#MAX HEADROOM VIDEO SERIES#
"Max" sang the phrase " Your love is fading" hummed part of the theme song to the 1959 animated series Clutch Cargo and said, "I still see the X!" (This was a reference to the last episode of that show, which is sometimes misheard as "I stole CBS"). The figure then ran through a series of quick comments and song snippets interspersed with excited noises and exclamations. The masked figure made a comment about "nerds", apparently called WGN sportscaster Chuck Swirsky a "frickin' liberal", held up a can of Pepsi while saying " Catch the wave" (a slogan from an ad campaign for Coca-Cola featuring the Max Headroom character), and held up a middle finger inside what appeared to be a hollowed-out dildo. The culprit was the same Max Headroom impersonator, this time speaking with distorted audio.
#MAX HEADROOM VIDEO SERIAL#
That same night, at about 11:20pm, the signal of local PBS station WTTW was interrupted during an airing of the Doctor Who serial " Horror of Fang Rock". Roan then proceeded to restart his report of the day's Chicago Bears game, which had been interrupted by the intrusion. Upon returning to the airwaves, WGN sports anchor Dan Roan commented, "Well, if you're wondering what's happened, so am I", and joked that the computer running the news "took off and went wild". The entire intrusion lasted for about 28 seconds and was cut off when engineers at WGN changed the frequency of the signal linking the broadcast studio to the station's transmitter atop the John Hancock Center. 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.
#MAX HEADROOM VIDEO TV#
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. He was a decade-defining icon, never better represented than in this sardonically witty, adventurous look at society and the place of media within it.The unidentified hijacker dressed to resemble Max Headroom in the pirate broadcast After his “accident,” his mind is uploaded to create the world’s first self-aware, computer-generated TV host: Max Headroom! But will Max bow to his creators? Or will he be the key to his human alter ago bringing down a network superpower?Īble to boast his own international talk show, music videos, countless endorsements and merchandising, the puckish Max Headroom became more than just a character on television. So when Network 23s star reporter, Edison Carter, uncovers a deadly secret that could shake up the dominion the station has over its viewers, the only option is to eliminate Carter before he can make his story public.
Whoever controls the airwaves controls the dystopic world in which they broadcast.
Television networks battle one another in an unrelenting ratings war.
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