![]() I say “cold case” because yes, hijacking a broadcast signal is a crime. In no time at all, the Max Headroom Signal Intrusion became a cold case and an object lesson in how to pull off a kind of gleefully weird form of hacking. He had a woman in a maid’s outfit use a flyswatter on his bare butt. He mocked WGN and broadcaster Chuck Swirsky. Max scatted the theme to Clutch Cargo, a short-lived (but super-popular) cartoon that ran between 19. ![]() The video is both self-evident and perplexing. Big Head Max hijacked the broadcast signal of public TV station WTTW, taking over during a broadcast of Doctor Who. It lives in that ambiguous space between uncanny and scary, that place where “the hacker” continues to live.The longer intrusion happened after eleven. I wonder if the hackers could have suspected that their momentary coup on the broadcast spectrum would find a new life on the Internet, where it still plays forever on repeat, forever subject to analysis and befuddlement. But the incident’s impact lies in its murk. ![]() It’s ripe for media studies too, perhaps-a cyberpunk culture jam, an anarchic protest decades before Anonymous and hacktivism became household terms, reminding unsuspecting audiences how unsuspecting they really were. While Motherboard was not 100% convinced of Poag’s story, it did tie the hacker subculture of the era in with the famous signal intrusion: They hang out at Denny’s until they’re asked to leave, they can quote Monty Python sketches from memory, and sleep with JRR Tolkien books under their beds where other guys stash porn.Ī subsequent investigation by Motherboard into the Headroom Incident includes an interview with Poag, delving deeper into the then-nascent “Internet” subculture of dial-up and BBS chat. People who were into the hacking scene back then were basically the same type of people who are into the hacking scene now…Guys who live in their parent’s basements, charming/brilliant guys who don’t think to bathe often, and often lacking in social skills pretty much across the board. Poag claimed to have known the people who carried out the signal intrusion-they were allegedly part of a bunch of hackers in suburban Chicago: We could do this at any time, were we not busy watching pirated copies of the old Clutch Cargo cartoon and getting spanked by fly-swatters.” Indeed, the spirit of the Headroom signal intrusion-though admittedly silly on the surface-is very much anarchistic. Robot, but when you think about it, they look a lot like “Anonymous” videos. Indeed, not only does it seem to be visually referenced by the “fsociety” broadcasts in the TV series Mr. The “Max Headroom Incident” (as it’s now come to be known) is part of an unrelated trifecta of legendary signal interruptions the others were the 1977 Southern Television broadcast interruption, in which “aliens” claimed to take over the signal, and the 1986 “Captain Midnight” case, involving a message protesting HBO’s recent fee hikes.īut it is definitely the Headroom broadcast that has captured the imagination of the public all the way to the present day. The broadcast hijackers were never found or identified, though apparently they had managed to briefly break through the signal earlier that evening during sports coverage at a different Chicago station. Then, back to your regularly-scheduled broadcast of Doctor Who: The whole segment clocks in at around a minute-and-a-half. Bend over and have his naked buttocks spanked by a woman in a French Maid outfit holding a flyswatter.Humming the theme to the 1950s children’s program Clutch Cargo. ![]()
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