There should be an intro so relevant to the topic that when it's finally over there's only a page of bland, superficial coverage of the actual main topic, but Simon won't know that it's all the intro until the very end when it says something like, "Now we get to the reason we're here today..." Silence. Cue WTF moment.
@@ThatWriterKevin don't worry... part of the stipulations should involve Simon actually reading the full intro on the show, and not just skipping ahead to the next header--or just cutting off recording after a certain amount of times Yes, Danny is trying to get around this by simply no longer including headers... but I suspect this is going to result in Simon applying a small measured amount of "discipline" to Danny
I was in the Army at the time. Rumor was it had been a technician from the Navy base just north of Chicago. At the time Cold War era necessities' required every broadcast station in the US allow national emergency broadcasts. The Technician(s) being teenagers working mostly unsupervised had plenty of time to get bored. Hence the crude humor, halfway decent set design and the Annie Oakley character. Not long after these incidents occurred base broadcast towers, EBS tone keys and installation studios were placed much higher on physical security checklists DOD wide. The Navy/DOD of course never ever made any official or public statements.
@RGC2005 damned whippersnappers. Up until last year, we [my husband, our eldest son & myself] had lived next to the community pool & a high school, with football field & track field. Apparently, someone was pretty lax with the keys to one of the buildings where the announcements were "broadcast" from. And late at night, when some pimple-faced ne'er-do-well would gain access to the microphones, speakers, volume knobs, etc. and just make loud and/or rude noises.. at 2-3 a.m... with no consequences at all. In a snobby, suburb. On a weeknight. Totally cool on the weekend, and if they had played music [any music would be better than garbled trash talk] it would've been absolutely okay, imho. People seem to not know how to pull a prank anymore. This prank doesn't seem so bad, tbh.. although it's a bit idiotic to pull a prank involving something at a federal level [communication airwaves _do_ operate under the ever "watchful" eyes of our governments]. Almost a death wish, really.
@@St.Linguini_of_Pesto Back then the internet did not exist so the answer for a trouble maker was to ship them to another base. Once I got into doing physical security inspections the lack of knowledge and concern for the older analog communications equipment always shocked me. There are locked doors on every military installation nobody has a key for or knows you does.
@@RGC-gn2nm Internet is way older than that, but the public didn't really know it existed (apart from uni students) prior to -95 or thereabouts when the web was the first reason why anyone public would ever find a use for it?! (most people today still thinks that the "internet" is just www...) Arpanet was born in 1969 which spawned the first edition of internet. (a bit later the US military had their own net called milnet, much later connected to internet. White Sands had really poor security back in the days... Just saying... hehehehe! ) Prior to 1982 you used v.24/x.25 until TCP/IP became the new standard to communicate via internet. Those were the days when I used a 300 baud modem to (not exactly legally) connect to the internet via a hacked modem in callback mode (to make it free - for me that is ;) ) to gain access to the internet from my bedroom as a teenager, hacking away through the night... Those were the days! Decades before spam and crap was invented! Anyhow, just an anecdote from an early user of internet years before the Max Headroom incident happened! ;) Your army story sounds like the most plausible I've heard so far since it happened, unless inside shenanigans! I hope they come forward one day just to set the record straight, but on the other hand that would kill the legend...
The actual culprit is more likely to be a former employee of WGN with an ax to grind against that network. Or it could have been one of the local hackers in the Phone Phreak culture of hacking with some expertise in broadcast tech.
I was at Benning at the time. Yea talk about an instant shift at our broadcast site! For a while there only 4 people were even allowed near the studio. It took about 6 months to calm down a bit. Even then one had to sign in to use the ham radio gear at the site.
This is my absolute favourite unsolved mystery. I desperately want those involved to come forward just before they die just so the story can finally be fully known and told.
I think someday someone is going to be going through their dearly departed Grandad's possessions and ask Reddit about this goofy looking mask they found in his attic...
I grew up in Chicago, & caught the one when they hacked WGN during The Bears game highlights on the news, & it was 1 if the weirdest things I've ever seen or had happen to me in my life, & that's saying a lot! 💯 I really want to know before I die who did this, the rumor in Chicago was it was this hacker that was part of a collective, but did this alone, he used to make the things to hack phones to make free calls
I saw both of those live that night ... and it was a mind-blower to have the second one come on. It's a perennial news story here in Chicago, with somebody using it when they don't have anything better to write about. I have an acquaintance who is currently around 80, who I suspect might know who did the Max Headroom thing (as he has deep contacts in old anarchist and tech circles), but I've never asked him about it ... if I run into him again, I might have to.
I saw the Max Headroom incident live as I was a huge Dr.Who fan. I even recorded it. The ART BELL SHOW was broadcast on many different AM stations. They all received a sat signal from Art bells property in Pahrump Nevada.
The theory is Exactly what Simon said. Ch11 received their signal from a local source. The theory is that they overpowered the transmission to Ch11's receiver. It could have been done from the right office window with a dish made from a metal saucer sled.
@@salty6pence672 Exactly right. Our rural neighborhood was getting severe interruptions by two different unlicensed HAM operators (one in the 70's and another one in the 80's) with a hotfoot that would loudly step all over channel WFMY 2's audio transmission.
Blast from the past! I'm from Minnesota, and I remember OK soda. It was available in the mid-90's. I liked it. The can art was really cool, like something from a graphic novel. It tasted like a combination of citrus and cola. I think most people tasted it and said, "This stuff is ok", because it wasn't around for long. Thanks for the remembrance, Kevin!
They had a large stack of free OK soda at a local gas station. The stuff sat their for weeks. I recall a friend bringing it to parties, but nobody really liked it. There was a lot of weird ideas surrounding OK soda. Likely because of the marketing campaign, and lack of what it's supposed to be. A friend of mine claimed that each can had a different flavor based on the can design (there were several different ones). The advertising campaign surrounding it was an anti-advertising advertising campaign. The firm was convinced Gen-X was so over-exposed to advertising, they decided to create an advertising campaign that poked fun at advertising. Which was pretty brilliant, but it didn't work of course. Which... at least with a my friends GF backfired. She got oddly offended at the anti-advertising advertising. As if the advertisers were really trying to fool us, and they really WEREN'T the cool, hip, anti-advertising people they said they were... but a product of the coca-cola corporation!. Shocking! Yeah... we laughed too. Its just soda with a clever marketing campaign, and it all ultimately failed rather spectacularly.
@@stevesether It because they didn't realize that the ones that would respond to it were a couple years too young to have their own money to spend on soda
An Orange, plastic guy with really weird blonde hair constantly rambling and blipping incoderantly on a television? I think that's already been rebooted...
He was vacuous and annoying in the late 80's, now, he would be just one fucking thing too much. We just can't handle a Max Headroom AND the Kardashians. Let that irritating twat rest.
ah Max Headroom, what a throwback. I remember arguing with people that he wasn't CGI. Even at that time, I knew it wasn't possible to get that kind of render.
@@jamesoverholt878 A corpse who caused the Berlin Wall to be taken down and the Soviet Union to collapse. We could use a corpse like that, rather than the one that falls up stairs and off of bicycles.
@@Frankie5Angels150 Reagan was not president when either of those things happened. Chernobyl broke the USSR Reagan was just an old racist who sold arms to terrorists it's probably a good thing his brain was gone by the 2nd term so he didn't do more damage
Also a night owl and spot on with Art Bell. Coast to coast was the best way to stay awake on a boring night shift. Art really made the show! He had the perfect personality for the show. Apparently he lived near me in that “undisclosed location in Az”. 😂😂😂😂😂
Living in the UK I'd never caught the real Coast to Coast, however the video game Prey, (released in 2006 - not to be confused with the later one) featured fictional segments from Coast to Coast voiced by the real Art Bell, assuming his wit in the real thing was anything like those fictional segments, I'd agree with you.
As a child on the late 80s and early 90s, I remember a Max Headroom type presenter on a kids game show that took place in a fictional abandoned high rise block, where were the kids were in a lift that stopped on seemingly random floors with various puzzles and 'wacky' games and they had to survive and earn points to win prizes. The presenter only appeared on a very small screen inside the lift.
It was very easy to do back in those days. All he did was overtake the very weak Microwave signal. Today it would be impossible to do. Some day he will tell his story but as of now, he's still working in the biz. He was however the Ham Radio Convention in Orlando this year. That's a clue
baseline WGN etc. tech in 87 was all analogue right? i was born in 76 and back before the flips from 1G to 2G to 3G and the advent of DSL... almost all the TV and cable networks were analogue and the only digital was satellite dishes... the huuuuge ones that took up almost a whole car's worth of dish space in your yard at home and you had to aim them manually or had a small electric motor pointing the dish to various satellites in orbit to catch their signals. but they weren't highly scrambled right? basically, anybody with a good PC and decent skills in decryption back then could catch any satellite signal 'up there' that appeared over the horizon to your home's location. BBC and SKY and all the other Euro networks and some even from India or Asia or South America. so these freakers or crackers wouldn't need crazy mad skills or a huge generator and a mega powerful transmitter antenna etc. right? one camera, a sound board, a mic, output to their tuning and amplification system... point the antenna at WGN's main array and poof... they would hop their signal onto WGN's and override or even piggyback it? it has been a long time since i dug into radio broadcast technology of the legacy tech era...
The problem with playing music was determining viewership for ratings, and ultimately commercial rates. AC Nielsen had people manually record what shows they watched at a specific time, but it didn’t fit a music variety format.
I'm a night owl. It's nice because the phone isn't ringing (mostly) and my husband goes to bed early because he gets up early for work. When I was still working I was the one who always volunteered for off shifts, so I could sleep as late as I wanted and no one thought it was odd, especially my mother.
The biggest tragedy was Hollywood allowing Jim Carrey to steal Matt Frewer's "Max Headroom" and "Crazy Guy" personas and then threatened to blacklist Matt if he spoke up.
Man I miss that time. I suppose the other thing that was unique about Max Headroom, it was created on a home computer specifically an Amiga. Technology may be far more advanced today but the 80s felt so cutting edge.
"Technology may be far more advanced today".. true, true.. but what about us idiots glued to tiny glass screens, eagerly awaiting a magical tone to inform us that we, each of us, are "real" & "significant"?
In high school we used to listen to Coast to Coast AM and get stoned. The best night was Sunday when they opened up the phone lines. The callers they got were very interesting to put it mildly
I remember when this happened. I wasn't watching at the time but it was a big mystery back in the day that people talked about. He's basically the FCC's equivalent of DB Cooper. The mystery man who got away. Its so creepy lol
I can narrow it down. In that time period, there are only two groups of people who would possess the knowledge to obtain or manufacture the required equipment: Professional broadcast engineers, and ham radio operators. Professional engineers can sneak equipment from the scrap heap. Hams are inventive, and often build their own equipment from components up.
There was a very large freaking community at the time. Radio operators and broadcast engineers would be far from the only ones to know how to hijack an analogue signal. The tech used is outright primitive by today's standards and it was the kind of things you'd learn in shop class in school at the time.
