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SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: The Max Headroom Incident · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Here is a classic episode that covers a single event
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: that happened on one night in 1987 in the great
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: city of Chicago, where someone wearing a Max Headroom mask
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: took over a local TV station for several minutes. And
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: when I put it like that, it sounds pretty inconsequential,
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: but it was such a big deal that the feds
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: got involved. And even better, it's a mystery that's still
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: not fully solved today. And it's weird. Welcome to Stuff
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark. There's Chuck Bryant and Jerry Rowland. What
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: do you think? Pretty good?
• 0:54
  Speaker 2: It's pretty good.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: And this is Stuff You Should Know.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: Josh Headroom.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 0:59
  Speaker 2: I saw you over there with your earbuds today. You were...
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: Working on this all day, weren't you?
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: I watched season one, episode one.
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: Oh, really?
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: In full? Of Max Headroom. Like, the last ten minutes
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: is still pending.
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: Oh, okay.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: But it's crazy. Like, Max Headroom himself doesn't show up until, like,
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: 40 minutes into the first hour-long episode. But when he does,
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: it's dynamite.
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: So what are we talking about?
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: We're talking about Max Headroom.
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: That's right. A huge shout-out at the beginning of this
• 1:27
  Speaker 2: to vice.com, specifically... Motherboard.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Specifically, Alex Pasternak.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, who wrote the article on Motherboard. And we actually,
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: we used to blog a little bit for them back
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: in the day. Remember that?
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't think they like to talk about that
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: or acknowledge it publicly.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: You don't think?
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: I don't think so.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: Oh, I think it was mutually beneficial.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: I'll bet you can't find those on Motherboard anymore. I'm
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: trying to remember. I'm sure they were like.
• 1:52
  Speaker 2: I think I read one about driving a stick shift
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: versus automatic or something weird.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: That's a big one. Yeah. We started out with an
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: old fashioned recipe, I think.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that was you.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: They were like, let's do better than this, guys. And
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: we said no.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: And then they said, we got our own people.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah. We'll let somebody come in and ghostwrite for you.
• 2:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so that motherboard article was the basis. And from
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: what I found, I mean, we used a lot of
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: different sources on this, but this article entitled The Mystery
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: of the Creepiest Television Hack is sort of the culmination,
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: like the coup de grace.
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: Coup de grace?
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: Sure. Of Max Headroom incident articles.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it actually.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: Really good job.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: Pasternak very exhaustively investigated it and turned up new information,
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: got a new understanding of it, and basically contributed to
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: the mythos of it himself. So way to go, Pasternak.
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: Right. And what we're talking about is... If you don't
• 2:52
  Speaker 2: know who Max Headroom at all is, we're about to
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: set that up.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, let's talk about Max Headroom.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: But if you were alive during the 1980s, then you
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: probably know who Max Headroom is because, weirdly, for a
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: brief few years, it was kind of a big pop
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: culture thing.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: About four years by my calculations.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: So starting in 1984, there was a movie called Max Headroom... colon,
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: so you know it was an important movie, 20 Minutes
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: in the Future.
• 3:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Right?
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: And it was kind of a cyberpunk movie, dystopian future,
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: very Terry Gilliam, Brazil-ish. And it was, I haven't seen
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: that one, but it was basically where the character of
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: Max Headroom was born, right?
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: And I think it actually formed the basis for the
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: TV show later. In between the later TV show that
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: you and I are more familiar with, And that movie,
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: Max Headroom was a pop culture sensation. He was a
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: pitchman for New Coke.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: Oh, man.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: I went and watched an old ad. He was in
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: an ad with Run DMC pitching New Coke. And I
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: was like, doesn't get any more 80s than this. But
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: it was actually a pretty cool ad, right?
• 4:09
  Speaker 2: Was it? Did it say, here's a little story I
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: need to tell about a new Coke on the scene
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: that you'd love so well?
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: That was exactly word for word how the ad went. Yeah.
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: So let's back up a little more, right? Okay. Let's
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: describe what Max Headroom is for the kids. Because I
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: guarantee about 80% of our audience are like, what's the 80s?
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: What's New Coke?
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 4:32
  Speaker 1: Who's run DMC? Well, that's probably not true. So what
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: was Max Headroom? He was billed as like the first
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: virtual talk show host, right?
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: Correct. Okay. Yeah. So he was played by a guy
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: named Matt Frewer. who, out of prosthetic makeup, had that
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: look anyway, very chiseled, square-jawed. He was not bald, but
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: had— was he balding? He had a receding hairline. Okay, but
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: he kept it really, really short, so he kind of
• 5:01
  Speaker 2: looked bald.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Here, this will explain it to all the kids
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: at home. He was a colleague of Murphy Brown on
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: the Murphy Brown television show. They're like, oh. Oh, that guy.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: I got you.
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: Not the painter. No. The other one, the love interest.
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: I don't think I knew that. I never watched Murphy Brown, though.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: Oh, man, I hope it was him. I'm pretty sure
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: it was him.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah?
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 5:19
  Speaker 2: Well, he's been around. He's still acting today. Sure. But, yes,
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: he played the character of Max Headroom, and the TV
• 5:27
  Speaker 2: show Max Headroom was actually pretty far ahead of its time,
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: tonally speaking.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So the whole premise of the TV show, his
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: big last great gasp, that was actually the most serious
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: of all of it, was where... In the future, TV
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: networks controlled the world.
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: And the station, the Network 23, that Matt Frewer's character
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: and later Max Headroom, who became his alter ego, worked for,
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: were putting these things called blipverts out.
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah. His character's name was Edison Carter at first. Right.
