Home viewers' screens went black for about fifteen seconds, then displayed the footage of a person wearing a Max Headroom mask and sunglasses rocking erratically in front of a rotating corrugated metal panel that mimicked the real Max Headroom's geometric background effect accompanied by a staticky and garbled buzzing sound. The first intrusion took place during the sports segment of WGN-TV's The Nine O'Clock News. The video ended with the person's exposed buttocks being spanked by a woman with a flyswatter before normal programming resumed.ĭespite an FCC investigation and decades of speculation, the culprits were never caught and have not been positively identified.
REDDIT MAX HEADROOM SERIES
The masked person spoke throughout this intrusion and made references to Max Headroom's endorsement of Coca-Cola, the TV series Clutch Cargo, WGN anchor Chuck Swirsky and "all the greatest world newspaper nerds", a reference to WGN's call letters, which stand for " World's Greatest Newspaper". The second incident occurred around two hours later during PBS member station WTTW's broadcast of Doctor Who and lasted for about 90 seconds. During this intrusion, the person in the mask swayed erratically and was accompanied by a strange buzzing noise. The first incident took place during the sports segment of independent TV station WGN-TV's 9:00 p.m. The Max Headroom signal hijacking occurred on the night of November 22, 1987, when the television broadcasts of two stations in Chicago, Illinois, United States, were hijacked in an act of broadcast piracy by a video of an unidentified person wearing a Max Headroom mask and costume, accompanied by distorted audio and a corrugated metal panel swiveling in the background to mimic Max Headroom's geometric background effect. State television stations across the Soviet Union were frequently taken over by pirate transmissions that overpowered transmissions from relay stations.The unidentified hijacker dressed to resemble Max Headroom in the pirate broadcast And in 1986, supporters of the Polish labor movement Solidarność hijacked state television stations with printed anti-government messages. The first major one took place in 1977, when someone interrupted the audio of an ITV Southern Television broadcast from a tower in Hannington, England, with a message purported to be from an alien representative of an "Intergalactic Association." The message warned, "All your weapons of evil must be removed… You have but a short time to learn to live together in peace."Īs with the Chicago takeover, the Hannington broadcast tower was connected by a wireless uplink, not a hard-wired connection.
REDDIT MAX HEADROOM FULL
But the WTTW takeover lasted a full 90 seconds, and the pirate TV broadcast's audio, while distorted, was audible to anyone who happened to be tuned in.īroadcast intrusions were not rare in the 1980s. In the case of the WGN news broadcast, engineers were able to change the frequency used in the uplink to the John Hancock tower after a brief interruption, and the audio from the pirate transmission was drowned in static. The hack was made possible by the analog television broadcast technology of the day-the attacker was able to overpower the signals sent by the television studios to a broadcast antenna atop the John Hancock building in Chicago with his or her own signals. Further Reading Hackers set off Dallas’ 156 emergency sirens over a dozen times
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