As a Gen Xer, I can honestly say I've never heard of OK soda so I grabbed this for everyone, including myself: **OK Soda is a discontinued soft drink created by The Coca-Cola Company in 1993 that courted the American Generation X demographic with unusual advertising tactics, including neo-noir design, chain letters and deliberately negative publicity.**
They had quite a lot of that in the 90s, come to think of it. There was Josta, Chaos Iced Tea, Fruitopia, and a bunch of other stuff that didn't last long. Trying to be all hip for the youngsters. I spent the 90s working in a store and I have a great memory lol
@@PinkyJujubean I remember a soda called "Surge" it was a citrus soda, so competed with Sprite and Mountain Dew. Back in the late 90s, the commercials would feature a bunch of skater punk looking guys, all jumping over couches and other obstacles to get to the bottle of soda. I think it was advertised as having EXTRA carbs, and might have been the first beverage touted as an energy drink.
I remember this from my childhood. I was about five or six. My mother was watching Doctor Who but had gotten up to do something. Upon returning she was upset and asked me why I changed the channel. I hadn’t. I was so confused. I was I trouble for something but didn’t know why for many many years later. My mom never became upset with me prior to this incident but clearly she loved Doctor Who more.
I was like 7 years old living in northwest Indiana when this happened and I saw the WTTW incident. I remember watching Doctor Who with my uncle and being super freaked out by the interruption. My uncle made me leave the room when it got too weird. lol
@@eadweard. If he had the right sort of equipment he could have hijacked the microwave feed from the studio to the transmitter by transmitting his own microwave feed from a location closer to the transmitter than the studio overpowering the legal feed.
With the right equipment this sounds probable. pirate radio stations are a thing, and intercepting/interrupting a signal takes more expertise and preparation, but a former employee is just the kind of person to have both.
@@sherylcascadden4988 Other incidents like this have happened, just in a less sophisticated way. In the 1970s a prankster hijacked an ITN news broadcast by overpowering the off-air signal the Hannington transmitter rebroadcast on a different channel, allowing them to make a fake alien broadcast, although that was only the audio channel, not the video channel. Whoever the Max Headroom prankster was, he definitely had technical qualifications and was able to use professional equipment.
I lived in Nebraska when OK soda came out. I don't remember what it tasted like, only that I really liked it. There was a phone number on the can that you could call to hear their manifesto. It was a recording and it was funny. I was disappointed when I could no longer get OK soda. I hadn't thought about that in years.
I always thought it tasted like a when you'd mix all the flavors of soda on the fountain, but with more orange soda than the others. And yeah, I remember the phone number, but I recall it being a "leave your stories of OK soda".
I never heard about o.k. soda till I saw it on the show. I grew up in Redneck ville N. Florida. ,Thats why I live in C.A.. Now, Could you tell me more about it. Thank you
I live in Chicago and was twelve when this happened. It didn't start to become a big deal until the national news started to make a big deal about it. I never saw it myself but knew a few kids who did, they all thought it was weird but nothing to take seriously. Pirate broadcasts like this weren't new, but this is the one that most people remember.
"This was such a strange story." Tell me about it. I was in my teens & it was a massive event. And then nothing. Just nothing. Until 10 or so years later when there was short program about how absolutely no evidence or motive had come to light. "Strange" doesn't do it justice.
I mean it's not as strange as a lot of other mysteries that are really weird as to what happened and how. This was pretty much a broadcast hijacking prank. The only mystery is who was behind it and obviously this isn't one of the things that someone will willing to come out and say (and prove) "yeah we did it" because I'm pretty sure there will be legal consequences even decades later. It's kind of like that TV head guy that was dropping old TVs on people's porches, the point was that it happened and will be remembered, not as much as who was behind it. Another possible outcome (even tho it's probably less likely) is like the technicians said that it's almost guaranteed that it was an inside job because at that time you need all that equipment and technical skills that can be done only inside the station and if the TV station did internal investigation they may have found who is behind it but didn't want to release the information because it would make the station look bad so they made them sign NDC document and if they ever released the information they will be sued.
Surprised that there was no mention of the fact that the can "Max" holds up while he recites the New Coke slogan was a *Pepsi* can. Some cutting satire there!
Everybody realizes (from the TV show's opening credits) that the character's name came from Edison Carter's dying memory of seeing a sign that read "MAX HEADROOM 2.3 METERS." Very few people, however, caught that "Network 23" was generously financed by a Chinese investor named "Ped Xing." (Which *can be* a proper, Chinese name, but-on American streets-can also be an acronym for "PEDESTRIAN CROSSING.")
I remember the original movie that was made in England and then eventually NBC or whoever picked it up. The movie had a lot of rude things in it that you could do on cable and probably in England on the air but they couldn't do that in the USA so they toned it down a bit and brought some of the original actors over to the USA and ran with it. I still really liked it but it wasn't quite the same. Computers back then were mostly pretty low powered so you'd get glitches like that trying to watch videos or play games unless you had a high end pc.
I moved from Tucson, Arizona to Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1994. I was 14. When I started looking around, there was this wonderful, mysterious product on store shelves. It was stark and uncanny in its presentation. I was immediately enthralled. I also immediately realized that there were multiple packaging art designs, and I was delighted. I began collecting the various packages and enjoying the flavor of the contained soda. I could describe the flavor as “red, but a good red. A little towards orange.” And then there were the TV adverts. I was 14, had just moved to a huge city, and it was 1994. This was exactly what I had hoped for moving out of the desert and into the city. This is also how I learned about test markets. And that some products don’t make it through testing. And that my las OK Soda was already in the past.
Really well done video that summarized this Max Headroom broadcast hijack incident -- I love the analysis summary that poses theories -- Lots of new stuff on this vid not on the other 'Max H' vids that got me hooked and obsessing over this weird event. Thanks Simon W. (And team).
Honestly, with all that mentioning of Aliens and Probing in the preamble, I thought this was going to turn into an episode on the "Southern Television Broadcast Interruption" (aka the "Ashtar Galactic Command Incident") of 1977 - another infamous and unsolved broadcast interruption/signal hi-jacking.. honestly, you could have done both interruptions in the same episode, given the similar time frame and how both stories have such little investigative meat on the bone 😅
Re: the Coast to Coast radio show: Art really wasn't subtle at all, in fact he was a self proclaimed skeptic, and I remember episodes where he actually kicked GUESTS off his show. George, the guy who took his place on the other hand, he took the show in the other direction, humoring everybody that was on there pretending to take them seriously no matter how ridiculous it sounded. it's possible that Art was hamming up the skepticism bit, because that actually helps the show keep some credibility. but it was really obvious that George is playing up to the conspiracy theorists and alien chasers. the last straw for me with that show was when on one episode George had on one of those "ghost whispers." I don't know if you would have seen it there but here in the US on daytime TV the guy named Jonathan Edwards had a show and he was a "ghost whisperer." people would sit in his audience and hope that he picked them and he did things in a way that made it very hard to tell how he was getting his information. the first trick is that you know anybody who's there for that is there for that BECAUSE somebody important to them had recently died. and odds are even if they hadn't there would be somebody in their life who had died at some point. the next thing that makes it work is that somebody who's there because somebody died wants to talk to that person one last time probably because they're guilty about something. so in this case the "psychic" task is to get them to lead him. this lady did the exact same thing that he did but very poorly I could hear exactly what she was doing to lead the callers into giving her answers, but George pretended to be amazed through the whole thing! it was so obvious! and that's the last time I chose to listen to Coast to Coast. Art Bell on the other hand has his voice in a video game called Prey that was actually pretty good for its time
A syndicated show like Art Bell would have a studio that sends their program to other stations to rebroadcast. The studio can send this over the internet, a phone bank, or even send it to a satellite company to rebroadcast it and have the local radio stations use their own equipment to pick the signal up and rebroadcast it. The AM radio part isn't sent by satellite, but the show was sent via satellite.
I used to catch art bell from time to time. Specifically in the winter when radio signals would carry up into canada. It never really felt to me like he bought into any of it. I remember one of his callers adamantly insisting that star wars was real and that it took place in the andromeda system. Apparently it was just beamed into George Lucas's mind for him to share with all of us.
Hey Simon, this channel of yours seems like a good one to cover a weird phenomenon I only recently learned of, in Scotland there is a bridge where dogs apparently feel the overwhelming desire to jump off the bridge, sometimes to their death, sometimes just with severe leg injuries. Various theories have been put forth, like a nearby naval base having submarines using sonar and messing with the dogs' hearing and perceptions, and one about how mink live in the area, and their urine is a powerful stimulant to a dog's nose, and gives it the overwhelming urge to chase after/hunt the mink. Sound technicians with recording equipment debunked the sonar one, and there are other bridges where mink live, so....? It is called Overton Bridge.
@@ThatWriterKevin After posting this comment, I watched another video about it. That one said it was basically 10% true, 90% hoax caused by poor journalism. According to them, only a dozen or so dogs have jumped, rather than the 400 to 600 others state. They blame the Daily Mail for starting the story, without citing a source for the numbers involved, and others for quoting the Daily Mail without independent research. They still mentioned the mink theory though. Ironically, after accusing others of lazy journalism, their video featured the same 5 second clip of a black mink scampering across some rocks that other videos I have seen do, when talking about the mink theory. PS, apologies to any Scottish or UK residents out there reading this, I misspelled "Overtoun" as 'Overton".
I've been a pirate radio creator, with all the equipment and locations being needed to broadcast at such a level, Television is the toughest, we've looked into it... this was "some bored technicians" or actually from the station itself to gain more viewers.
Bored technicians matches Simon's comment (which I agree with) that this seems like someone realised they could interrupt a broadcast, decided they had to do it, and then struggled to figure out what to interrupt it with.
I doubt the station itself would've filed a report with the FCC had this been an inside job. Not particularly good for business. The FCC doesn't have a sense of humor. Personally, I don't see why this would have been particularly difficult given enough money and nerve. The frequencies allocated to individual stations for these purposes might even be a matter of public record.
OMG you guys referenced OK soda!! One of my friends was engaged to the creator's daughter. I met them in like 2005 and during a party they mentioned OK soda and she let us know about her dad's involvement. I also actually liked OK soda and they used to run a call in line where you could leave a message saying how much you loved OK soda. We used to troll the call in line and make up dumb skits lol.
Forner radio person here: there were definitely programs received from a satellite source and broadcast over local radio. It required a specialty receiver which either recorded the program for later broadcast or passed it on through for real-time play. I assume it's still a thing.
The Art Bell incident will ring very familiar if you're a fan of the band Tool. They used the audio of the Area 51 caller for the last track on their album _Lateralus,_ entitled "Faaip De Oiad" ('Voice of God' in Enochian). The album ends at the point in the call when the original broadcast suddenly went off-air.
Ho-lee hell. I’ve listened to that album for 22 years and didn’t know this is where that came from. I’ve always just thought it was a voice actor (which it probably was.) Thanks tor decoding _that_ unknown for me. Edit: just watched the next two minutes of the video to see it was a voice actor. Patience is a virtue.
The tuner causes the radio to receive just one sine wave frequency (in this case, 680,000 hertz). Now the radio has to extract the DJ's voice out of that sine wave. This is done with a part of the radio called a detector or demodulator. In the case of an AM radio, the detector is made with an electronic component called a diode. A diode allows current to flow through in one direction but not the other, so it clips off one side of the wave.
If Max here had a beef or a point to make, he did an asses-up job of getting that across. At least CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT did it to protest cable fees and straight out said as much. Really, this weirdo is basically just your average internet troll... before the internet.
Well, that was fun, Simon. I was around in the '80s, but don't remember much about Max Headroom. I'm a native Chicagoan, also and don't recall anything of the hijinks over at WGN and WTTW. It must not have been much of a thing when it happened, because the whole thing came and went with barely a ripple, at the time. What I can tell you is that WGN radio had an extraordinarily powerful transmitter, but I don't know if that means anything to the TV side of things.