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: And he was like an investigative journalist. Yeah. So he
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: starts looking into these blipverts because the problem with blipverts,
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: they are 30-second ads compressed into three seconds, and it's
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: meant to keep you from changing the channel. The problem
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: is that everybody watched so much TV by this time,
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: they didn't move around, which meant that all of the
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: electricity generated by their nerve endings wasn't burned off, is
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: how the show explained it. So when their brains were
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: assaulted with these blipverts, they kind of short-circuited, and all
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: of that electricity that was just hanging around their bodies
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: because they weren't moving at all during the day made
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: them explode. The network really liked blipverts, and they didn't
• 6:43
  Speaker 1: want to get rid of them, so they decided to
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: instead get rid of Edison Carter.
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and the TV advertising at the time, or advertising
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: in general, sort of, not only did TV rule the world,
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: but the ads behind it was really the driving force.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: It sounds very familiar.
• 7:01
  Speaker 2: It does. Everyone's like, I'd take a blipvert.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 7:05
  Speaker 2: Give me a three-second ad on the podcast.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: Guys, it'll blow you up.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: So what ended up happening was the character of Edison
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: Carter eventually was– there was an incident, not the Max
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: Headroom incident, where he was left in a coma in
• 7:23
  Speaker 2: an episode.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: The first episode.
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, the pilot, of course. And the last thing
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: he sees before falling into a coma is a sign
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: that said Max Headroom colon 2.3 meters. Mm-hmm. And so
• 7:35
  Speaker 2: that's how he got the name Max Headroom.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: Right. It was in like a parking garage. And it
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: was basically saying this is the overhead clearance is the
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: way it's put in the United States.
• 7:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: Right. So that's the name Max Headroom, right?
• 7:46
  Speaker 2: But he was an AI character.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: Right. So the evil TV network got a hold of him,
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: uploaded his brain. And they originally did this with the
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: intent of bringing Edison Carter because, again, he was like
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: their star reporter. Yeah. Bringing him back in virtual form.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: So they created an artificial intelligence. Well, it was kind
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: of glitchy and blippy and it looked weird. So they
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: threw it out. Well, some pirate broadcasters got a hold
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: of this database that Max Headroom lived on and they
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: started broadcasting with him and Max Headroom was born.
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: That's right. And you said glitchy and blippy. And that, kids,
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: explains your intro when you went Josh.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: I was doing my Max Headroom impression. Thank you for
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: explaining that.
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that bears... Josh was... He's okay, everybody. So that's
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: what Max Headroom did. It was jittery. It was blippy,
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: like you said. The background was this weird sort of
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: horizontal and diagonal lined moving around thing. And that was
• 8:49
  Speaker 2: all part of this, at the time, sort of futuristic look.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: He was also really sarcastic and really catty. And he
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: was really... He poked fun at censorship. And he was
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: just kind of like a cult hero, just the character itself, right?
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: The awesome thing about him is in the real world
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: of 1984, we didn't have any kind of computers that
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: could generate a CGI host. So they actually used like prosthetics. Yeah.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: Like there was a four-hour process to put Matt Frewer
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: into the Max Headroom makeup. So it's the guy acting,
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: and they mess with the video a little bit, but
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: it wasn't a CGI version of a guy. It was
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: a guy acting like he was a CGI version of himself.
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: Right, which is why, for instance, if Max Headroom, the character,
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: were to appear on, say, David Letterman, which he did,
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: it would be Letterman interviewing a TV screen.
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: Which is what they did.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: But it was actually Matt Frewer in another studio.
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: He was probably just.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: Backstage.
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: Backstage being broadcast.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: And it's really like, as a kid, I did not
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: get all of it.
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: No, I just thought it was a.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: I didn't really know what it was because I'd never
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: seen the show. I thought he was the Coke guy.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: Right. And I think I'd seen the show a little bit.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: I was like, this is way too grown up for me.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: But I think I just kind of took it on
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: faith that he was computer generated or something like that.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: I didn't really think about it much. But now as
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: an adult looking back, I'm like, that... is brilliant and
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: really difficult. And the fact that they did this and
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: pulled it off as well as they did, it's a
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: pretty amazing thing, right? And you can kind of understand
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: how Max Headroom, with all that information now, became this
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: kind of cult icon, especially among cyberpunks at the time.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: And what?
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: Just keep saying cyberpunk.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: So let me, I'm not like a, particularly well-versed in
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: what constitutes cyberpunk, but it's like pornography to a Supreme
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: Court justice. I know it when I see it, right?
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: So if you watch the Max Headroom show, you're like, yeah,
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: that's cyberpunk. Robocop is supposedly cyberpunk, right? It's like a
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: bleak technological future where people are controlled by, almost down
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: to their minds by the government or some corporation or
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: some amalgamation of the two. That's pretty cyberpunk, right? So
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: at the time, you had what are called geeks and nerds,
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: but they are not really what you would call a
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: geek or a nerd today, right? Somebody who wears like
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: glasses that don't actually have prescription glass in them.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: Do people do that?
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: Some people do.
• 11:34
  Speaker 2: I did that in the fourth grade.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: Well, then you were a geek, apparently.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: No, I was a prep and I wore those little
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: tortoiseshell round uh preppy glasses because that was a cool
• 11:45
  Speaker 2: look yeah and actually went in it's it's one of
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: my least proud moments fashion wise yeah is actually bought
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: fake glasses and wore them around do you have photos
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: of this i'd really have to dig through some boxes.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: I think i speak for everyone when i say start digging.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: Dig yeah it was not my proudest moment yeah i'd
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: like to see that picture all right so um.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: At the time, people who were geeks and nerds, that
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: whole culture was very much derided and pushed around. I mean,
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: look at Revenge of the Nerds, right?
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: Like they came out on top.
