Hiding the color subcarrier in-band but largely invisible on black and white sets was a work of collective engineering genious.
Our neighborhood blocked off the street for a Fourth of July picnic a few years ago. Sitting in a lawn chair talking to a long-retired neighbor over a beer, we got to talking about old analog TV standards. (We are both hams, so conversation tended to turn to radio-ish things.)
I remarked about how clever I thought it was mixing the video carrier and audio subcarrier to get the audio IF. And he says:
"Oh, it wasn't always like that. When I was a kid, there was a TV station in Philadelphia that transmitted 2 1/2 hours two nights a week. They taped up the schematics for a receiver inside a big picture window at their station, and we would all go down with notebooks and copy down the latest changes so that we could update our receivers. The audio subcarrier went through a lot of changes. AM, FM, and they moved the frequency around."
So... I realized that here was a guy who was watching television back when the way you got a TV receiver was to build it from scratch yourself. Wow number 1.
I said: "I suppose when the war came along you were sent to radar school like almost everybody else that worked on television?"
Answer: "No. Did you ever hear of Eckert and Mauchly?"
Me: stunned.
It's hard to find these days, but a competent university library may have a copy (where I read it). This ref may be helpful: https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.5555/539966
A quick link to his papers: https://archives.upenn.edu/collections/finding-aid/upt50l694
https://colour-recovery.fandom.com/wiki/The_Unofficial_Colou...
For instance, a high resolution (still) film photo of a large high resolution TV from back in the day.
What you're seeing is probably Fechner Color [0]. I've seen the effect myself, as I recall there was a bit of a craze for demoing it some years back.
This backwards compatibility has been the bane of my career. The 29.97 or 30000/1001 frequency, the interlacing, and the effects it had on 24fps film transfer has given me a niche career path, but one so frustrating when dealing with media content butchered by people that had zero understanding of the history of why film/video content was formatted the way it was.
We kept that same gamma when we switched to digital color spaces (and MPEG compression) - it's why noiry dark movies (think of Blade Runner with people in dark spaces smoking) - because of gamma correction there are few digital codes available at the dark corner of the digital color cubes and the result tends to be blocky simply because the color space simply can't represent those colors .... all because of a technical choice made in the late 30s to reduce the cost of Tvs