I had a total of 4 OK soda 12 packs before it disappeared. I remember both shows that Max had, the talk show and the sci-fi series. I was a wee child during those shows and it did seem like the future is now back then especially to my primary school brain.
I thought there was effectively 4 parts to the Max Headroom show, 1st the sci fi storyline of how max headroom came into being, 2nd the original music video show with only max and the music videos (IMO the best season had videos such as Paul Hardcastles "19" and Belouis Some's "Imagination" ----- banned for explicit sexual content & nudity) followed by seasons 2 & 3 where the show took a comedic talk show direction not to my taste as it felt somewhat forced and contrived also the lack and cut short music vids (i wanted something more akin to MTV party zone with funny segues than a talk show) disinterested many original fans, I've still got the max headroom book and some of season 1 on vhs tape in a cupboard which is good for a chuckle
Simon saying “I wasn’t born in 1985” was just the kick to the testicles I needed today. Geez I’m old. Edit: I am old enough and Minnesotan enough to live in an Okay Soda test market! Memorialized in the song “Smells like Okay Soda” by Dillinger Four. What up, Kevin?
@@ThatWriterKevin Same! I was just excited about the Okay Soda reference… which probably runs counter to the whole Okay Soda ethos. Nice work on the episode.
4:30 I 100% remember listening to that live! The satellite lost geostationary lock with the ground.... That like never happens. Art broadcast from his home in Nevada over satellite and all the syndicated stations picked it up from satellite for rebroadcast over am/fm.
@@r66fplaysgames I guess ya it does happen... But the odds of that happening at that moment in that broadcast... IIRC There were like a dozen or so broadcasts impacted.
Ok soda seems like such a brain blaze segment waiting to happen. I don't know the full story, but I seem to recall it being Coke's failed attempt at seeming punk and anti capitalist, the result missing the mark completely
I wrote about it (Along with the McPizza and Starbucks' beer flavoured coffee) over on Sideprojects, thought BB would've been a better fit. I don't think OK was a failure, just ahead of its time. They thought they were targeting a specific market, but it turned out the one that their campaign resonated with was slightly younger than they expected, which also meant we were too young to have jobs and buy the soda.
I was in a test market for OK Soda (Minneapolis) and was 12-14 at the time. We all loved it. It tasted like a mix of coke, orange, and Dr pepper. It was full of bizarre marketing strategies, including 1-800-I-FEEL-OK, which we used to call all the time. You could leave random messages, and also listen to random messages from other kids. None of us had internet yet, so this blew our minds. It is legendary because it was so potent, and strange, and fleeting.
That's odd. Looking back with a more modern perspective, my inclination is to look more into the woman. Any sort of workplace harassment complaint against that sportscaster that was swept under the rug? I think I'd start there for lack of leads. That could explain the graphic display and the call out.
Simon this is how broadcast television and syndicated radio works: 1. Person in studio does their thing. This is relayed in a delayed feed (usually 3-7 seconds depending) via a satellite dish to a satellite in orbit. 2. This satellite then relays it via encrypted signals to specific dishes in other regions of the earth. Let's say you are broadcasting in Nevada and I am listening in Illinois. The signal gets (for the sake of simplicity) "beamed" to a local affiliate station. This station pays a fee to air the content that you are sending. 3. The signal that is sent and received via satellite is then transcoded into a signal that can be received by the end user (me). This signal (let's say broadcast TV as this is what I know best) is sent out via a specific frequency on a transmitter on the VHF/UHF spectrum within a designated area, as licensed and agreed upon by both the station, carrier, and government, which is then received via an antenna by the end user. 4. The end user has equipment that receives the signal and converts it into something recognizable by the human eye or ear (the image of you and the audio of you speaking). Oftentimes when national channels go down it's the fault of the actual channel. Most of the time this is because of a failure between the studio and the dish. In the winter it's usually because the dish is full of snow and someone has to go up and sweep it out lol. This is how TV works. I hope it was interesting!
always a fun time with you BB/SWverse guys. ;) thanks for the flashback to my childhood in the 80's! now, i gotta go find the Max Headroom TV series online and see if anybody has uploaded it to the grey web. :D i haven't watched that show in years. :D
You don't explain the story behind Max Headroom,it would put this a bit more into context if you did. From memory,so might not be very accurate as I only ever saw the show (film?) the once.He (the character) is an investigative journalist who has some very bad men after him as he's getting too close to exposing what ever it is they do.He is riding a motorbike with a handheld video camera and tries to escape by riding under a car park barrier with a warning sign on it.He doesn't make it though and gets knocked off the bike (I can't remember if he was killed) as the camera captures everything and the very last image seen by it before it's smashed is the barrier sign that says 'Max Headroom .......'
/way/ off. The show's main protectionist is is an investigative journalist, yes, but not Max Headroom. His name is Edison Carter. While trying to escape one of the many powerful people who doesn't want to be investigated he crashes into the barrier and is incapacitated. In order to find out how much Carter knows (and if he is too dangerous to live), the villains of the first episode get the studio's resident uber-nerd to try an experimental procedure dumping his brain into the studio mainframe. This goes wrong: The AI they create is a partial copy with fragmented memory and a personality lacking any inhibitions. The first words it utters are the last thing that Carter saw before being knocked out: "Max Headroom." The words written on the barrier. Carter and his new computerised alter-ego proceed to work together in releasing their evidence, unmasking the corporate conspiracy, and being hailed as heroes... but as the corporation they just exposed was their own employer, they also make powerful enemies on the board, and sow the seeds for a conflict that will return in many later episodes as the board tries to find a way to control their lucrative but dangerously independent employee. The show is a sci-fi political satire, mocking libertarian politics, vapid television and consumer culture. Each episode is generally structured as Carter investigating some new evil corporate plot to make money by highly exploitive and unethical means, backed up by his sidekicks Max (Unstable AI and manipulator of technology) and Theora (Carter's 'controller' at the studio, responsible for real-time communications, monitoring and editing).
I remember that episode of Coast and remember when that happened. Art broadcast from his house in Pahrump Nevada. The satellite lost track of Art's house, hence the feed disruption. Now the thing about Pahrump is that it is next to Area 51, and the facility had a huge influence on Art's show. I knew that this incident would be brought up when Art was first mentioned
I have this on ßetamax somewhere, was recording Doctor Who off cable up in Milwaukee. Was freaked out by the signal intrusion. 36 years later, I work at a TV station, I have no idea who did this, and the WGN old-timers I spoke with either didn't know, or kept mum about it. A couple of notes. The first intrusion on WGN was unsuccessful because they had the audio sub carrier set wrong for one or both of the two audio channels. Also, their Master Control was on the ball and switched to the second STL path. (Studio-Transmitter link) that's how the signal gets from the studio to the transmitter. The WTTW intrusion was successful, both audio sub carriers were set correctly. This was on tape, likely U-Matic as public access television was a relatively new thing in 87. As for being a disgruntled employee, I'm not so sure about that, the frequency a station uses to & from the transmitter is common knowledge between stations. However, the group did have solid knowledge on how TV signals get on the air. Plus they had a microwave transmitter and antenna with them wherever they set up. This took skills to pull off. They had some information but not all. Makes me wonder who Swersky pissed off in the sports news. Everything "Max" says is ragging on WGN, not Doctor Who. The intrusion could be done from an apartment or office building roof in line of sight of the transmitter or a building very close to Sears Tower or the Hancock building. (Can't remember what transmit site either one uses anymore) Both studios are located north west of the transmitter sites downtown.
This is the best comment on the incident that I've seen in years. It really deserves getting a higher position. Everybody should like it to get it up there. By the way, I wonder if they picked the Dr. Who episode because it would be a good time for technicians to take a nap since there wasn't much for them to do.
@@bradleyross2274 my guess is that the perpetrators realized going after prime time television wasn't viable after getting their transmission overridden fairly quickly on the first attempt. Whomever was responsible for the pirated broadcast had some knowledge of the TV industry and figured correctly that only apprentices or whatever they are called in the industry were at the control board on late night PBS. As an 80s/90s kid I remember if PBS went off air due to technical difficulties it was off air for a while lol. I assume when things went wrong they had to call a guy to come in to fix the issue
A bit more technical information on putting television signals on the air. From almost the beginning microwave transmitters and receivers (the same type of signal bouncing around in your microwave oven) the big white vans you see on scene use microwave, as do the links between the studio and the antenna. Live trucks use 2ghz, very close to the frequency in your oven. Studios use 13 or 15ghz (at least in this part of the country) Until 2009 those frequencies were analog (just like your old tv) after 2009 everything was switched to digital. The channels within the three bands are assigned by the FCC, but beyond the channel assignments the rest was up to the station (again, at least around here) so in our case we chose the audio sub carrier frequency (we had four to choose from) 5.8, 6.2, 6.4, & 6.8 this is where my earlier comment comes in. The first signal intrusion had both channels on the wrong frequency. The WTTW intrusion had both set correctly. Also as I said earlier, these people had a most of the knowledge. They knew one of WGNs frequencies but not the sub carriers. They knew (or guessed) WTTWs frequency. This took skills to pull off.
In Back to the Future 2 when he goes to the diner in 2015 and orders a Pepsi from a person on a screen it is from Max Headroom. We have chicken b b beef and pork.
Simon. Thanks for the show. Watch all your channels. This is hands down my favorite. I'm 62 and basically grew up in the 70s and 80s. Brought back all kinds of the weird shit that was the hallmark of that time. Keep up the great work. Already subscribed to all the channel puts out. Looking forward to more great shit. 👍 😆 🤣 😂
Ah Max Headroom, I loved Max Headroom. The commercials and the tv show. It does have a cult following. It's just too bad that it was too far ahead of it's time.
He had the music video on MTV too for quite a while. Sure, small contribution, but it played over and over and over and..... I didn't get to see much of his series but still get overly excited any time Max Headroom comes up.
You know, I just realized that federal communication commission violations have a 5 year statue of limitations. Those guys and their fly girl could confess today, write a book even, they are in the clear 👍🏼
@@jamesoverholt878 LMMFAO, I was curious if anyone else caught that mistake. I believe the term you had intended is: statute. There is a third tee. @The Grinning Viking》Statues tend to not have arms.. or heads.. or clothing... just a beachtowel/curtain/bedsheet, but we know what you meant and, to my knowledge, you are 💯.
it's statute, a statute is a law, a statue is a piece of art depicting a person or a symbol of some kind that reflects a culture, city, organization etc just saying 5 years huh? so if one is good they can hijack a signal and do something random as a prank never do it again, sit for 5 years write a book and get rick off the royalties?? I wish I knew this sooner... my wasted life!
@@Red_Lanterns_Rage Ah! Swipe text got me again. It's as bad as the old auto-correct used to be, back in the day. At least its not saying fuck when I want to talk about ducks anymore. lol
Hello Simon. Nice to be early. Just Binged all your Decoding the unknown Videos :D Sugestion: Make a video about Polibius(The Mysterious Arcade Game). It is interesting stuff and I wold like listen to a take on it from you :D
All I know is the person who was behind it was clearly skilled at hacking a program in order to deliver the video. I honestly have no clue who did it as I don’t know how hacking a TV station (much less hacking in general) is done other than typing code into a program. In fact I was surprised my parents never even heard of this incident and they were in Chicago at the time it happened. I mean my mom knew about the Tylenol murders which did occur in Chicago when she and my dad were living there (this was when they were in their twenties so it was before I was born) so you think she might have heard from a friend of hers in Chicago about it.