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: I watched a little bit of that just the other night.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: This is probably the earliest celebration of nerd culture. It
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: was not something that was like venerated or subscribed to
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: by anyone who wasn't a genuine nerd or geek at all.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: And these were a very rarefied group of people who
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: really knew what they were doing with computers at a
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: time when almost no one else did.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, early adopters across the board.
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: Very much so, right? So Max Headroom's kind of a
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: cult hero to this guy. And that kind of sets
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: up what happened on November 22, 1987, in a little
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: town called Chicago, Illinois.
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: The city of industry.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: The city of angels.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: The city that doesn't ever sleep.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: Never.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: The Windy City.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: That's it. There you go. Of all time.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: The Windy City of all time. Yeah.
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: So that sets the stage. We know who the character
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: of Max Headroom was. Then at 9.14 p.m. Wait, wait, wait. Yes.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: Are you sure I set the stage?
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: I think so.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: Did we set the stage fully here?
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: It looks nice. All right. Let's do it. So at
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: 9.14 p.m. on that November night in Chicago.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: Four days before Thanksgiving. Yeah. Yeah.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: So everyone was in that frame of mind. Right. Put
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: yourself there.
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: I think that that helps a lot. It helped me
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: at least. Sure. Okay.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: Football season's going on. Yeah.
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, just that very day, the
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: Bears had beat the Lions.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Which, you know, it was a long time ago
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: because the Bears won a football game.
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: Oh, ouch. I know. The people in the Windy City
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: of All Time are not going to be happy with
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: you for that.
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: The Windy City of All Time. Oh, and there's a
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: sportscaster on local Channel 9. uh, Dan Roan, our way in.
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: And he was, he was going over the highlights of
• 14:12
  Speaker 2: that football game. Then all of a sudden, right in
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: the middle, the, the broadcast signal goes, right. It makes
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: those noise, uh, noises. And then over at WGN, the
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: control room, they were like, what's, what's going on here.
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: We have no idea what this is.
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: I think the exact quote was a girl.
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: So, um, What happened was they eventually, what they were
• 14:38
  Speaker 2: doing at the time was, and this is how, we're
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: not going to go into the weeds here on how
• 14:42
  Speaker 2: broadcast signals work.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: No.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: But what they did back in the day was they
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: broadcast microwave transmissions to antennas at the top of the
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: tallest buildings of whatever city that they were in.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: For local TV.
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: For local TV, which is, I mean, there was cable
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: at the time, but local TV still kind of ruled.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: In the, well, sort of in the late 80s.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: Right. So like.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: Starting to segue to cable.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Cable is, you know, kind of a thing.
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: But you if you were a local TV station, you
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: still have pretty big market share.
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: For sure.
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: Right. Especially WGN in Chicago. I mean, it's like Chicago Station.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: So what I think you're saying is that in a studio,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: whatever they're recording or shooting or playing on their their
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: little videotapes. They're beaming that from the actual studio to
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: a transmitter, say, atop a very tall building, and that
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: just kind of bounces around to other transmitters, and that's
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: how everybody in Chicago gets their WGN signal, right?
• 15:39
  Speaker 2: Right. So all of a sudden, during the sportscast, it
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: skitzes out, and then all of a sudden you see
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: a guy in a suit wearing a Max Headroom mask, and.
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: There was no audio. That was, I guess, the problem
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: with this first intrusion. It was called a broadcast intrusion. Yeah.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: But you couldn't hear anything. But I'm sure it was
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: certainly distressing to a viewer to see this kind of
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: weird thing happen.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: Especially a viewer who wanted to know what the heck
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: happened between the bears and the lions that day.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: And the whole thing lasted, I think, like 11 seconds
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: or some very short amount of time.
• 16:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this was a short one.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: Before the WGN engineers went... And switched to the backup
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: transmitter and I guess transmitted on a slightly different signal.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: And brought the broadcast, the sportscaster back on. And Dan
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: Roan was like, if you're wondering what just happened, so
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: am I. Right. There's a chuckle in between. I wasn't
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: going to do my impression of it.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: You should.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: But it's good. You should watch it. Like somebody, just
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: go look it up.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: Right. So federal investigators, the FCC that is, was called
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: in to investigate. Um, what technically is, well, not technically,
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: it's a crime to do so. And then just a
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: few minutes later, they thought, well, this is probably coming
• 17:02
  Speaker 2: from inside the building. And so that's the first place
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: they started looking.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: They said the intrusion's coming from inside the building.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: They didn't find anybody though. I mean, it was, as
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: you'll see, after we explained further, it would make sense
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: that you would look in the building.
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: Right. For something like this.
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: Inside job.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: It apparently was not an inside job, at least as
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: far as the WGN engineers search was concerned.
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: That's right.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: So that was at 9.14. About two hours later, I
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: think at 11.15, on another channel in Chicago, WTTW, which
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: was the PBS station.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: They were airing an episode of Doctor Who called The
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: Horror on Fang Island.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: Fang Rock.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: Fang Rock.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: The Horror of Fang Rock.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: You have to say it like that, though.
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: The Horror of Fang Rock.
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Thank you.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: And this is the Tom Baker Doctor.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: Okay. That's the only one I recognize.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: Oh, really?
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: He's 70s, right?
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: Hey, I'm no Doctor Who guy, so don't embarrass me.
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: It looked like the 70s, what they cut in on,
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: looked pretty 70s. It didn't look 87. So who knows?
• 18:07
  Speaker 2: I would think it would be 87.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: I'm guessing it was a rerun on PBS. That's what
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: I think.
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: We'll find out. Oh, man, we are going to find
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: out too, aren't we?
