books are in black and white.
• When The Packrat accidentally travels to 1939 with a time machine keytar, everything around him is black and white. 1955 is colored again, though.
• Queen of Wands has a sepia-toned flashback, with a black and white flashback nested inside it.
• The Back Story of Trying Human is set in the 1940's and colored sepia with red details.
• Arthur, King of Time and Space briefly had Flashbacks in sepia, then abandoned this (and changed existing strips to colour) because there wasn't an equivalent way of indicating Flashforwards.
• Rain (2010): Flashbacks and past events are always presented in black and white.
• Sleepless Domain: An interesting diegetic variation on this is used during a flashback in Chapter 10. To give some background, the Inner Barrier forms every night to protect civilians from monsters, and as a side effect it transforms the city into a technicolor battlefield whose appearance changes nightly. During a flashback sequence, there are no explicit Flashback Effects, but the barrier on that particular night happened to have a pattern of washed-out grey and brown tones that give the impression of an in-universe sepia filter.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: Torbjörn's flashback on getting the Mission Control team together, Emil's flashback on deciding to join the Cleansers and the flashback triggered by the reading of the Odense hospital papers reduce the comic's already limited palette to just one color.
• Unsounded: Sette's flashbacks to her father are sepia toned and when Jivi has dreams of his past they're in black and white. Duane, whose memories are stored in the khert as his brain has long since rotted, has "dreams" and flashbacks in full color.

Web Original

• Sepia tones are used for the Flashbacks shown at the end of certain episodes of the Mario Party TV series, reviewing some of the more memorable incidents on that board. The same effect is used when flashing back to events from previous games.
• SCP-8900-EX: The past was black-and-white, until an unexplained anomaly created the colors we see today. All photographs are color photographs, what we think of as the advance of photo technology is actually just the effect spreading. Basically, Calvin's dad was right. The Foundation couldn't find any way to stop it, so they just said "fuck it" and doped the entire planet with amnestics that caused everybody to think that the world was always this way.

Web Video

• Patient J. When the Joker is relating his first encounter with Batman he says "it was like an old 1940's movie", and the flashback is shown in the style of The Batman (Serial). Later events however are depicted in color, in the style of the 1960's tv show.

Western Animation

• Employed in Avatar: The Last Airbender, although just with muted, sepia colours. The exact shading depending on which character's memories we were seeing; Aang's were washed out with a bright yellow, Zuko's were a darker gold, and Katara and Sokka was a blueish tint to theirs.
• Batman: The Animated Series: The episode "Pretty Poison" opens with a Flashback shaded in sepia tone before transitioning to present day which uses regular colors.
• In Code Lyoko, some flashbacks of Aelita's previous life are sepia-colored — including in the usually brightly-colored world of Lyoko during her first virtualization. And the final episode consists entirely of flashbacks done in this manner. The sepia-toned tower deactivated sequence in particular invoked many Manly Tears.
• One House of Mouse short showed a flashback involving Mickey Mouse and Goofy being animated in black and white while everything else is done in color.
• In one episode of Kim Possible, the picture turns sepia when we are shown in flashback (sort of) how Ron invented the Naco (a nacho/taco hybrid).
• The Legend of Korra uses a sepia wash over Korra's jumbled-up dreams. The scenes are eventually replayed in colour as Korra meditates, while imprisoned by Tarrlok, and finally connects with the warning Aang was trying to give her through her dreams.
• In Loving Vincent, the present-day is brightly colored, but all flashbacks are in black and white.
• Played straight in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episodes "Family Appreciation Day"(sepiatones and desaturated colors), "A Friend in Deed"(completely monochrome), and "Leap of Faith"(sepiatone). Averted in "Apple Family Reunion", where the flashbacks are full color.
• The Patrick Star Show: In "The Lil' Patscals", when Patrick goes back to 1927, everything is in black and white.
• The Rugrats flashback episode "Sour Pickles" has this when Lou tells a story of Stu and Drew when they were babies, having been fighting all their lives.
• Parodied in one episode of Sheep in the Big City in a line sort of like, "A long time ago, when the world was black and white..."
• The Simpsons, Treehouse of Horror XVII segment, "The Day the Earth Looked Stupid" was done this way since it took place in Springfield 1938. It was even Lampshaded by Lenny.
  Lenny: I like that everything's sepia-toned; makes me feel all nostalgic.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "Terminal Provocations", Ensign Fletcher's "recollection" (really a fake story) of what happened to him while Ensign Mariner and Ensign Boimler were at the Chu Chu dance show is in black-and-white except for the phaser fire that hit him.

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