My dad knew about Max Headroom, but I am not sure if my mom did. But both (as myself) were born and raised in the Chicagoland area, and they were in the 70's or 80's.
although I didn't do it (and I do NOt know, personally, who did it), I DO know a lot on how it was done and from where it was done... you would be surprised! where? 3300 N. Campbell how? VCR on a timer in a locked room, feeding a 10 watt microwave uplink transmitter connected to a Yagi on a tower, directly-inline from the studios at 54th St Louis to the JHC, using pairs of wires feeding across the facility to another room which was accessible to the outside. Who? a collection of Hams (not the Doctor!) I have discovered the "evidence" being the fly swatter, some hooks and cables and corrugated roof shingle when I opened a long-forgotten locked cabinet well over a year after the incident. I did find other items, but now I can't recall what they were and I did NOt find any dildos or the actual tape. unfortunately, I can not reveal much more as then you could track-down / learn who I am!
My first thought is that a number of television station used a radio signal to get the signal from the recording studio to the transmitter next to the antenna. So they wouldn't have to be more powerful than the broadcast signal (hundreds of thousands of watts) but only be more powerful than the radio link from the recording studio to the transmitter ( a few hundred watts at most). A number of stations had equipment that could do this simply by changing the frequencies on their equipment and aiming a parabolic antenna at the receiving antenna at the transmitter. My understanding was that the FCC identified a number of studios that had the necessary equipment were supposedly unoccupied at the time. So it was probably an inside job at one of those studios, but they weren't able to identify which. There are other possibilities. Now that I think about it, that could also explain why they went after a different television station that night. The station might have switched frequencies to stop the first attack or after the first attack. One possibility might be that the first attack stopped because somebody accidentally knocked the antenna over. The FCC does have some equipment that they can ship out to pick up pirate broadcasts and other similar illegal activities. I once saw one of their monitoring cars where the front passenger seat was replaced by electronics.
The biggest tragedy was Hollywood allowing Jim Carrey to steal Matt Frewer's "Max Headroom" crazy guy persona and then threaten to blacklist Matt if he spoke up.
What? Are you talking about The Mask? Cause that was based on a comic book. Frewer didn't own the Max Headroom character - it was created by Channel 4's technical staff as a response to MTV. They were broadcasting music videos and wanted a 'presenter' to introduce the videos just like MTV's VJ's. They hired Frewer, an actor, to play Headroom. The character was spun off into a TV movie...and that was seen by network television execs who then created not one, but two short-lived TV series. By the time Jim Carrey showed up on TV and movie screens, Frewer had already moved on with his career [playing Rick Moranis' father in Honey, I Shrunk The Kids in 1989] - because the Max Headroom fad had died as quickly as MTV.
@@bullseyecanada What are you talking about?? Of course it was after the Max Headroom era. I said Jim stole Matt's crazy guy "persona" not the character. I was using the "Max Headroom" character as an example of Matt's "wacky, crazy guy" persona that Matt owned. When I did contract work around L.A. in and around Burbank back in 90's, that was where I first heard a lot of people talking about it. I worked 2nd shift back in the 80's during that time period that Max Headroom was on primetime. I knew who he was but only really saw him on the Coke commercials. So I really didn't understand what those people that worked at the studios were talking about till they explained it to me. They also said Matt wasn't allowed to accept parts in anything that would allow him to use his "Wacky Crazy Guy" persona in. A year or 2 later when I finally got a chance to watch "The Stand" I noticed in Matt's scenes that he let a lil bit of that persona slip out. You can throw that napkin theory of yours in the trash. I was actually there in amongst all the talk. In that dog-eat-dog part of the world if it isn't serious, no one would've mentioned it.
@@bullseyecanada Frewer didn’t play Moranis’s father. He played Moranis’s next door neighbor who eventually finds out that his own two sons were shrunk by Moranis’s invention.
I can give you a summary about the Max Headroom Incident: a kid called Jimi Hendrix took his at the time top tech Marshall full tube amplifier on stage and turned it as loud as he could. Turns out they're not as clean as something like class D amplifiers invented later, and when he smashed his guitar strings, he ran out of headroom. To the delight of everyone in the audience, a sharp pain of peak amplitude wave didn't pierce their eardrums, but instead this sweet distortion came out where the waveforms peak amplitude had been cut in a round ("soft") manner. Furthermore there was this sagging effect where momentarily the power section of his amplifier couldn't transfer as much power as was required, and the amp's signal weakened only to "bloom" out as the note lived. This incident is what lead to people seeking out this fascinating imperfection of those tube amplifiers and this thing called distortion. The Max Headroom Incident could have been a major disaster, in the wrong context, wrong gig it could've been an embarrassing and doomed situation. A distorted guitar signal, by the gods? But the stars were aligned and it sparked something beautiful (occasionally it sparked mr. Hendrix's guitar on fire).
Art Bell would spend 20 minutes talking to people who thought they had a monster living under their bed. They should of ran a disclaimer about failing asleep listening to that show. I enjoyed the time traveler call in nights : )
Either she's got tons of internal free space, or you're just so not filling her that she's got Max Headroom. Either way, weird joke to make, and also, doesn't work.
I don't think people give enough "creativity" credit to hooligans when they conclude "it had to be done by engineers". I can think of several college pranks that friends pulled off (I admit NO involvement, I plead the 5th!) where people assumed it "had to be professionals" and came up with all sort of elaborate ideas on "how it was done". When, in fact, it was simply a group of hooligans who had one-too-many-beers, a crazy simple idea and extremely fermented bravado. Kinda like the mystery of crop circles, where everyone suspects aliens or some elaborate equipment and planning and it turns out to be 2 guys with sticks, string and a few hours to kill.
This is exactly what you're doing with this show tough, aren't you? And it's working because we're watching despite you being an obvious condescending skeptic... Or because of 👻
To address your confusion about the satellite going out... I used to work in the commercial communication satellite industry, and my father still does. I think it's safe to say of commercial satellite capacity is used for "backhaul". An AM signal won't make it "coast to coast", so the broadcast needs to be sent to repeaters country wide that send it out from local AM transmitters. The same goes for television and cellphones. There are services where you can get your signal (television or otherwise) directly from the Satellite, but even if you're watching "terrestrial" television it has probably been routed through a satellite.
Good stuff. Except for the moment when Simon checked that he was not born yet in 85 whereas I was in university then. I miss Max Headroom days. And chef's kiss on the subtle editing nod to Max Headroom.
Kevin and Danny are secretly trying to see who can write the longest intro in order to decide who gets first pick of the basement mushrooms.
There is no way I could ever out-intro Danny
@@ThatWriterKevin hey Kevin, how would one go about becoming a writer for Simon?
There should be an intro so relevant to the topic that when it's finally over there's only a page of bland, superficial coverage of the actual main topic, but Simon won't know that it's all the intro until the very end when it says something like, "Now we get to the reason we're here today..." Silence. Cue WTF moment.
@@connorbosley4431 I suspect it involves getting locked in the Blazement
@@ThatWriterKevin don't worry... part of the stipulations should involve Simon actually reading the full intro on the show, and not just skipping ahead to the next header--or just cutting off recording after a certain amount of times
Yes, Danny is trying to get around this by simply no longer including headers... but I suspect this is going to result in Simon applying a small measured amount of "discipline" to Danny
I was in the Army at the time. Rumor was it had been a technician from the Navy base just north of Chicago.
At the time Cold War era necessities' required every broadcast station in the US allow national emergency broadcasts. The Technician(s) being teenagers working mostly unsupervised had plenty of time to get bored. Hence the crude humor, halfway decent set design and the Annie Oakley character. Not long after these incidents occurred base broadcast towers, EBS tone keys and installation studios were placed much higher on physical security checklists DOD wide.
The Navy/DOD of course never ever made any official or public statements.
@RGC2005 damned whippersnappers. Up until last year, we [my husband, our eldest son & myself] had lived next to the community pool & a high school, with football field & track field.
Apparently, someone was pretty lax with the keys to one of the buildings where the announcements were "broadcast" from. And late at night, when some pimple-faced ne'er-do-well would gain access to the microphones, speakers, volume knobs, etc. and just make loud and/or rude noises.. at 2-3 a.m... with no consequences at all.
In a snobby, suburb. On a weeknight.
Totally cool on the weekend, and if they had played music [any music would be better than garbled trash talk] it would've been absolutely okay, imho.
People seem to not know how to pull a prank anymore. This prank doesn't seem so bad, tbh.. although it's a bit idiotic to pull a prank involving something at a federal level [communication airwaves _do_ operate under the ever "watchful" eyes of our governments].
Almost a death wish, really.
@@St.Linguini_of_Pesto Back then the internet did not exist so the answer for a trouble maker was to ship them to another base. Once I got into doing physical security inspections the lack of knowledge and concern for the older analog communications equipment always shocked me. There are locked doors on every military installation nobody has a key for or knows you does.
@@RGC-gn2nm Internet is way older than that, but the public didn't really know it existed (apart from uni students) prior to -95 or thereabouts when the web was the first reason why anyone public would ever find a use for it?! (most people today still thinks that the "internet" is just www...)
Arpanet was born in 1969 which spawned the first edition of internet. (a bit later the US military had their own net called milnet, much later connected to internet. White Sands had really poor security back in the days... Just saying... hehehehe! )
Prior to 1982 you used v.24/x.25 until TCP/IP became the new standard to communicate via internet.
Those were the days when I used a 300 baud modem to (not exactly legally) connect to the internet via a hacked modem in callback mode (to make it free - for me that is ;) ) to gain access to the internet from my bedroom as a teenager, hacking away through the night... Those were the days! Decades before spam and crap was invented!
Anyhow, just an anecdote from an early user of internet years before the Max Headroom incident happened! ;)
Your army story sounds like the most plausible I've heard so far since it happened, unless inside shenanigans! I hope they come forward one day just to set the record straight, but on the other hand that would kill the legend...
The actual culprit is more likely to be a former employee of WGN with an ax to grind against that network. Or it could have been one of the local hackers in the Phone Phreak culture of hacking with some expertise in broadcast tech.
I was at Benning at the time. Yea talk about an instant shift at our broadcast site! For a while there only 4 people were even allowed near the studio. It took about 6 months to calm down a bit. Even then one had to sign in to use the ham radio gear at the site.
This is my absolute favourite unsolved mystery. I desperately want those involved to come forward just before they die just so the story can finally be fully known and told.
I think someday someone is going to be going through their dearly departed Grandad's possessions and ask Reddit about this goofy looking mask they found in his attic...
2nd only to db cooper imo
I want their autobiography to be illegally broadcast by someone mysterious after they pass. lol
I grew up in Chicago, & caught the one when they hacked WGN during The Bears game highlights on the news, & it was 1 if the weirdest things I've ever seen or had happen to me in my life, & that's saying a lot! 💯
I really want to know before I die who did this, the rumor in Chicago was it was this hacker that was part of a collective, but did this alone, he used to make the things to hack phones to make free calls
There’s a Reddit from someone that pretty much nails it with some very good “proof”
I saw both of those live that night ... and it was a mind-blower to have the second one come on. It's a perennial news story here in Chicago, with somebody using it when they don't have anything better to write about.
