![]() Imagine an age before YouTube videos and on-demand streaming. You’re up late watching reruns on a cold, cloudy night in Chicago. ![]() On air is the Doctor Who classic “ Horror of Fang Rock”-one of the scariest episodes in the British science fiction show’s run. Just as the plot turns, your television fuzzes out and Max Headroom, the 1980s fictional AI icon appears-and he’s staring right at you. ![]() Or at least, someone wearing a latex Max Headroom mask is. Like an amateur broadcast from another dimension, this mad Max Headroom imposter shuffles in front of some spinning corrugated sheet metal, a homemade effect mimicking the television character’s signature wavy backdrops. The audio is distorted, but you can make out some murmurs about a “masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds.” A little over a minute later, the interruption ends and you’re back watching Doctor Who, wondering what… just… happened? You’d just witnessed what would later be regarded as the greatest unsolved mystery in pirate television. The event, technically called a signal intrusion, was the second that night on 22 November 1987. Not once, but twice, the masked Max Headroom and his fly-swatting accomplice had hijacked the airwaves, and decades later it’s safe to say: they got away with it. These pirates got away with stealing a signal boost. Their dish antenna placed high above the city, the theory goes, overpowered the TV stations’ feeds on their way to the receivers that would amplify them across the Windy City.Īnd, thanks to those viewers hoping to record an old Dr. Who episode, the intrusion was captured for posterity. An important media artifact-unique among the mostly unrecorded history of pirate broadcasting.įrom ephemeral radio stations playing rave music without a license, to the latest streaming sites with their strange and iterating domain names, examples of piracy are hard to discover the pirates are trying to hide. Clips like this one help offer us a glimmer of the pirate acts hidden in the shadows of property and propriety.īut even still we’re left to wonder: what was the point? The pranksters didn’t use their ill-gotten attention to evangelize. ![]() The clip’s boyish bum jokes epitomize the ambiguous politics of piracy. There also was a TV intrusion in the 80s Poland done by the underground Solidarity movement, done with a homebuilt transmitter and a ZX spectrum computer, performed from the rooftop not far from where I live (theres a plaque on the building). Was the interruption a protest against commercial culture, or a crafty prank? The meaning is just noise, but ultimately the noise can be so compelling. We begin to imagine things as we stare into that TV static: a Max Headroom unwilling to sell corporate culture, a public broadcaster willing to bare ass, and pirates catching the airwaves.įor a kid like me growing up online, the prank had all the ingredients of pirate lore. Even proper TV stations sometimes still did that stuff live in 78.The 1985 Max Headroom movie portrays the character as an artificial intelligence gone rogue-devoted to fighting the subliminal advertising techniques deployed by its corporate masters. It would have been a lot easier to to that live than to record it. But it's very unlikely, there's just a lot that would have to go right.Įven the people who ran the station probably never had copies of the interesting bits - the introductions to programs, the unique material. It's not totally impossible - there are examples of VCR recordings from 76 and 77 on YouTube. Probably a lot of pre VHS recordings were thrown out because the effort to play them want wasn't seen as worth it. ![]() It takes a lot more effort to play an Umatic tape than it does a VHS since the difference in how long they were on the market is so huge. It's also too early for VHS, so would have to be UMatic or another early format. Even tapes were expensive, enough that people would only record things they were very interested in. Even though millions saw the message, authorities fined MacDougall only 5,000. MacDoughall, a satellite dish salesman, interrupted the transmission of HBO with a written message criticizing the company for preventing non-subscribers from receiving the stations' transmission. It was so early that home vcrs were an expensive luxury item. The Max Headroom hack happened just one year after John R. ![]()
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