Not sure what this is for? It appears when I play certain VHS tapes that display on the tv. Does anyone know what its original meaning was?

Here are photos I have of playing a VHS tape with a weird color thing on screen before it actually started, the red light turned on during this and then shut off after the colors disappeared: https://imgur.com/a/thGGoGN

I think this is what you have.

http://www.videokarma.org/showthread.php?t=253284

VIR present probably what it is.
Most modern JCP sets were built by GE & Panasoni.
GE was the first to use VIR @1978. Panny & a few others
also did.
Cant tell who made the set. Would need a goiod shoy of the back
or a chassis nudie.

73 Zeno:smoke:
LFOD !

That's a GE set. It has VIR, which hardly ever worked right - the set could be fooled by all sorts of things into thinking a VIR signal was present, and it would then interpret other information present in the signal as color data and attempt to "adjust" the picture based on the erroneous data. We had one of these when I was growing up, and the local ABC affiliate never did figure out how to make it work right - oftentimes you'd see the local news anchors with navy blue faces. There's a toggle switch you can use to turn it off.

I recall a certain early '80s Hitachi-made GE VCR that had a VIR stripper circuit that would insert a black bar over the VIR signal in the vertical interval so it wouldn't cause problems with the GE TVs. Seems the wow-flutter speed variations of the tape would play havoc on the color playback so they just got rid of it. There was an alignment procedure for that and the black bar insertion position could be aligned to kill the Copyguard on prerecorded tapes. :D

I had relatives years ago who owned a GE color set with VIR. To the best of my knowledge, however, they never used the VIR function, so the feature remained off from the day they bought the TV until they replaced it several years later with a Zenith 25" console. I honestly don't think they even knew the VIR switch was on the front panel; however, even if they did know, they may have had no idea what VIR was, so they simply left the switch off and forgot about it. All they cared about was that the TV worked well enough so they could watch the six local TV stations in our area near Cleveland, which it did--from the day they bought it until they replaced it with the Zenith console. They couldn't have cared less about fancy features such as VIR, but that was understandable since they were non-technical, older people; as long as the TV worked, as I said, that was all that mattered to them.

I believe VIR meant (vertical interval reference).