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that would have been super easy to check.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: At any rate, in the middle of this Doctor Who episode,
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: it suddenly cuts out again. And now you've got what
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: appears to be the full run of this Max Headroom intrusion.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: Yes. Instead of 30 seconds, this one was a minute
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: and 22 seconds. And right now, I would say if
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: you are somewhere where you can pause and go to
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: a video, online video carrier of your choosing. And type
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: in Max Headroom incident. Uh-huh. Spend the next minute and
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: 22 seconds watching it.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: We'll wait.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: And we'll wait.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: We'll just insert a minute and 22 seconds of silence here.
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: How about this? Let's take a break.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: Oh, okay.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: And then we'll come back and then we'll talk about
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: exactly what happened during that minute and 22 seconds.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: Okay. Okay, we're back.
• 19:29
  Speaker 2: Did you watch it?
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: Are you talking to me?
• 19:31
  Speaker 2: No. Oh, okay. I was looking at you.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: I'm guessing that people did watch it. A few people did.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: Smart ones did. Because this is really tough to describe
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: and we're going to try. But it's something you really
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: have to see yourself.
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, in here. It's genuinely disturbing. sitting in an office
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: years later, watching it. And I can imagine if I
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: was at home, I would have probably been a little
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: freaked out.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: You found it disturbing? Yeah. I found it hilarious in
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: like a really juvenile way.
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it creeps me out.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: It was like watching David Byrne on acid at a
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: talking head show. That's what I think of when I
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: saw that. You know?
• 20:11
  Speaker 2: All right. So let's describe the scene here. Okay.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: So you got Max Headroom. Well, actually a dude wearing
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: a rubber mask. A rubber Halloween mask of Max Headroom.
• 20:21
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: And this is just genius to me. So you mentioned
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: earlier about how the Max Headroom had like these kind
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: of grid lines behind him at all times. And they
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: kind of moved and adjusted and they were different colors.
• 20:35
  Speaker 1: To simulate that, these guys had like a piece of
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: corrugated metal, shiny metal. Yeah. And I guess they had
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: it attached somehow to something that rocked it back and forth.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: And they kind of... Somebody was clearly rocking it back
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: and forth here or there erratically. And it really does
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: a good job of... It gets the point across.
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: That it looked like the Max Edrum TV show.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the background.
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: And the character. Yes.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: But again... I would say that this person was very,
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: very clearly on acid.
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: Well, I think what disturbs me, I need to make
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: it clear, it is definitely funny and stupid. But what
• 21:11
  Speaker 2: disturbs me is the sound of the voice, which is
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: all garbled. It's really like on YouTube it has subtitles, thankfully,
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: because it's hard to make out. And a lot of
• 21:20
  Speaker 2: times it just says, can't, you know, understand what he's
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: saying or whatever. And the garbled quality and just the
• 21:27
  Speaker 2: random weirdness that's going on. It's not like, It was
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: creepier to me than if V for Vendetta dude had
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: to come on. Guy Fawkes had to come on and said,
• 21:37
  Speaker 2: you know, we are coming into your thing to tell
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: you this about this.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 21:41
  Speaker 2: This was just so weird and all over the place.
• 21:43
  Speaker 2: It was creepy to me.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. I see what you mean. Like you're watching somebody.
• 21:48
  Speaker 2: It's nonsensical.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: Somebody's brain slightly damaged. Yeah.
• 21:51
  Speaker 2: I felt like I was watching somebody lose their mind.
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah.
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: Totally get that. Um, And here's what the guy did
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: that would make you feel like he lost his mind.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: This is the weird thing to me. It's very targeted
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: toward WGN, right? Almost so much so that some people
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: would say, this is clearly somebody who had a grudge
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: against WGN. He makes fun of the Bulls sportscaster, the
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: guy who worked for WGN at the time. He makes
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: reference to how he just made a masterpiece for the greatest—
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: world's newspaper nerds, which was a messed up version of
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: WGN's call letters stand for world's greatest newspaper.
• 22:37
  Speaker 2: He wields a rubber penis.
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's one. Although it was great. In almost every article,
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: it was referred to as a marital aid. Did you
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: see that?
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: No, but I actually guessed it on Strickland's tech stuff
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: like four years ago. And we covered this and I
• 22:52
  Speaker 2: called it a marital aid.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: Did you? Okay.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: So I wanted to keep it clean. Sure. But then
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: I realized that saying the word penis is OK.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: Well, it's clinical. I mean, we did a puberty episode.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: Surely we have the chops to say penis. But marital
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: aid is hilarious, especially in this context. Like this crazy
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: dude on acid wearing a Max Headroom mask has a
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: marital aid. No, he doesn't. That's not what that is
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: in that context.
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And that's a new T-shirt, by the way.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: What?
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: We have the chops to say penis.
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: There you go. That's a band name.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: Let's go ahead and say some of the direct quotes. Yes, let's.
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: So he comes on and he goes, he's a freaking nerd.
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: I think I'm better than Chuck Swirsky, freaking liberal.
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: That's a really good impression of this.
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: And Chuck Swirsky was the- The Bulls guy. Yeah, the
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: sports announcer.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: And this is a time too when the Bulls were,
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: this is the Jordan Pippen era still.
• 23:52
  Speaker 2: Well, still, it was at the beginning of it.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: Was it 87? I thought it was in the middle
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: of it. Was it the beginning?
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: Pretty early-ish, let's say.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: I wish these days that I would have been more
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: cognizant and more into basketball than I am now.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: See, that's when I was the most into it was Bird, Jordan, Magic.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: I would have liked to have watched some of those games.
• 24:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it was good stuff. Because that's when the Hawks
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: were good back then.
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, back then.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: Dominique.
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: Hey, shout out to Kent Bazemore. You know, he listens
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: to this show.
• 24:25
  Speaker 2: No way.
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he's a fan.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: How'd you find that out?
