American Public Television

Background

APT was founded in 1961 as the Eastern Educational Television Network (EEN), distributing public TV shows such as The French Chef, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, and Washington Week to public television stations on a regional basis, and then nationwide when NET (now PBS) was formed. They changed their name to Interregional Program Service in the 1980s (though it still used the old name on some shows, such as Travels in Europe with Rick Steves, until 1992), became American Program Service (APS) in 1992, and changed to their current name, American Public Television in 1999. It didn't appear to use a logo until 1970, and then stopped using its own logo for nearly two decades after that.

1st Logo (1970-1975)

Eastern Educational Network (1975)

Nickname: "The 2.5D Compass"

Logo: Against a black background, we see six overlapping circles of varying sizes. In the center is a compass with the north, west, and south arrows pointing to the innermost circle and the east arrow pointing to the outermost circle. Behind it is a seventh, smaller circle to which the four ordinal directions point. At its core is a black circle with "EEN" inside it. To the right is the text

Eastern
Educational
Network

in what appears to be ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

FX/SFX: None.

Music/Sounds: Just an announcer saying, "This is the Eastern Educational Television Network."

Availability: Extinct, and more well-hidden than any Holy Grail-class public television logo before it, to the point where it was only discovered in 2020 on episodes of Wall $treet Week on the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. How elusive did it prove to be? The tail end of a 1975 episode of WNED's One Man Show that had it was part of a recording of WNET's Where Have All the Rebels Gone? that had been on the Internet Archive and gone unnoticed by the logo community for just over five years before being discovered the next month!

Editor's Note: After Wall $treet Week became a PBS program around 1972, the EEN would not use another logo for two decades, by which point it had already rebranded itself twice.

2nd Logo (1992-1999)

American Program Service (Early-Late 1990s)APS

Nickname: "A Production of..."

Logo: On a maroon background, we see the text

A PRESENTATION OF
AMERICAN PROGRAM
SERVICE

in Copperplate, which zooms in slightly. There is a shining wipe on the text.

Variant: There is a variant which has "BOSTON" under the text.

FX/SFX: The name zooming in, and the "shimmer".

Music/Sounds: None. In other cases, it uses the end theme of the show. Bloopy's Buddies, however, used their own generic theme over the logo (as well as two other logos that produced Bloopy's Buddies as well).

Availability: Extinct on television, but preserved on VHS tapes of Bloopy's Buddies and the "Cyber Cafes" and "Macworld" episodes of Computer Chronicles on the Internet Archive. It also appeared on American PBS airings of The Big Comfy Couch episodes from the era. Don't expect to see this on Nightly Business Report, which used in-credit notices until 1999.

Editor's Note: Very much a simple logo. Despite looking like a placeholder, this logo was used for eight years.

3rd Logo (1994-April 25?, 1999)

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Nicknames: "Shady Squares", "The 50th Anniversary Logo"

Logo: On a shady steel gray/blue gradient background, we see the words "American Public Television" appear in the Times New Roman font. Then, several blue/aqua/white-textured squares zoom out from the sides of the screen and the URL "aptonline.org" appears below.

Trivia: This logo was made by Zydeco Design as part of a rebrand of APT coinciding with the latter's 50th anniversary.

Variants:

• On Doc Martin and the Legend of the Cloutie and The Whole Truth with David Eisenhower, the 4:3 version of the logo is stretched to fill the 16:9 image.
• Sometimes, as seen on Nightly Business Report and Rough Cut: Woodworking with Tommy Mac, the logo fades in and out.

FX/SFX: The zooming, done in modern computer animation.

Music/Sounds: A re-arranged version of the last 3 notes of the 1994 music. Otherwise, the actual 1994 theme is used.

Availability: Current and common. Seen on current prints of PBS's archival programming such as Mr. Bean and The Joy of Painting, and newer (episodes of) PBS shows such as WORLDFOCUS and Nightly Business Report, among others. The version with the 1994 fanfare can be seen at the end of Doc Martin, Midsomer Murders, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Royalty Close-Up, A Daring Journey: From Immigration to Education, The Reformation: This Changed Everything, Free to Rock, the fifth season of Fit 2 Stitch, and a series of 78 movies licensed from 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., Paramount, and Sony (though the telefilm Doc Martin and the Legend of the Cloutie uses the later fanfare).

Editor's Note: Simple but effective. However, the 1994 theme does not fit well with this logo.