In 1997, after several years of being known on the air as "Fox 32" (although it began to visually de-emphasize references to channel 32 on-air in 1993), the station changed its on-air branding to "Fox Chicago". This was due to the perceived embarrassment of being on a UHF analog channel in the third-largest market in the United States, especially considering that The WB was carried on VHF station WGN-TV. For much of this period, WFLD was the only Fox owned-and-operated station that did not use the conventional "Fox (channel number)" branding standardization, even though most Chicagoans still referred to WFLD as "Fox 32" or "channel 32" (WFLD's Philadelphia sister station WTXF-TV utilized this same practice for nine years after Fox purchased that station from the Paramount Stations Group in 1994).