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: Twitter?
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah. That's great.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: Man, I love Baz.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: I know. How do you not love Baz?
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: He's awesome.
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: Man, he's bright red right now.
• 24:35
  Speaker 2: That's so cool.
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: So Chuck Swirsky's freaking liberal. He's wielding the rubber penis.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: The marital aid.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: The marital aid. He drops that. Then he picks up
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: a new Coke. Well, you can't really tell if it's
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: a Pepsi. Oh, was it? OK, I couldn't really tell.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: He picks up a can and but he says, catch
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: the wave, which is the new Coke slogan.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: Then he starts humming. It's so random. Then he starts
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: humming the theme song to the 60s show Clutch Cargo.
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: Which is weird in and of itself. Sure.
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: That's that one where it's like animation, but for the mouths,
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: it was just like a human mouth moving. That's disturbing.
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah. If you've seen Pulp Fiction, the scene where Bruce
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: Willis was a kid and Christopher Walken comes in with
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: the wristwatch scene, that Clutch Cargo is playing on TV
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: when he's watching it.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: But it is weird looking. Right.
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: So you would say, why did he do the Clutch
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: Cargo theme? Well, again, this is a WGN thing, and
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: apparently that's where you saw it as a kid in Chicago.
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: Okay. So he says also, your love is fading. I
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: still see the X, which apparently is something from the
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: last episode of Clutch Cargo.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that was the big X or something.
• 25:51
  Speaker 2: And then he says what you were talking about earlier,
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: I just made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: world newspaper nerds.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: But he should have said world's greatest newspaper nerds.
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: WGN.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: Right. Which you might find confusing as I did too.
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: But apparently the Chicago Tribune Company owns WGN TV. So
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: they call themselves world's greatest newspaper TV.
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: Right. WGN. It's all coming together.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: Ipso facto. There you go.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: Then finally toward the end, the camera cuts to a
• 26:24
  Speaker 2: different angle, uh, This one has the dude bent over
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: with his bare butt hanging out. His face is now
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: off screen, but he's holding the mask still out like
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: his head is in it, but it's not. There is
• 26:39
  Speaker 2: a person, I say woman, but I don't know, but
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: a person in like an Annie Oakley dress. Is that
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: what it was?
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: I didn't get that.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it looked like a prairie bonnet ensemble, but the
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: bonnet kind of hides the face, so you don't know
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: if it's a man or a woman.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: And they are spanking... The bear butt with a fly swatter.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: Right. And he's worried about them coming to get him.
• 27:00
  Speaker 2: They're coming to get me. Yeah. And then he says,
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: come get me and uses a bad word.
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: B word.
• 27:06
  Speaker 2: The B word. And then it goes back to Doctor Who.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Just like it came in. went out it just
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: and it's like gone.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: Can you imagine seeing that live and that.
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: Well the people who saw it live the next thing
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: they would have heard was the doctor saying something like
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: uh oh he died of an electric shock must have
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: died instantly yeah and then and everybody's just sitting there
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: like their mouths hanging open.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: Well it was dr who too so it was probably
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: a bunch of chicago nerds yeah watching pbs yeah so
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: all right my imitation was okay but let's just play
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: at least like a All right.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: So you did a pretty good impression. I think everyone
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: can agree now, right? It's so strange. So this was
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: an enormous thing, right? Like, people were watching this and were... aghast, agog.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: Some people probably thought it was funny. WGN's reporting on
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: it all over the place the next couple of days.
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the newspapers had picked it up.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah. There's this one, there's a compilation of WGN broadcasts,
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: or it may even be more than just WGN, of
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: people in the street being interviewed. What do you think
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: about this? And one guy's like, it's kind of like
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: hooligans throwing a brick through your window, you know, to
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: get your attention. There's a little kid who's like very,
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: very funny. The star of the news, though, was this
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: one Doctor Who fan, this lady who is not at
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: all amused by this. And I just want to play
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: her little segment, OK?
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: It annoyed some viewers.
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: I just thought it would be just a slight mess up.
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: But that in the middle of the tape, it's going to.
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: Be.
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: We're going to have to tape over it.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: I just think that's the funniest thing out of the
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: whole the whole thing.
• 29:04
  Speaker 2: Well, another guy said he wanted to smash his TV.
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: He was so angry.
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't see that guy. I saw that in
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: the Pasternak article.
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: So funny.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he was mad. So there was a lot of
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: mixed reaction, but the voice from on high that came
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: from the FCC, who you said were called in pretty quickly.
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: They were like, this is no laughing matter. You might
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: think it's funny. It's not very funny. Okay, it's kind
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: of funny, but not really. And you can get a
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: $ 100, 000 fine and a year in jail for this kind
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: of thing. So stop doing it.
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: But at this point, by this point, it was actually
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: a federal offense. It was a felony.
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: A felony offense.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: Wait, what was that?
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: Dazed and confused.
• 29:45
  Speaker 2: Oh, okay.
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: Tampering with the mailbox is a felony offense.
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: I was like, wait a minute. I know that from somewhere.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: So the FCC gets involved in this. This is really
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: interesting in this article.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: The FBI got involved too.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: FBI was involved. Chicago PD, like there was, they were
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: looking into it. Apparently the, man, it has become obvious
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: to me that I say the word apparently a lot.
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: A lot. I was listening to an episode, QAing an episode,
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: and I was like, stop saying apparently, Josh.
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I've started to, after 10 years, I've started to
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: notice some things about my own self.
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: It's like a tick.
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: I try to just avoid it.
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: I try to too. Normally I can, but man, it
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: just came welling up into my awareness. Well, apparently- Apparently,
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: I'm going to have to get over it. At any rate,
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: there were a lot of different agencies working on this,
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: but the trail went cold pretty quick. And you remember
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: how you said that the WGN engineers started looking around
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: the station? Yeah. I think what they were looking for
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: was this. Somebody... physically patching in to the transmission network,
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: the cables.
