Start your TV shows with the NBC “Peacock”

You don’t see these very often any more. They were called network identifiers, and they would appear at the start of a prime time broadcast schedule, or after a TV show’s closing credits.

What I’m going to show you now is a collection of network identifiers from the National Broadcasting Company – what we know today as NBC. Follow along.

First off, we get the NBC chimes. These three notes are “G”-“E”-“C” on a musical scale – GEC being the initials of the General Electric Company.

In some cases, the letters themselves would light up in synchronization to the chime notes.

During the 1960’s, NBC employed a logo that was nicknamed “The Snake”; it would combine all three initials into one linked glyph.

Eventually the snake logo and the chimes were merged together into one quick network identifier.

But of course, you all know and love the most famous NBC logo of them all – the NBC Peacock. It first appeared in the late 1950’s, and if you had a color television set at the time, it looked a little something like this.

It would later be known as the “Laramie Peacock,” because it would air before episodes of NBC’s color western drama Laramie. As soon as NBC added more color broadcasts to their lineup, the NBC Peacock appeared at the beginning of more and more NBC shows.

By the late 1960’s, the peacock intro was shortened to a few seconds.

There was also a goof NBC Peacock logo, it was used on Rowan and Martin’s “Laugh-In” – as well as in the Walt Disney short film “It’s Tough to Be A Bird.”

At that time, every broadcast network was producing their own “in color” identifiers.

ABC	CBS	NET, the precursor to PBS

But in 1977, the NBC Peacock was retired. Using a new team of graphic design experts, NBC came up with a geometric rendering of the letter “N”, and ran with that for a few years.

Eventually a redesigned version of the peacock was returned to the network broadcasts, and ran concurrently with the block “N” for a time.

And look – even local television station WRGB put together their own “NBC Proud as a Peacock” station identifier. Hope they recouped that money when WRGB dumped their NBC affiliation a few months later and hooked up with CBS…

And in 1986, a new NBC peacock – this time with only six feathers and the bird facing to the right – debuted, and 25 years later it’s the same bird we see on NBC shows today. In these promotional clips, entitled “Come Home to NBC,” actresses Jackee and Phylicia Rashad not only promote the various shows that populated the NBC lineup at the time, but also you can see cameo appearances from the vintage chimes, the block “N” and the snake NBC logos. Fun fun stuff.

Hope you enjoyed this little trip down television history!