I have an acquaintance who is currently around 80, who I suspect might know who did the Max Headroom thing (as he has deep contacts in old anarchist and tech circles), but I've never asked him about it ... if I run into him again, I might have to.
I saw the Max Headroom incident live as I was a huge Dr.Who fan. I even recorded it. The ART BELL SHOW was broadcast on many different AM stations. They all received a sat signal from Art bells property in Pahrump Nevada.
The theory is Exactly what Simon said. Ch11 received their signal from a local source. The theory is that they overpowered the transmission to Ch11's receiver. It could have been done from the right office window with a dish made from a metal saucer sled.
If you still have the recording. Please upload it!
@@salty6pence672 Exactly right. Our rural neighborhood was getting severe interruptions by two different unlicensed HAM operators (one in the 70's and another one in the 80's) with a hotfoot that would loudly step all over channel WFMY 2's audio transmission.
Love your ADE avatar!! I've always been a TYO fan from back in the mid 80's. RIP Rick Mayall
Do you still have the recoding, and is it better audio quality than what's available online?
Blast from the past! I'm from Minnesota, and I remember OK soda. It was available in the mid-90's. I liked it. The can art was really cool, like something from a graphic novel. It tasted like a combination of citrus and cola. I think most people tasted it and said, "This stuff is ok", because it wasn't around for long.
Thanks for the remembrance, Kevin!
It was so much more than OK, it was amazing! There's a video on Sideprojects that covers it (and a couple other products)
They had a large stack of free OK soda at a local gas station. The stuff sat their for weeks. I recall a friend bringing it to parties, but nobody really liked it.
There was a lot of weird ideas surrounding OK soda. Likely because of the marketing campaign, and lack of what it's supposed to be. A friend of mine claimed that each can had a different flavor based on the can design (there were several different ones). The advertising campaign surrounding it was an anti-advertising advertising campaign. The firm was convinced Gen-X was so over-exposed to advertising, they decided to create an advertising campaign that poked fun at advertising. Which was pretty brilliant, but it didn't work of course.
Which... at least with a my friends GF backfired. She got oddly offended at the anti-advertising advertising. As if the advertisers were really trying to fool us, and they really WEREN'T the cool, hip, anti-advertising people they said they were... but a product of the coca-cola corporation!. Shocking!
Yeah... we laughed too. Its just soda with a clever marketing campaign, and it all ultimately failed rather spectacularly.
@@stevesether It because they didn't realize that the ones that would respond to it were a couple years too young to have their own money to spend on soda
I also grew up in MN. I thought it tasted like all soda mixed together.
@@mangala666 For the record, OK Soda was 30% Fanta Orange (which wasn't widely distributed in the US at that time) and 70% New Coke/Coke II.
Max Headroom is such a misunderstood parody character. He deserves a rebound. Now more than ever.
An Orange, plastic guy with really weird blonde hair constantly rambling and blipping incoderantly on a television?
I think that's already been rebooted...
@@DrNothing23 Biden sure has gone shit ass crazy
No. Remakes ruin everything.
He was vacuous and annoying in the late 80's, now, he would be just one fucking thing too much. We just can't handle a Max Headroom AND the Kardashians. Let that irritating twat rest.
@@DrNothing23 rofl
ah Max Headroom, what a throwback.
I remember arguing with people that he wasn't CGI.
Even at that time, I knew it wasn't possible to get that kind of render.
Wrestling, real. Max Headroom, real. Reagan, probably a corpse run by Disney animatronics.
It was done with jump edits.
@@jamesoverholt878
A corpse who caused the Berlin Wall to be taken down and the Soviet Union to collapse.
We could use a corpse like that, rather than the one that falls up stairs and off of bicycles.
@@Frankie5Angels150 Reagan was not president when either of those things happened.
Chernobyl broke the USSR
Reagan was just an old racist who sold arms to terrorists it's probably a good thing his brain was gone by the 2nd term so he didn't do more damage
Matt Frewer is one of my favorite thespians.. he pops up in surprising series and/or films, still.
Kevin's description of Art Bell's reactions to callers is spot on. 👌
Glad you agree! I think if Simon could listen to it, he'd understand that it could definitely still work.
Also a night owl and spot on with Art Bell. Coast to coast was the best way to stay awake on a boring night shift. Art really made the show! He had the perfect personality for the show. Apparently he lived near me in that “undisclosed location in Az”.
😂😂😂😂😂
Living in the UK I'd never caught the real Coast to Coast, however the video game Prey, (released in 2006 - not to be confused with the later one) featured fictional segments from Coast to Coast voiced by the real Art Bell, assuming his wit in the real thing was anything like those fictional segments, I'd agree with you.
As a child on the late 80s and early 90s, I remember a Max Headroom type presenter on a kids game show that took place in a fictional abandoned high rise block, where were the kids were in a lift that stopped on seemingly random floors with various puzzles and 'wacky' games and they had to survive and earn points to win prizes. The presenter only appeared on a very small screen inside the lift.
I think that was called "The Incredible Games" set in a fictional skyscraper. Fun fact, the guy on the screen in the lift was David Walliams!!!
@@chrisharris5497 whoa!!
As someone who works in television broadcast engineering, this is truly legendary among us nerds.
It was very easy to do back in those days. All he did was overtake the very weak Microwave signal. Today it would be impossible to do. Some day he will tell his story but as of now, he's still working in the biz. He was however the Ham Radio Convention in Orlando this year. That's a clue
baseline WGN etc. tech in 87 was all analogue right? i was born in 76 and back before the flips from 1G to 2G to 3G and the advent of DSL... almost all the TV and cable networks were analogue and the only digital was satellite dishes... the huuuuge ones that took up almost a whole car's worth of dish space in your yard at home and you had to aim them manually or had a small electric motor pointing the dish to various satellites in orbit to catch their signals. but they weren't highly scrambled right? basically, anybody with a good PC and decent skills in decryption back then could catch any satellite signal 'up there' that appeared over the horizon to your home's location. BBC and SKY and all the other Euro networks and some even from India or Asia or South America.
so these freakers or crackers wouldn't need crazy mad skills or a huge generator and a mega powerful transmitter antenna etc. right? one camera, a sound board, a mic, output to their tuning and amplification system... point the antenna at WGN's main array and poof... they would hop their signal onto WGN's and override or even piggyback it?
it has been a long time since i dug into radio broadcast technology of the legacy tech era...
@televisionarchivestudios1130 please tell us more
Ah, old Max. Back in the day when they actually played music on MTV.
Max: MTV is neither music or TV!
Me: thank you for that stunning report.....
@@Red_Lanterns_Rage Yeah, kinda odd that they called it Music TV.
@@garyoa1 it used to be wall to wall music, now it's just Shit TV lolz
The problem with playing music was determining viewership for ratings, and ultimately commercial rates. AC Nielsen had people manually record what shows they watched at a specific time, but it didn’t fit a music variety format.
That’s Ridiculousness 😇
I'm a night owl. It's nice because the phone isn't ringing (mostly) and my husband goes to bed early because he gets up early for work. When I was still working I was the one who always volunteered for off shifts, so I could sleep as late as I wanted and no one thought it was odd, especially my mother.
To be honest, the Max Headroom incident makes a helluva lot more sense than most things seen on TV today.
for reels
The biggest tragedy was Hollywood allowing Jim Carrey to steal Matt Frewer's "Max Headroom" and "Crazy Guy" personas and then threatened to blacklist Matt if he spoke up.
@@MAGGOT_VOMIT what the fuck does this have to do with this comment at all
OK boomer.
Sorry, I had to say it. It's the law
@@jamesoverholt878 "You rang"
Man I miss that time. I suppose the other thing that was unique about Max Headroom, it was created on a home computer specifically an Amiga. Technology may be far more advanced today but the 80s felt so cutting edge.
"Technology may be far more advanced today".. true, true.. but what about us idiots glued to tiny glass screens, eagerly awaiting a magical tone to inform us that we, each of us, are "real" & "significant"?
I just want to show my appreciation for the subtle Max Headroom editing on this video 😉
In high school we used to listen to Coast to Coast AM and get stoned. The best night was Sunday when they opened up the phone lines. The callers they got were very interesting to put it mildly
I used to love listening to that when I was doing a few years behind bars, they did have alot of interesting callers
I remember when this happened. I wasn't watching at the time but it was a big mystery back in the day that people talked about. He's basically the FCC's equivalent of DB Cooper. The mystery man who got away. Its so creepy lol
Nothing was creepy about it. It was a TV stunt.
I can narrow it down. In that time period, there are only two groups of people who would possess the knowledge to obtain or manufacture the required equipment: Professional broadcast engineers, and ham radio operators. Professional engineers can sneak equipment from the scrap heap. Hams are inventive, and often build their own equipment from components up.
There was a very large freaking community at the time.
Radio operators and broadcast engineers would be far from the only ones to know how to hijack an analogue signal.
The tech used is outright primitive by today's standards and it was the kind of things you'd learn in shop class in school at the time.
@@morphman86 Shop class? 😂
No. Ham radio operator, yes.
I don't think this was as difficult to pull off as lot of people think.
As a Gen Xer, I can honestly say I've never heard of OK soda so I grabbed this for everyone, including myself: **OK Soda is a discontinued soft drink created by The Coca-Cola Company in 1993 that courted the American Generation X demographic with unusual advertising tactics, including neo-noir design, chain letters and deliberately negative publicity.**
Oh…I should have heard about it because it was around when I was a kid (90s kid) yet I have never heard of it.
I've only heard about it because Simon did a video on it and other similar products on another channel (might have been Brain Blaze or Top Tenz)
I remember that. It was around for about 2 minutes or so. Don't think I ever tried it
They had quite a lot of that in the 90s, come to think of it. There was Josta, Chaos Iced Tea, Fruitopia, and a bunch of other stuff that didn't last long. Trying to be all hip for the youngsters. I spent the 90s working in a store and I have a great memory lol
@@PinkyJujubean I remember a soda called "Surge" it was a citrus soda, so competed with Sprite and Mountain Dew. Back in the late 90s, the commercials would feature a bunch of skater punk looking guys, all jumping over couches and other obstacles to get to the bottle of soda. I think it was advertised as having EXTRA carbs, and might have been the first beverage touted as an energy drink.
I remember this from my childhood. I was about five or six. My mother was watching Doctor Who but had gotten up to do something. Upon returning she was upset and asked me why I changed the channel. I hadn’t. I was so confused. I was I trouble for something but didn’t know why for many many years later. My mom never became upset with me prior to this incident but clearly she loved Doctor Who more.
I was like 7 years old living in northwest Indiana when this happened and I saw the WTTW incident. I remember watching Doctor Who with my uncle and being super freaked out by the interruption. My uncle made me leave the room when it got too weird. lol
The Region!
Oh shit! Man, I bet that’s a trip to think back on now!
Represent the 219!
Yep me too, I use to watch wttw all the time and remember seeing this.
Same. Still the weirdest thing I’ve seen on tv
6:40 - Chapter 1 - Who is Max Headroom
9:35 - Chapter 2 - The incidents
13:10 - Chapter 3 - What do we know ?
16:10 - Wrap up
Thank you Sir
And nothing pre 6:40 lmao
I wish I found this comment 9:34 ago.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say "disgruntled former technician who was fired and wanted revenge".
Would he have had access though?