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: Wearing a Max Hedren mask.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: And yeah, either playing a videotape, which it seems pretty obvious.
• 30:58
  Speaker 2: It was pre-taped, yeah.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: It was pre-taped. Or doing something like in a studio.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: But they would have to physically patch into WGN's transmission network.
• 31:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like when a car doesn't work and I
• 31:13
  Speaker 2: open the hood thinking I'm going to see A squirrel
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: gnawing on a cable that's in two pieces now.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: And frayed at the ends.
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: Right. Now imagine that squirrel wearing a Max Headroom mask
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: and being on acid. Okay. With a marital aid.
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: So, and at first the FCC and the FBI and
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: anybody who was in the know basically said this was
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: a very sophisticated attack. It would have required a very, very,
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: some very expensive equipment. Yeah. A lot of electricity. There's
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: not a lot of ways that they could have done this.
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: But later on in the Pasternak article, and this is
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: one of the ways Pasternak contributed to this whole thing,
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: he talked to one of the FCC investigators. And this
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: guy basically did away with that whole viewpoint that had
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: lasted for almost 30 years. That it had to have
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: been somebody with $ 100, 000 piece of equipment and $ 10, 000 worth
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: of electricity over the minute and a half. He was saying, no,
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: you could probably have gotten the equipment needed for this
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: new for 10 grand at the time.
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: Or you could have probably bought it for use for
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: just a fraction of that. And it would have taken
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: very little electricity. It would have just taken some know-how
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: and good positioning, really.
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Basically, he was like, it could have been done
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: with like the size of a direct TV dish today.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 32:41
  Speaker 2: And all they would have had to do was get.
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: In a high enough location in between, like literally, because
• 32:48
  Speaker 2: they're beaming waves. They're beaming microwaves through the air. So
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: he's like, all they had to do was get in
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: between the original studio and that initial tower on top
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: of the, I think it was the John Hancock building.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: For WGN, yeah.
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And have a stronger signal.
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: Right. So even just like a slightly stronger signal.
• 33:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: So you remember how WGN has their studio... transmission shooting
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: up to the John Hancock building.
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: And then that transmitter shoots it out to everybody else
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: in Chicago.
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: What, what, what, what I think you're saying is like,
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: if somebody was on the roof of another nearby building
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: and they just shoot a transmission, their own max headroom
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: transmission at a stronger, a stronger weight or no, a
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: stronger amplitude. That's what it is of the same frequency.
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: You just overpower it, cancels out what WGN's doing, and
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: instead it transmits your max headroom thing.
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: And they would be closer to that broadcast tower.
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 33:47
  Speaker 2: Ostensibly.
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: Yes. So that would mean that it required far less
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: electricity than you would think or that they originally thought
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: and far less equipment too. They also had a pretty
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: good idea of where these people would have had to
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: have done it because after they got shut out of WGN,
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: They turned their attention to WTTW, the PBS station, and
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: they hijacked their signal. Well, WTTW shot their studio link
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: to the Sears Tower.
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: So this would have been somebody who was on a
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: roof somewhere that had a clear view of the John
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: Hancock building and the Sears Tower and could transmit to
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: either one of them. But that's basically what they think happened.
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And the guy you were talking about, Dr. Michael Marcus,
• 34:32
  Speaker 2: who at the time was the assistant bureau chief in
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: the FCC's Field Operations Bureau. He was the lead investigator,
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: and he said that the guy in Chicago that was
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: sort of in charge wasn't super, like... He was just
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: sort of used to traditional FCC investigations. He wasn't one
• 34:49
  Speaker 2: to go knocking on doors and... as to, like, investigate
• 34:53
  Speaker 2: some kind of weird, kind of maybe creepy criminal dudes.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: Who may or may not have a marital aid in
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: his apartment.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: Just smack him on the head with it. And then
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: they also... Nobody was being hurt. No one got hurt.
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: In the end, it was almost a victimless crime. So
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: they didn't throw a ton of resources at it. They
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: were kind of like, listen, if you want to go
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: investigate this, that's great. You should. But we're not going
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: to assign a team of 12 people to try and
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: crack this case of a bunch of nerds. who did
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: a weird thing for a minute and 20 seconds.
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: And I think the longer it went on and there
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: was no more of these intrusions from these guys, the
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: fewer and fewer resources they had to work with, and
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: it just kind of fell to the wayside. But what's
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: interesting is in the beginning they said it would take
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: somebody with a very expensive piece of equipment, a lot
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: of electricity, and a lot of know-how. And today the
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: only one of those that's remaining is a lot of know-how.
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: There wouldn't have been a lot of people running around
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: Chicago who would have known how to do something like this.
• 36:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: So it's kind of surprising, even with very few resources,
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: that no one has ever been really implicated in this one.
• 36:13
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think we've said. They still don't know
• 36:15
  Speaker 2: who did this.
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: It's an unsolved mystery. Yeah. Like Dennis Farina and Robert
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: Stack love this one.
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah. The FBI, for their take, started concentrating on the
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: actual video. They had the technology at the time, which
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: is kind of funny now to think about it. But
• 36:33
  Speaker 2: they're the only ones who had the technology at the
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: time to actually make enhanced frames of this videotape and
• 36:39
  Speaker 2: print out, you know, pictures, enhance them. And they were
• 36:45
  Speaker 2: kind of focused on this upper right-hand quadrant, as they say,
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: where the Annie Oakley was spanking with a fly swatter.
