![]() Poag claimed to have known the people who carried out the signal intrusion-they were allegedly part of a bunch of hackers in suburban Chicago: We could do this at any time, were we not busy watching pirated copies of the old Clutch Cargo cartoon and getting spanked by fly-swatters.” Indeed, the spirit of the Headroom signal intrusion-though admittedly silly on the surface-is very much anarchistic. Robot, but when you think about it, they look a lot like “Anonymous” videos. ![]() Indeed, not only does it seem to be visually referenced by the “fsociety” broadcasts in the TV series Mr. The “Max Headroom Incident” (as it’s now come to be known) is part of an unrelated trifecta of legendary signal interruptions the others were the 1977 Southern Television broadcast interruption, in which “aliens” claimed to take over the signal, and the 1986 “Captain Midnight” case, involving a message protesting HBO’s recent fee hikes.īut it is definitely the Headroom broadcast that has captured the imagination of the public all the way to the present day. The broadcast hijackers were never found or identified, though apparently they had managed to briefly break through the signal earlier that evening during sports coverage at a different Chicago station. Then, back to your regularly-scheduled broadcast of Doctor Who: The whole segment clocks in at around a minute-and-a-half. Bend over and have his naked buttocks spanked by a woman in a French Maid outfit holding a flyswatter.Humming the theme to the 1950s children’s program Clutch Cargo.Hold up a Pepsi can and say “Catch the Wave” (Max Headroom was promoting Coca-Cola at the time).The faux Headroom goes on to do the following, among other things: Instead of Matt Frewer’s dulcet-yet-stuttery tones, however, there is the gleeful screech of an electronic falsetto. ![]() What followed was a rough mock-up of the popular Max Headroom show, complete with a sheet of moving corrugated metal in the background and of course a suited man in a Headroom mask. A broadcast of Doctor Who on Chicago PBS station WTTW was interrupted at around 11:15 PM with what’s known as a “broadcast signal intrusion.” Basically: somebody hijacked the television signal and replaced it with their own programming. This actually happened on the evening of November 22, 1987. Then your television program is replaced with a weird figure in a mask who speaks in an eerie, tinny voice. Suddenly, static crackles across your screen. Picture it: You’re watching Doctor Who on the TV set (just minding your own business). He held up a can of Pepsi, flipped off the camera with a dildo, sung a line from a Temptations song, hummed an old animated TV show theme, and exposed his butt so that a lady could hit it with a flyswatter.“I made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds.” (Max Headroom, if you’re not familiar, was a weird stuttering character in an 80s TV show he was supposed to be a computer AI, although he was played by a man in makeup.) It was a simple signal hijacking: you broadcast your own signal with more power than the actual feed, and you take over the airwaves for a time.ĭuring an episode of Doctor Who on a different channel two hours later, the hijacker returned. The first phase was minor: 28 seconds of an evening news broadcast was replaced with a masked figure silently bopping back and forth while a corrugated iron background rotated behind him. There have been a few significant TV signal intrusions – including one notable 1986 incident in which an HBO satellite signal was hijacked in order to protest rising cable prices – but the Max Headroom intrusion has to be one of the most… unique, I guess? Unknown, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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