@@eadweard. If he had the right sort of equipment he could have hijacked the microwave feed from the studio to the transmitter by transmitting his own microwave feed from a location closer to the transmitter than the studio overpowering the legal feed.
With the right equipment this sounds probable.
pirate radio stations are a thing, and intercepting/interrupting a signal takes more expertise and preparation, but a former employee is just the kind of person to have both.
@@sherylcascadden4988 Radio is also much easier to hijack than television
@@sherylcascadden4988 Other incidents like this have happened, just in a less sophisticated way. In the 1970s a prankster hijacked an ITN news broadcast by overpowering the off-air signal the Hannington transmitter rebroadcast on a different channel, allowing them to make a fake alien broadcast, although that was only the audio channel, not the video channel. Whoever the Max Headroom prankster was, he definitely had technical qualifications and was able to use professional equipment.
I lived in Nebraska when OK soda came out. I don't remember what it tasted like, only that I really liked it. There was a phone number on the can that you could call to hear their manifesto. It was a recording and it was funny. I was disappointed when I could no longer get OK soda. I hadn't thought about that in years.
It was a citrus flavoured soda, and it was absolutely amazing.
I always thought it tasted like a when you'd mix all the flavors of soda on the fountain, but with more orange soda than the others. And yeah, I remember the phone number, but I recall it being a "leave your stories of OK soda".
I never heard about o.k. soda till I saw it on the show. I grew up in Redneck ville N. Florida. ,Thats why I live in C.A.. Now, Could you tell me more about it. Thank you
@@danielwilliams705 There's a sideprojects video I posted a link to. It wouldn't have been available in CA either though
@@ThatWriterKevin Kevin can u send me a link? Thanks Daniel
I live in Chicago and was twelve when this happened. It didn't start to become a big deal until the national news started to make a big deal about it. I never saw it myself but knew a few kids who did, they all thought it was weird but nothing to take seriously. Pirate broadcasts like this weren't new, but this is the one that most people remember.
Yaay!! Danny-level introductions!! Get Kevin to the Blazement!!
"This was such a strange story." Tell me about it. I was in my teens & it was a massive event. And then nothing. Just nothing. Until 10 or so years later when there was short program about how absolutely no evidence or motive had come to light. "Strange" doesn't do it justice.
I mean it's not as strange as a lot of other mysteries that are really weird as to what happened and how. This was pretty much a broadcast hijacking prank. The only mystery is who was behind it and obviously this isn't one of the things that someone will willing to come out and say (and prove) "yeah we did it" because I'm pretty sure there will be legal consequences even decades later. It's kind of like that TV head guy that was dropping old TVs on people's porches, the point was that it happened and will be remembered, not as much as who was behind it.
Another possible outcome (even tho it's probably less likely) is like the technicians said that it's almost guaranteed that it was an inside job because at that time you need all that equipment and technical skills that can be done only inside the station and if the TV station did internal investigation they may have found who is behind it but didn't want to release the information because it would make the station look bad so they made them sign NDC document and if they ever released the information they will be sued.
4:15 ~ Thumbs up to the artist responsible for that piece of artwork. Amazing!
"That's not how any of this works!" Haha I love that old commercial. I still quote that sometimes
Surprised that there was no mention of the fact that the can "Max" holds up while he recites the New Coke slogan was a *Pepsi* can. Some cutting satire there!
Was it a Pepsi MAX?
It's "Simon Whistler Day" every day on youtube.
I was 30 years old in 1987. I remember Max Headroom well. They even made a TV series based on him. It was a really big deal at the time.
Welllll, NBC tried to make the show a big deal
....not saying I didn't watch. (12 in '85)
It was a pretty good series too.
Everybody realizes (from the TV show's opening credits) that the character's name came from Edison Carter's dying memory of seeing a sign that read "MAX HEADROOM 2.3 METERS."
Very few people, however, caught that "Network 23" was generously financed by a Chinese investor named "Ped Xing." (Which *can be* a proper, Chinese name, but-on American streets-can also be an acronym for "PEDESTRIAN CROSSING.")
I remember the original movie that was made in England and then eventually NBC or whoever picked it up. The movie had a lot of rude things in it that you could do on cable and probably in England on the air but they couldn't do that in the USA so they toned it down a bit and brought some of the original actors over to the USA and ran with it. I still really liked it but it wasn't quite the same. Computers back then were mostly pretty low powered so you'd get glitches like that trying to watch videos or play games unless you had a high end pc.
@@jamesoverholt878 Max Headroom aired on Cinemax and ABC in the United States, not NBC.
NBC had nothing to do with Max Headroom.
Fantastic! One of the greatest broadcast mysteries of all time!
shaye it isnt so
That famous phone call on the Art Bell show was later used by the band Tool as the "hidden" final track Faaip de Oiad on their album Lateralus.
I moved from Tucson, Arizona to Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1994. I was 14. When I started looking around, there was this wonderful, mysterious product on store shelves. It was stark and uncanny in its presentation. I was immediately enthralled. I also immediately realized that there were multiple packaging art designs, and I was delighted. I began collecting the various packages and enjoying the flavor of the contained soda. I could describe the flavor as “red, but a good red. A little towards orange.” And then there were the TV adverts. I was 14, had just moved to a huge city, and it was 1994. This was exactly what I had hoped for moving out of the desert and into the city. This is also how I learned about test markets. And that some products don’t make it through testing. And that my las OK Soda was already in the past.
I’ve always loved this case. Frickin’ hilarious and I love that it’s still unsolved.
what happened in Old man Withers's wood shed will remain in the wood shed lolz maybe it was filmed in the basement IDK I'm guessing SUE ME! lol
Show yourself you bastard
Really well done video that summarized this Max Headroom broadcast hijack incident -- I love the analysis summary that poses theories -- Lots of new stuff on this vid not on the other 'Max H' vids that got me hooked and obsessing over this weird event. Thanks Simon W. (And team).
Honestly, with all that mentioning of Aliens and Probing in the preamble, I thought this was going to turn into an episode on the "Southern Television Broadcast Interruption" (aka the "Ashtar Galactic Command Incident") of 1977 - another infamous and unsolved broadcast interruption/signal hi-jacking.. honestly, you could have done both interruptions in the same episode, given the similar time frame and how both stories have such little investigative meat on the bone 😅
Thumbs up because I've never heard of this thing.
Whoooooahoho. That is a crazy amount of Theosophy, and I'm genuinely surprised that I haven't heard of this before now.
Oh man, that one was even wilder.
I love how Matt Frewer reprised his Max Headroom role in "Altered Carbon"
Re: the Coast to Coast radio show: Art really wasn't subtle at all, in fact he was a self proclaimed skeptic, and I remember episodes where he actually kicked GUESTS off his show. George, the guy who took his place on the other hand, he took the show in the other direction, humoring everybody that was on there pretending to take them seriously no matter how ridiculous it sounded. it's possible that Art was hamming up the skepticism bit, because that actually helps the show keep some credibility. but it was really obvious that George is playing up to the conspiracy theorists and alien chasers. the last straw for me with that show was when on one episode George had on one of those "ghost whispers." I don't know if you would have seen it there but here in the US on daytime TV the guy named Jonathan Edwards had a show and he was a "ghost whisperer." people would sit in his audience and hope that he picked them and he did things in a way that made it very hard to tell how he was getting his information. the first trick is that you know anybody who's there for that is there for that BECAUSE somebody important to them had recently died. and odds are even if they hadn't there would be somebody in their life who had died at some point. the next thing that makes it work is that somebody who's there because somebody died wants to talk to that person one last time probably because they're guilty about something. so in this case the "psychic" task is to get them to lead him. this lady did the exact same thing that he did but very poorly I could hear exactly what she was doing to lead the callers into giving her answers, but George pretended to be amazed through the whole thing! it was so obvious! and that's the last time I chose to listen to Coast to Coast. Art Bell on the other hand has his voice in a video game called Prey that was actually pretty good for its time
Your top ten broadcast interruptions was my first fact boy video. I've been hooked ever since
A syndicated show like Art Bell would have a studio that sends their program to other stations to rebroadcast. The studio can send this over the internet, a phone bank, or even send it to a satellite company to rebroadcast it and have the local radio stations use their own equipment to pick the signal up and rebroadcast it. The AM radio part isn't sent by satellite, but the show was sent via satellite.
I used to catch art bell from time to time. Specifically in the winter when radio signals would carry up into canada. It never really felt to me like he bought into any of it.
I remember one of his callers adamantly insisting that star wars was real and that it took place in the andromeda system. Apparently it was just beamed into George Lucas's mind for him to share with all of us.
Hey Simon, this channel of yours seems like a good one to cover a weird phenomenon I only recently learned of, in Scotland there is a bridge where dogs apparently feel the overwhelming desire to jump off the bridge, sometimes to their death, sometimes just with severe leg injuries.
Various theories have been put forth, like a nearby naval base having submarines using sonar and messing with the dogs' hearing and perceptions, and one about how mink live in the area, and their urine is a powerful stimulant to a dog's nose, and gives it the overwhelming urge to chase after/hunt the mink. Sound technicians with recording equipment debunked the sonar one, and there are other bridges where mink live, so....?
It is called Overton Bridge.
I have definitely read about that, though I believe it was actually solved
It would make a cool video, cuz I'm not sure how many people know it's been solved. I'd like to know why!
@@ThatWriterKevin After posting this comment, I watched another video about it. That one said it was basically 10% true, 90% hoax caused by poor journalism. According to them, only a dozen or so dogs have jumped, rather than the 400 to 600 others state.
They blame the Daily Mail for starting the story, without citing a source for the numbers involved, and others for quoting the Daily Mail without independent research. They still mentioned the mink theory though.
Ironically, after accusing others of lazy journalism, their video featured the same 5 second clip of a black mink scampering across some rocks that other videos I have seen do, when talking about the mink theory.
PS, apologies to any Scottish or UK residents out there reading this, I misspelled "Overtoun" as 'Overton".
Petition to all refuse to discuss this mystery and shun anyone who does, as an oblique Overton Window pun.
Simon has already done a video on this subject, unsure of the channel but he's defo covered it.
I've been a pirate radio creator, with all the equipment and locations being needed to broadcast at such a level, Television is the toughest, we've looked into it... this was "some bored technicians" or actually from the station itself to gain more viewers.
Yeah, I didn't get into technical detail, but it sounds like there's extensive evidence that it almost certainly had to be an inside job
Bored technicians matches Simon's comment (which I agree with) that this seems like someone realised they could interrupt a broadcast, decided they had to do it, and then struggled to figure out what to interrupt it with.
Yeah, the pirate is just jumping the satellite link with a stronger signal to the main TX.
I doubt the station itself would've filed a report with the FCC had this been an inside job. Not particularly good for business. The FCC doesn't have a sense of humor.
Personally, I don't see why this would have been particularly difficult given enough money and nerve. The frequencies allocated to individual stations for these purposes might even be a matter of public record.
@@ThatWriterKevin I'd go with "social engineering".
OMG you guys referenced OK soda!! One of my friends was engaged to the creator's daughter. I met them in like 2005 and during a party they mentioned OK soda and she let us know about her dad's involvement. I also actually liked OK soda and they used to run a call in line where you could leave a message saying how much you loved OK soda. We used to troll the call in line and make up dumb skits lol.
Forner radio person here: there were definitely programs received from a satellite source and broadcast over local radio. It required a specialty receiver which either recorded the program for later broadcast or passed it on through for real-time play. I assume it's still a thing.