• 36:51
  Speaker 2: I don't know why they were so into that. But
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: they said, you know, we're trying to get clues on
• 36:57
  Speaker 2: the actual location of the people who made the tape,
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: not necessarily where they broadcast it from, but where did
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: they shoot this thing to begin with? There was very
• 37:04
  Speaker 2: little to go on aside from that spinning corrugated metal.
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: And that could have been literally anywhere because it's a
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: really tight shot.
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: It really is. Yeah. And there was very little evidence
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: given in the video.
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, it says that they were looking at
• 37:18
  Speaker 2: industrial warehouses and things, but that could have been in
• 37:21
  Speaker 2: an apartment building.
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 37:22
  Speaker 2: Living room.
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: I mean, it wasn't like the door was attached to anything.
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: It was freely spinning. Yeah. Back and forth. It did
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: make sense. Not the best lead, right? No. So over time,
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: and again, this is weird too. It's not so weird
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: that the FCC or the FBI didn't find who did
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: this if they weren't really looking very hard. Yeah. What's
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: really weird is that no one has been like, it
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: was these guys. I was there. I know these dudes.
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: It was these guys.
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: Statute of limitations is done. Like, who cares?
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah. After 1993, these guys would have gotten off scot-free
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: because the statute of limitations for this one was five years, right?
• 37:59
  Speaker 2: I'm shocked that no one later said, hey, that was me. Right.
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: I'm soy bomb.
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: No one's done that, right? Yeah. There was some, so
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: very early forum, like message board stuff took the form
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: of bulletin board services, I think.
• 38:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: Really early geek culture, like Matthew Broderick dialing something with
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: his phone and then putting it on that weird little
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: Commodore 64 thing, the modem, yeah, to transmit the dial
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: tone over the telephone system. So that's the level of
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: technology that these people were dealing with. But they were
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: communicating with each other over this proto-internet, these bulletin board systems.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: And two days after this, A guy named The Chameleon
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: posted basically what you and I said about how all
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: it took was these guys to go up on a
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: tall building and overwhelm the WGN and the WTTW studio links.
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: And ipso facto, I'm a big fan of that, by
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: the way, this intrusion was successful, right? Two days, not
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: two years, not a year ago, two days after it.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: Somebody was on there explaining how it went down. So
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: somebody knew this, right? But only two theories have really
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: ever come to light as to who it was. One,
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: you can basically just throw right out. And the other one,
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: it turns out to have been a dead end.
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the first one that you're talking about that doesn't
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: really hold water was a, and this was a rumor
• 39:33
  Speaker 2: online for a while. It was a musician named Eric
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: Fournier or Fournier.
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: Fournier.
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: Fournier.
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: I had a friend in preschool, I think, named Fournier.
• 39:44
  Speaker 2: That's how it was spelled? F-O-U-R-N-I-E-R.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: Actually, I don't know how it's spelled. I couldn't spell
• 39:49
  Speaker 1: back then.
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: So this guy was in a band, and he did
• 39:57
  Speaker 2: this weird, super creepy YouTube series called Shea St. John. S-H-A-Y-E.
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: Did you watch it?
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: Love it.
• 40:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I knew that you would love it. I love it, dude.
• 40:10
  Speaker 2: It's right up your alley.
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: But this is genuinely unsettling, too.
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: I'm with you on that.
• 40:14
  Speaker 2: So it kind of fit in that he was doing
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: these weird things. He had this band. They were in Bloomington, Indiana,
• 40:21
  Speaker 2: not too far from Chicago.
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: The Blood Farmers.
• 40:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the band was the Blood Farmers. And they did
• 40:26
  Speaker 2: these weird music videos and they thought this is the
• 40:28
  Speaker 2: kind of guy that would have done that. And the
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: thinking was that he went to go broadcast one of
• 40:33
  Speaker 2: their weird music videos as a broadcast intrusion. but chickened
• 40:37
  Speaker 2: out at the last minute because they would have been found. Sure.
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: And then ended up just improv-ing. That part makes a
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: little sense because it definitely seems improv-ed.
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: It does, but it was also videotaped, remember? So that
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: means he would have had two videotapes with him.
• 40:50
  Speaker 2: What do you mean?
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: So if he was going to play the music video
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: and said, I'm not going to do that, he would
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: have had to have brought this other videotape and played
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: that as a backup. The other thing is apparently, see,
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: I just said apparently again. Alex Pasternak from Motherboard contacted
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: some of Furnier's friends.
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: Because Furnier died in 2010, but his friends were like,
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: absolutely not. Even some of the blood farmers were like,
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: it wasn't him. Yeah. Like, I know what you're saying,
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: and yeah, he did the whole Shea St. John thing.
• 41:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: But this was not him. It was not quite there.
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: He didn't know what he was doing with any broadcast
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: stuff or video editing or anything like that. Yeah.
• 41:30
  Speaker 2: So this other one, to me, seems pretty promising.
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: Uh, so we flash forward to when did this actually happen?
• 41:40
  Speaker 2: Was this like by the time Reddit to come around?
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: Wasn't it on Reddit?
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it was about 25 years after. So
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: it would have been in 2007. Yeah.
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: So there's this guy.
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: 2012, 13. Okay. Sorry.
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: There was this guy named from Chicago named Bowie Pogue.
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 41:59
  Speaker 2: P-O-A-G.
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: I didn't have any friends with that last name. when
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: I was a kid.
• 42:03
  Speaker 2: And he was one of the kids hanging around those
• 42:05
  Speaker 2: BBSs in the 80s in Chicago. From the sounds of it,
• 42:10
  Speaker 2: he was on the younger side. He was 13. And
• 42:13
  Speaker 2: even as a 13-year-old geek was very much intimidated by
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: the older geeks in that crowd. And so it wasn't boisterous.
