Chicago TV listings from early color days

[Jeffhs]

NBC also made a huge to-do over its color programming (since it was America's first "full color" television network by the mid-'60s, I am not surprised), with its signature peacock and a bold announcement--"The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC!" ABC's color programming was preceded by the network's animated ball-shaped logo and an announcer intoning "The following is an ABC COLOR presentation!". CBS, not to be outdone, came up with an animated logo in which the letters "CBS", each letter being one of the three primary colors and followed by the network's "eye" logo, dropped down seemingly out of nowhere to the center of the screen. An announcer proudly proclaimed, "CBS presents this program IN COLOR!"

PBS (formerly NET), however, did not, to the best of my knowledge, announce color programming over the network, at least not audibly. PBS, however, did have a logo consisting of the letters "PBS", each a different primary color, which the network showed after every color program until about the late '80s or so. Today's "Be more. PBS" logo is shown entirely in monochrome, as are the station IDs for the PBS affiliate in Cleveland; the interesting thing, to me anyway, about the latter is that the "W" in the station's call sign [WVIZ] is highlighted in blue, with the other three letters being white. I get another PBS affiliate on cable here, the ID for which (showing on-screen constantly) is all monochrome except for a small on-screen symbol following the words "Western Reserve" (the official name for the northeastern Ohio region, including Cleveland). The station, however, shows that symbol in full color during hourly IDs. Cleveland's hourly PBS station ID is "wviz.org" in white lower-case letters, against a dark blue background; the PBS network symbol is there, but easily missed unless specifically looked for, as it is extremely small.


By the time The CW and MyTV (formerly UPN and The WB) came along, virtually all network programming was in color anyway, so there was no need to make any kind of announcement preceding such programming. In fact, the few TV programs still telecast in b&w (there are a few of them left, mostly very old movies and comedy shows running during periods when MyTV and The CW are inactive, not to mention on cable channels; The Three Stooges, The Munsters and DuMont's The Honeymooners, et al. come to mind) are broadcast with the 3.58-MHz color burst subcarrier still intact--the signal is not disabled during the telecasting of monochrome shows.