Heh, I grew up in St Louis, growing up I assumed all AM radio was like kmox and just reached everywhere
The Art Bell incident will ring very familiar if you're a fan of the band Tool. They used the audio of the Area 51 caller for the last track on their album _Lateralus,_ entitled "Faaip De Oiad" ('Voice of God' in Enochian). The album ends at the point in the call when the original broadcast suddenly went off-air.
Ho-lee hell. I’ve listened to that album for 22 years and didn’t know this is where that came from. I’ve always just thought it was a voice actor (which it probably was.) Thanks tor decoding _that_ unknown for me.
Edit: just watched the next two minutes of the video to see it was a voice actor. Patience is a virtue.
The tuner causes the radio to receive just one sine wave frequency (in this case, 680,000 hertz). Now the radio has to extract the DJ's voice out of that sine wave. This is done with a part of the radio called a detector or demodulator. In the case of an AM radio, the detector is made with an electronic component called a diode. A diode allows current to flow through in one direction but not the other, so it clips off one side of the wave.
NERD! I love it!
Simon definitely covered OK soda on one of his Brain Blaze videos haha
I wrote about it for Sideprojects. I'm guessing Danny wouldn't have covered it as Rotherham wasn't a test market for Coke.
@@ThatWriterKevin ah yeah that's probably what I'm thinking of!
If Max here had a beef or a point to make, he did an asses-up job of getting that across.
At least CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT did it to protest cable fees and straight out said as much.
Really, this weirdo is basically just your average internet troll... before the internet.
Internet trolls get remembered, but broadcast TV trolls never die.
Well, that was fun, Simon. I was around in the '80s, but don't remember much about Max Headroom. I'm a native Chicagoan, also and don't recall anything of the hijinks over at WGN and WTTW. It must not have been much of a thing when it happened, because the whole thing came and went with barely a ripple, at the time. What I can tell you is that WGN radio had an extraordinarily powerful transmitter, but I don't know if that means anything to the TV side of things.
R.I.P Art. Legend!
Kevin, one page intro, you're getting there. Let's get one and a quarter now.
Ironically, Cicada 3301 had the longest intro at like a page and a third, but the episode was so long no one even noticed
I had a total of 4 OK soda 12 packs before it disappeared. I remember both shows that Max had, the talk show and the sci-fi series. I was a wee child during those shows and it did seem like the future is now back then especially to my primary school brain.
I thought there was effectively 4 parts to the Max Headroom show, 1st the sci fi storyline of how max headroom came into being, 2nd the original music video show with only max and the music videos (IMO the best season had videos such as Paul Hardcastles "19" and Belouis Some's "Imagination" ----- banned for explicit sexual content & nudity) followed by seasons 2 & 3 where the show took a comedic talk show direction not to my taste as it felt somewhat forced and contrived also the lack and cut short music vids (i wanted something more akin to MTV party zone with funny segues than a talk show) disinterested many original fans, I've still got the max headroom book and some of season 1 on vhs tape in a cupboard which is good for a chuckle
Hey the editing is getting really creative! I appreciate it
Simon saying “I wasn’t born in 1985” was just the kick to the testicles I needed today. Geez I’m old.
Edit: I am old enough and Minnesotan enough to live in an Okay Soda test market! Memorialized in the song “Smells like Okay Soda” by Dillinger Four. What up, Kevin?
Not much, what's up with you?
@@ThatWriterKevin Same! I was just excited about the Okay Soda reference… which probably runs counter to the whole Okay Soda ethos. Nice work on the episode.
Good call on the authenticity. Its one reason that keeps me coming back. From channel to channel
4:30 I 100% remember listening to that live! The satellite lost geostationary lock with the ground.... That like never happens. Art broadcast from his home in Nevada over satellite and all the syndicated stations picked it up from satellite for rebroadcast over am/fm.
There actually have been instances of space satellites failing though.
@@r66fplaysgames I guess ya it does happen... But the odds of that happening at that moment in that broadcast... IIRC There were like a dozen or so broadcasts impacted.
"My dude the FCC (glitches) my dude the FCC."
You know, one of the thing they still have trouble with is animating dynamic hair.
The "Oddity Archive" channel covered this story in much more detail. If you are really interested in this case, look them up.
I was thinking of that as well!
Yes, live syndicated radio programs are transmitted by satellite to the individual radio stations subscribing to the feed for AM (or FM) broadcast.
Ok soda seems like such a brain blaze segment waiting to happen. I don't know the full story, but I seem to recall it being Coke's failed attempt at seeming punk and anti capitalist, the result missing the mark completely
I wrote about it (Along with the McPizza and Starbucks' beer flavoured coffee) over on Sideprojects, thought BB would've been a better fit. I don't think OK was a failure, just ahead of its time. They thought they were targeting a specific market, but it turned out the one that their campaign resonated with was slightly younger than they expected, which also meant we were too young to have jobs and buy the soda.
@@ThatWriterKevin should have turned it in on Danny's basement pc. Would have ended up being a blaze video for sure
I was in a test market for OK Soda (Minneapolis) and was 12-14 at the time. We all loved it. It tasted like a mix of coke, orange, and Dr pepper. It was full of bizarre marketing strategies, including 1-800-I-FEEL-OK, which we used to call all the time. You could leave random messages, and also listen to random messages from other kids. None of us had internet yet, so this blew our minds. It is legendary because it was so potent, and strange, and fleeting.
@@SarahHeller I didn't experience OK soda; I will now mix Coke, orange, and Dr. Pepper. (And maybe call that number....??)
If you go in the white room in The Matrix it’s just Simon receding into the distance in every direction.
That's odd. Looking back with a more modern perspective, my inclination is to look more into the woman. Any sort of workplace harassment complaint against that sportscaster that was swept under the rug? I think I'd start there for lack of leads. That could explain the graphic display and the call out.
Excellent point!🏆
Simon this is how broadcast television and syndicated radio works:
1. Person in studio does their thing. This is relayed in a delayed feed (usually 3-7 seconds depending) via a satellite dish to a satellite in orbit.
2. This satellite then relays it via encrypted signals to specific dishes in other regions of the earth. Let's say you are broadcasting in Nevada and I am listening in Illinois. The signal gets (for the sake of simplicity) "beamed" to a local affiliate station. This station pays a fee to air the content that you are sending.
3. The signal that is sent and received via satellite is then transcoded into a signal that can be received by the end user (me). This signal (let's say broadcast TV as this is what I know best) is sent out via a specific frequency on a transmitter on the VHF/UHF spectrum within a designated area, as licensed and agreed upon by both the station, carrier, and government, which is then received via an antenna by the end user.
4. The end user has equipment that receives the signal and converts it into something recognizable by the human eye or ear (the image of you and the audio of you speaking).
Oftentimes when national channels go down it's the fault of the actual channel. Most of the time this is because of a failure between the studio and the dish. In the winter it's usually because the dish is full of snow and someone has to go up and sweep it out lol. This is how TV works. I hope it was interesting!
I use to work at Art Bells 🔔 home guest hosting and at 840 am .
always a fun time with you BB/SWverse guys. ;) thanks for the flashback to my childhood in the 80's! now, i gotta go find the Max Headroom TV series online and see if anybody has uploaded it to the grey web. :D i haven't watched that show in years. :D
Of course Simon you know who is Max Headroom is an older Ai that you replaced few years ago , you can't fool me!
YOU CAN'T FOOL ME!!!!
Yea!!! I grew up with Max Headroom
6.5 minute intro in an 18 minute video lmao
I love it. Please don't stop.
You don't explain the story behind Max Headroom,it would put this a bit more into context if you did.
From memory,so might not be very accurate as I only ever saw the show (film?) the once.He (the character) is an investigative journalist who has some very bad men after him as he's getting too close to exposing what ever it is they do.He is riding a motorbike with a handheld video camera and tries to escape by riding under a car park barrier with a warning sign on it.He doesn't make it though and gets knocked off the bike (I can't remember if he was killed) as the camera captures everything and the very last image seen by it before it's smashed is the barrier sign that says 'Max Headroom .......'
/way/ off.
The show's main protectionist is is an investigative journalist, yes, but not Max Headroom. His name is Edison Carter. While trying to escape one of the many powerful people who doesn't want to be investigated he crashes into the barrier and is incapacitated. In order to find out how much Carter knows (and if he is too dangerous to live), the villains of the first episode get the studio's resident uber-nerd to try an experimental procedure dumping his brain into the studio mainframe. This goes wrong: The AI they create is a partial copy with fragmented memory and a personality lacking any inhibitions. The first words it utters are the last thing that Carter saw before being knocked out: "Max Headroom." The words written on the barrier. Carter and his new computerised alter-ego proceed to work together in releasing their evidence, unmasking the corporate conspiracy, and being hailed as heroes... but as the corporation they just exposed was their own employer, they also make powerful enemies on the board, and sow the seeds for a conflict that will return in many later episodes as the board tries to find a way to control their lucrative but dangerously independent employee.
The show is a sci-fi political satire, mocking libertarian politics, vapid television and consumer culture. Each episode is generally structured as Carter investigating some new evil corporate plot to make money by highly exploitive and unethical means, backed up by his sidekicks Max (Unstable AI and manipulator of technology) and Theora (Carter's 'controller' at the studio, responsible for real-time communications, monitoring and editing).
I remember that episode of Coast and remember when that happened. Art broadcast from his house in Pahrump Nevada. The satellite lost track of Art's house, hence the feed disruption. Now the thing about Pahrump is that it is next to Area 51, and the facility had a huge influence on Art's show. I knew that this incident would be brought up when Art was first mentioned
I have this on ßetamax somewhere, was recording Doctor Who off cable up in Milwaukee. Was freaked out by the signal intrusion.
36 years later, I work at a TV station, I have no idea who did this, and the WGN old-timers I spoke with either didn't know, or kept mum about it.
A couple of notes.
The first intrusion on WGN was unsuccessful because they had the audio sub carrier set wrong for one or both of the two audio channels.
Also, their Master Control was on the ball and switched to the second STL path. (Studio-Transmitter link) that's how the signal gets from the studio to the transmitter.
The WTTW intrusion was successful, both audio sub carriers were set correctly.
This was on tape, likely U-Matic as public access television was a relatively new thing in 87.
As for being a disgruntled employee, I'm not so sure about that, the frequency a station uses to & from the transmitter is common knowledge between stations.
However, the group did have solid knowledge on how TV signals get on the air. Plus they had a microwave transmitter and antenna with them wherever they set up.
This took skills to pull off. They had some information but not all.
Makes me wonder who Swersky pissed off in the sports news.
Everything "Max" says is ragging on WGN, not Doctor Who.
The intrusion could be done from an apartment or office building roof in line of sight of the transmitter or a building very close to Sears Tower or the Hancock building. (Can't remember what transmit site either one uses anymore)
Both studios are located north west of the transmitter sites downtown.
Just replying to get this technical information bumped up the comments ladder. Good stuff sir, thanks!
@@kylefowler5082
I'll ad some more info when I get caught up with work.
This is the best comment on the incident that I've seen in years. It really deserves getting a higher position. Everybody should like it to get it up there. By the way, I wonder if they picked the Dr. Who episode because it would be a good time for technicians to take a nap since there wasn't much for them to do.
@@bradleyross2274 my guess is that the perpetrators realized going after prime time television wasn't viable after getting their transmission overridden fairly quickly on the first attempt.
