Indian Head Test Card - As A Cultural Icon

As A Cultural Icon

An actual Indian Head Test Card, the pattern as printed on art-grade white cardboard, was only of secondary importance to television system adjustment, but many of them were saved as souvenirs, works of found art, and inadvertent mandalas. By contrast, nearly all of the hard-to-open, steel-shielded, vacuum glass monoscope tubes were junked with their hidden Indian Head Test Pattern target plates still inside. The monoscope target plates were also small, a few inches in size, while the showy camera test cards were sized on the order of 1-½ feet by 2 feet, making them natural keepers for picture-framed wall display.

The original art work was completed for RCA by an artist named Brooks on August 23, 1938. The master art was improbably discovered in a dumpster by a wrecking crew worker as the old RCA factory in Harrison, NJ was being demolished in 1970. The worker kept the art for over 30 years, and then used the Internet to locate and sell it to a test pattern collector.

The Indian Head test card became obsolete in the 1960s with the debut of color television; from that point onward, an alternate test card of color bars became the test card of choice. Since the 1990s, most television stations in the United States have broadcast continuously without regular sign-offs, instead running infomercials, networked overnight news shows, syndicated TV re-runs, or old movies; thus, all test cards have become mostly obsolete. Nevertheless, the Indian Head Test Card persists as a symbol of early television. It was even sold as a night-light (from 1997 to 2005 by the Archie McPhee company), reminiscent of the times when a fairly common late-night experience was to fall asleep while watching the late movie, only to awaken to the characteristic sine wave tone accompanying the Indian Head Test Pattern on a black-and-white TV screen.

Many of the nation's television stations used the image of the Indian Head card to be their final image broadcast when they signed off their analog signals for the final time between February 17 and June 12, 2009, as part of the United States digital television transition.

This test card appears as the first loading screen in video games such as Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 3, as part of the series' retro-futurism. It also appears in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood as a puzzle for Subject 16. It also appears in Call of Duty: Black Ops, in between the missions of the singleplayer campaign, and in Bioshock, Bioshock 2 and The Simpsons: Virtual Springfield, appearing on various television screens. The start screen for Zombie Apocalypse features the test screen with a zombified Indian head.