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: He was sort of like, hey, I'm kind of hanging
• 42:22
  Speaker 2: out here and not saying much and don't notice me.
• 42:25
  Speaker 2: I just want to ingratiate myself.
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: You guys can get me drunk for laughs if you want.
• 42:30
  Speaker 2: And at a party in 1987, he remembers this– he
• 42:34
  Speaker 2: described him as a small, peculiar man that he thought
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: was about in his 30s. And he had an older brother.
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: They lived in Chicago.
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: So Pogue is describing these two guys who were in
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: the same scene with him.
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: Correct.
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 42:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And he had– they lived with his girlfriend downtown–
• 42:52
  Speaker 2: about 10 miles from downtown Chicago.
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 42:54
  Speaker 2: And they had the know-how. They were super into computers
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: early on.
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
• 43:00
  Speaker 2: He said he went to their apartment and it was
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: just like, it looked like a computer hoarder mess of
• 43:05
  Speaker 2: wires and computers and equipment.
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: Like Neo's apartment.
• 43:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Why not?
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: Or what was the other one he was in before
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: the Matrix?
• 43:15
  Speaker 2: Johnny Mnemonic? Yes. Yeah. Bill and Ted? Yeah. Johnny Mnemonic.
• 43:20
  Speaker 2: That's cyberpunk. Yes.
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: Right? Yes, it is.
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: You could probably make the case that the Matrix is
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: as well. All right.
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: Sure. So he described him as a stocky guy with
• 43:32
  Speaker 2: tinted lens glasses in his early 30s, an odd dude.
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: His brother, he said he described as just kind of normal.
• 43:40
  Speaker 2: But he said that he didn't make the connection at
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: the time, but at a party on November about the
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: same day, midday on November 22nd, he was at a
• 43:50
  Speaker 2: gathering of these dudes at the brother's apartment and he
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: heard them say something about doing something big. Later that night,
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: they went to Pizza Hut and he's like, what are
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: you guys talking about? What's the big thing? And they said, hey,
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: don't ask questions, but just watch Channel 11 tonight.
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 44:06
  Speaker 2: On that same day. And I don't know how he
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: didn't put it together.
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: That's the one thing that really strikes me is fishy.
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: But he said that years later, now when he looks
• 44:15
  Speaker 2: at it, he's like, even with that mask on, I
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: see the body. I see what's going on. I hear that.
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: And it's that guy.
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: To me.
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: But 25 years later. Yeah. He was there that day.
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: They tell him to watch that night.
• 44:29
  Speaker 2: I know.
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: And he didn't put it together for 25 years. That,
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: to me, is the one fishy thing.
• 44:34
  Speaker 2: Well, and he has been called out as fishy. Sure.
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: I'm sure he knows that it's kind of fishy.
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So the guy, the motherboard, Pasternak, reached out and
• 44:45
  Speaker 2: he said, can you still get in touch with these
• 44:48
  Speaker 2: guys all these years later? He said he sent them
• 44:50
  Speaker 2: messages via Facebook. I don't even know if they saw him.
• 44:53
  Speaker 2: They didn't get back. Then in a last-ditch effort, he
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: sent them a certified mail. He found out where they lived.
• 44:59
  Speaker 2: Never heard anything back. And he was like, hey, it's
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: clear that these guys don't want to be talked to.
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: Right. So you want to take a break?
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, let's do it.
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: Damn, it's like being Joshua.
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: So that's where it stands right now. Like nobody knows
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: who is behind it still to this day.
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: Crazy.
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: It is crazy. And as a result, this Max Headroom
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: hack has taken its place in like the pantheon of
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: geek culture and of hacker culture. And rightfully so, you know.
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: It's legendary in its own way.
• 45:49
  Speaker 2: That's right.
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: You got anything else?
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: I got nothing else on this one. Cool, man.
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: Well, if you want to know more about Max Headroom, uh,
• 45:57
  Speaker 1: you should start by checking out this amazing, uh, motherboard
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: article by Alex Pasternak. And since I said amazing, it's
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: time for listener mail.
• 46:08
  Speaker 2: I'm going to go with, uh, I'm going to go
• 46:12
  Speaker 2: with the, the almond brothers eat a peach from emojis.
• 46:16
  Speaker 2: I don't know if this is true, but it's fun.
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: Uh, wanted to talk about when, uh, Josh talked about
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: the almond brothers band factoid, um, Because I think it's
• 46:25
  Speaker 2: actually a cool factoid. Dwayne Allman was once asked by
• 46:29
  Speaker 2: a reporter what he was going to do for the
• 46:31
  Speaker 2: war effort in Vietnam. And his response was, I'm going
• 46:34
  Speaker 2: to eat a peach for peace. Dwayne died not long
• 46:38
  Speaker 2: after that album. And Eat a Peach was released posthumously.
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: So he contends, Jesse Gaudette, that that is where the
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: album title came from. And that Eat a Peach was
• 46:49
  Speaker 2: not Eat a Butch.
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: He or she, I guess. Jesse could go either way.
• 46:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah. As always, keep up the good work. I'm currently
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: brewing beer and listening. Tell me where to mail some bottles.
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 47:02
  Speaker 2: Or come pick them up in Salt Lake City.
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: All right. We'll do both.
• 47:06
  Speaker 2: Sounds like a challenge. Right.
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: They're too heavy.
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: That's right.
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: You can't pick them up. Thanks a lot, Jesse. Appreciate that,
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: even though I still think I'm right. If you want
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: to contend that something one of us said was incorrect,
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: we'd love that stuff. You can tweet to us at
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: Josh M. Clark, SYSK Podcast, or Movie Crush. You can
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: hang out with us on Facebook.com slash StuffYouShouldKnow or slash
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. And as always, join us at
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com.