Whomever was responsible for the pirated broadcast had some knowledge of the TV industry and figured correctly that only apprentices or whatever they are called in the industry were at the control board on late night PBS. As an 80s/90s kid I remember if PBS went off air due to technical difficulties it was off air for a while lol. I assume when things went wrong they had to call a guy to come in to fix the issue
A bit more technical information on putting television signals on the air.
From almost the beginning microwave transmitters and receivers (the same type of signal bouncing around in your microwave oven) the big white vans you see on scene use microwave, as do the links between the studio and the antenna.
Live trucks use 2ghz, very close to the frequency in your oven.
Studios use 13 or 15ghz (at least in this part of the country)
Until 2009 those frequencies were analog (just like your old tv) after 2009 everything was switched to digital.
The channels within the three bands are assigned by the FCC, but beyond the channel assignments the rest was up to the station (again, at least around here) so in our case we chose the audio sub carrier frequency (we had four to choose from) 5.8, 6.2, 6.4, & 6.8 this is where my earlier comment comes in.
The first signal intrusion had both channels on the wrong frequency.
The WTTW intrusion had both set correctly.
Also as I said earlier, these people had a most of the knowledge. They knew one of WGNs frequencies but not the sub carriers.
They knew (or guessed) WTTWs frequency.
This took skills to pull off.
Nice vid 👍
In Back to the Future 2 when he goes to the diner in 2015 and orders a Pepsi from a person on a screen it is from Max Headroom. We have chicken b b beef and pork.
Simon. Thanks for the show. Watch all your channels. This is hands down my favorite. I'm 62 and basically grew up in the 70s and 80s. Brought back all kinds of the weird shit that was the hallmark of that time.
Keep up the great work. Already subscribed to all the channel puts out. Looking forward to more great shit. 👍 😆 🤣 😂
Remember the noid?
@@JAMESWUERTELE yeah I remember that. Thnks
Ah Max Headroom, I loved Max Headroom. The commercials and the tv show. It does have a cult following. It's just too bad that it was too far ahead of it's time.
*its time
He had the music video on MTV too for quite a while. Sure, small contribution, but it played over and over and over and.....
I didn't get to see much of his series but still get overly excited any time Max Headroom comes up.
An intro that's a third of the video, really Dannying it up today
You know, I just realized that federal communication commission violations have a 5 year statue of limitations.
Those guys and their fly girl could confess today, write a book even, they are in the clear 👍🏼
Statues are more immobile than limited. The only limit is your imagination
@@jamesoverholt878 LMMFAO, I was curious if anyone else caught that mistake.
I believe the term you had intended is: statute. There is a third tee.
@The Grinning Viking》Statues tend to not have arms.. or heads.. or clothing... just a beachtowel/curtain/bedsheet, but we know what you meant and, to my knowledge, you are 💯.
@@St.Linguini_of_Pesto I was touched by its noodly appendage
it's statute, a statute is a law, a statue is a piece of art depicting a person or a symbol of some kind that reflects a culture, city, organization etc just saying
5 years huh? so if one is good they can hijack a signal and do something random as a prank never do it again, sit for 5 years write a book and get rick off the royalties?? I wish I knew this sooner...
my wasted life!
@@Red_Lanterns_Rage Ah! Swipe text got me again. It's as bad as the old auto-correct used to be, back in the day.
At least its not saying fuck when I want to talk about ducks anymore. lol
In the Netherlands we have a appliance’s brand called OK. .
Hello Simon. Nice to be early.
Just Binged all your Decoding the unknown Videos :D
Sugestion: Make a video about Polibius(The Mysterious Arcade Game). It is interesting stuff and I wold like listen to a take on it from you :D
Weird. I got to thinking about Max Headroom this afternoon while perusing a Maximum Headroom sign. I remember when it aired as a kid.
All I know is the person who was behind it was clearly skilled at hacking a program in order to deliver the video. I honestly have no clue who did it as I don’t know how hacking a TV station (much less hacking in general) is done other than typing code into a program. In fact I was surprised my parents never even heard of this incident and they were in Chicago at the time it happened. I mean my mom knew about the Tylenol murders which did occur in Chicago when she and my dad were living there (this was when they were in their twenties so it was before I was born) so you think she might have heard from a friend of hers in Chicago about it.
My dad knew about Max Headroom, but I am not sure if my mom did. But both (as myself) were born and raised in the Chicagoland area, and they were in the 70's or 80's.
@@route2070 Wow. Sorry if I’m late but I’m curious if your dad had any theory on who was behind it?
Good video 👍
although I didn't do it (and I do NOt know, personally, who did it), I DO know a lot on how it was done and from where it was done... you would be surprised!
where? 3300 N. Campbell
how? VCR on a timer in a locked room, feeding a 10 watt microwave uplink transmitter connected to a Yagi on a tower, directly-inline from the studios at 54th St Louis to the JHC, using pairs of wires feeding across the facility to another room which was accessible to the outside.
Who? a collection of Hams (not the Doctor!)
I have discovered the "evidence" being the fly swatter, some hooks and cables and corrugated roof shingle when I opened a long-forgotten locked cabinet well over a year after the incident. I did find other items, but now I can't recall what they were and I did NOt find any dildos or the actual tape.
unfortunately, I can not reveal much more as then you could track-down / learn who I am!
My first thought is that a number of television station used a radio signal to get the signal from the recording studio to the transmitter next to the antenna. So they wouldn't have to be more powerful than the broadcast signal (hundreds of thousands of watts) but only be more powerful than the radio link from the recording studio to the transmitter ( a few hundred watts at most). A number of stations had equipment that could do this simply by changing the frequencies on their equipment and aiming a parabolic antenna at the receiving antenna at the transmitter. My understanding was that the FCC identified a number of studios that had the necessary equipment were supposedly unoccupied at the time. So it was probably an inside job at one of those studios, but they weren't able to identify which. There are other possibilities.
Now that I think about it, that could also explain why they went after a different television station that night. The station might have switched frequencies to stop the first attack or after the first attack. One possibility might be that the first attack stopped because somebody accidentally knocked the antenna over. The FCC does have some equipment that they can ship out to pick up pirate broadcasts and other similar illegal activities. I once saw one of their monitoring cars where the front passenger seat was replaced by electronics.
The biggest tragedy was Hollywood allowing Jim Carrey to steal Matt Frewer's "Max Headroom" crazy guy persona and then threaten to blacklist Matt if he spoke up.
What? Are you talking about The Mask? Cause that was based on a comic book. Frewer didn't own the Max Headroom character - it was created by Channel 4's technical staff as a response to MTV. They were broadcasting music videos and wanted a 'presenter' to introduce the videos just like MTV's VJ's. They hired Frewer, an actor, to play Headroom. The character was spun off into a TV movie...and that was seen by network television execs who then created not one, but two short-lived TV series. By the time Jim Carrey showed up on TV and movie screens, Frewer had already moved on with his career [playing Rick Moranis' father in Honey, I Shrunk The Kids in 1989] - because the Max Headroom fad had died as quickly as MTV.
@@bullseyecanada What are you talking about?? Of course it was after the Max Headroom era. I said Jim stole Matt's crazy guy "persona" not the character. I was using the "Max Headroom" character as an example of Matt's "wacky, crazy guy" persona that Matt owned.
When I did contract work around L.A. in and around Burbank back in 90's, that was where I first heard a lot of people talking about it. I worked 2nd shift back in the 80's during that time period that Max Headroom was on primetime. I knew who he was but only really saw him on the Coke commercials. So I really didn't understand what those people that worked at the studios were talking about till they explained it to me.
They also said Matt wasn't allowed to accept parts in anything that would allow him to use his "Wacky Crazy Guy" persona in. A year or 2 later when I finally got a chance to watch "The Stand" I noticed in Matt's scenes that he let a lil bit of that persona slip out.
You can throw that napkin theory of yours in the trash. I was actually there in amongst all the talk. In that dog-eat-dog part of the world if it isn't serious, no one would've mentioned it.
@@bullseyecanada Frewer didn’t play Moranis’s father. He played Moranis’s next door neighbor who eventually finds out that his own two sons were shrunk by Moranis’s invention.
I can give you a summary about the Max Headroom Incident: a kid called Jimi Hendrix took his at the time top tech Marshall full tube amplifier on stage and turned it as loud as he could. Turns out they're not as clean as something like class D amplifiers invented later, and when he smashed his guitar strings, he ran out of headroom. To the delight of everyone in the audience, a sharp pain of peak amplitude wave didn't pierce their eardrums, but instead this sweet distortion came out where the waveforms peak amplitude had been cut in a round ("soft") manner. Furthermore there was this sagging effect where momentarily the power section of his amplifier couldn't transfer as much power as was required, and the amp's signal weakened only to "bloom" out as the note lived. This incident is what lead to people seeking out this fascinating imperfection of those tube amplifiers and this thing called distortion. The Max Headroom Incident could have been a major disaster, in the wrong context, wrong gig it could've been an embarrassing and doomed situation. A distorted guitar signal, by the gods? But the stars were aligned and it sparked something beautiful (occasionally it sparked mr. Hendrix's guitar on fire).
Art Bell would spend 20 minutes talking to people who thought they had a monster living under their bed. They should of ran a disclaimer about failing asleep listening to that show. I enjoyed the time traveler call in nights : )
C2C Changed my life. those 4 hours were the best 4 hours ever...
Art was my favorite.
Max worked in one of the Art of Noise music videos at the time. Cool video!
Ohh I'm never first... Hi Simon Kevin and the meme'r if they are there this go round.. Have a blessed day
You too!
I never knew about this. Absolutely brilliant. 10 thumbs up to whoever did it.
My wife enjoys Max Headroom 😉
Doesn't work.
Either she's got tons of internal free space, or you're just so not filling her that she's got Max Headroom.
Either way, weird joke to make, and also, doesn't work.
@@eadweard. If you have to ask, big man, you can’t afford it 😏
I don't think people give enough "creativity" credit to hooligans when they conclude "it had to be done by engineers". I can think of several college pranks that friends pulled off (I admit NO involvement, I plead the 5th!) where people assumed it "had to be professionals" and came up with all sort of elaborate ideas on "how it was done". When, in fact, it was simply a group of hooligans who had one-too-many-beers, a crazy simple idea and extremely fermented bravado.
Kinda like the mystery of crop circles, where everyone suspects aliens or some elaborate equipment and planning and it turns out to be 2 guys with sticks, string and a few hours to kill.
This is exactly what you're doing with this show tough, aren't you? And it's working because we're watching despite you being an obvious condescending skeptic... Or because of 👻
I used to listen to Art Bell's show in the early morning as I drove 1 1/2 hours to work every morning.
Great show, good Times!
That long introduction is your karma for capping Danny's brain blaze intros, Simon 🤣
Well done Kevin!
To address your confusion about the satellite going out... I used to work in the commercial communication satellite industry, and my father still does. I think it's safe to say of commercial satellite capacity is used for "backhaul". An AM signal won't make it "coast to coast", so the broadcast needs to be sent to repeaters country wide that send it out from local AM transmitters. The same goes for television and cellphones. There are services where you can get your signal (television or otherwise) directly from the Satellite, but even if you're watching "terrestrial" television it has probably been routed through a satellite.
Good stuff. Except for the moment when Simon checked that he was not born yet in 85 whereas I was in university then. I miss Max Headroom days. And chef's kiss on the subtle editing nod to Max Headroom.