September 18, 2026 • 47 mins
In 1987, a very strange broadcast intrusion occurred in the city of Chicago. For just a couple of minutes, the odd TV character Max Headroom appeared onscreen in the middle of an episode of Dr. Who. He spoke in garbled tones, brandished a marital aid, and was spanked on the rear with a fly swatter by a person dressed in Annie Oakley garb. If this sounds weird, it is. It's the Max Headroom Incident.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Here is a classic episode that covers a single event
that happened on one night in 1987 in the great
city of Chicago, where someone wearing a Max Headroom mask
took over a local TV station for several minutes. And
when I put it like that, it sounds pretty inconsequential,
but it was such a big deal that the feds
got involved. And even better, it's a mystery that's still
(00:26):
not fully solved today. And it's weird. Welcome to Stuff
You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Chuck Bryant and Jerry Rowland. What
(00:51):
do you think? Pretty good?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
It's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
And this is Stuff You Should Know.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Josh Headroom.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
I saw you over there with your earbuds today. You were...
Working on this all day, weren't you?
Speaker 1 (01:02):
I watched season one, episode one.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Oh, really?
Speaker 1 (01:05):
In full? Of Max Headroom. Like, the last ten minutes
is still pending.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
But it's crazy. Like, Max Headroom himself doesn't show up until, like,
40 minutes into the first hour-long episode. But when he does,
it's dynamite.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
So what are we talking about?
Speaker 1 (01:22):
We're talking about Max Headroom.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
That's right. A huge shout-out at the beginning of this
to vice.com, specifically... Motherboard.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Specifically, Alex Pasternak.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Yeah, who wrote the article on Motherboard. And we actually,
we used to blog a little bit for them back
in the day. Remember that?
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Yeah, I don't think they like to talk about that
or acknowledge it publicly.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
You don't think?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Oh, I think it was mutually beneficial.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
I'll bet you can't find those on Motherboard anymore. I'm
trying to remember. I'm sure they were like.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I think I read one about driving a stick shift
versus automatic or something weird.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
That's a big one. Yeah. We started out with an
old fashioned recipe, I think.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, that was you.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
They were like, let's do better than this, guys. And
we said no.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
And then they said, we got our own people.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Yeah. We'll let somebody come in and ghostwrite for you.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Yeah, so that motherboard article was the basis. And from
what I found, I mean, we used a lot of
different sources on this, but this article entitled The Mystery
of the Creepiest Television Hack is sort of the culmination,
like the coup de grace.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Coup de grace?
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Sure. Of Max Headroom incident articles.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Yeah, it actually.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Really good job.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Pasternak very exhaustively investigated it and turned up new information,
got a new understanding of it, and basically contributed to
the mythos of it himself. So way to go, Pasternak.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Right. And what we're talking about is... If you don't
know who Max Headroom at all is, we're about to
set that up.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, let's talk about Max Headroom.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
But if you were alive during the 1980s, then you
probably know who Max Headroom is because, weirdly, for a
brief few years, it was kind of a big pop
culture thing.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
About four years by my calculations.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
So starting in 1984, there was a movie called Max Headroom... colon,
so you know it was an important movie, 20 Minutes
in the Future.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1 (03:27):
And it was kind of a cyberpunk movie, dystopian future,
very Terry Gilliam, Brazil-ish. And it was, I haven't seen
that one, but it was basically where the character of
Max Headroom was born, right?
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
And I think it actually formed the basis for the
TV show later. In between the later TV show that
you and I are more familiar with, And that movie,
Max Headroom was a pop culture sensation. He was a
pitchman for New Coke.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Oh, man.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
I went and watched an old ad. He was in
an ad with Run DMC pitching New Coke. And I
was like, doesn't get any more 80s than this. But
it was actually a pretty cool ad, right?
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Was it? Did it say, here's a little story I
need to tell about a new Coke on the scene
that you'd love so well?
Speaker 1 (04:16):
That was exactly word for word how the ad went. Yeah.
So let's back up a little more, right? Okay. Let's
describe what Max Headroom is for the kids. Because I
guarantee about 80% of our audience are like, what's the 80s?
What's New Coke?
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Who's run DMC? Well, that's probably not true. So what
was Max Headroom? He was billed as like the first
virtual talk show host, right?
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Correct. Okay. Yeah. So he was played by a guy
named Matt Frewer. who, out of prosthetic makeup, had that
look anyway, very chiseled, square-jawed. He was not bald, but
had— was he balding? He had a receding hairline. Okay, but
he kept it really, really short, so he kind of
looked bald.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Yeah. Here, this will explain it to all the kids
at home. He was a colleague of Murphy Brown on
the Murphy Brown television show. They're like, oh. Oh, that guy.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
I got you.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Not the painter. No. The other one, the love interest.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
I don't think I knew that. I never watched Murphy Brown, though.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Oh, man, I hope it was him. I'm pretty sure
it was him.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Well, he's been around. He's still acting today. Sure. But, yes,
he played the character of Max Headroom, and the TV
show Max Headroom was actually pretty far ahead of its time,
tonally speaking.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah. So the whole premise of the TV show, his
big last great gasp, that was actually the most serious
of all of it, was where... In the future, TV
networks controlled the world.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
And the station, the Network 23, that Matt Frewer's character
and later Max Headroom, who became his alter ego, worked for,
were putting these things called blipverts out.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah. His character's name was Edison Carter at first. Right.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
And he was like an investigative journalist. Yeah. So he
starts looking into these blipverts because the problem with blipverts,
they are 30-second ads compressed into three seconds, and it's
meant to keep you from changing the channel. The problem
is that everybody watched so much TV by this time,
they didn't move around, which meant that all of the
(06:22):
electricity generated by their nerve endings wasn't burned off, is
how the show explained it. So when their brains were
assaulted with these blipverts, they kind of short-circuited, and all
of that electricity that was just hanging around their bodies
because they weren't moving at all during the day made
them explode. The network really liked blipverts, and they didn't
(06:43):
want to get rid of them, so they decided to
instead get rid of Edison Carter.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, and the TV advertising at the time, or advertising
in general, sort of, not only did TV rule the world,
but the ads behind it was really the driving force.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
It sounds very familiar.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
It does. Everyone's like, I'd take a blipvert.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Give me a three-second ad on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Guys, it'll blow you up.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
So what ended up happening was the character of Edison
Carter eventually was– there was an incident, not the Max
Headroom incident, where he was left in a coma in
an episode.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
The first episode.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Oh, yeah, the pilot, of course. And the last thing
he sees before falling into a coma is a sign
that said Max Headroom colon 2.3 meters. Mm-hmm. And so
that's how he got the name Max Headroom.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Right. It was in like a parking garage. And it
was basically saying this is the overhead clearance is the
way it's put in the United States.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Right. So that's the name Max Headroom, right?
Speaker 2 (07:46):
But he was an AI character.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Right. So the evil TV network got a hold of him,
uploaded his brain. And they originally did this with the
intent of bringing Edison Carter because, again, he was like
their star reporter. Yeah. Bringing him back in virtual form.
So they created an artificial intelligence. Well, it was kind
of glitchy and blippy and it looked weird. So they
(08:10):
threw it out. Well, some pirate broadcasters got a hold
of this database that Max Headroom lived on and they
started broadcasting with him and Max Headroom was born.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
That's right. And you said glitchy and blippy. And that, kids,
explains your intro when you went Josh.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
I was doing my Max Headroom impression. Thank you for
explaining that.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah, that bears... Josh was... He's okay, everybody. So that's
what Max Headroom did. It was jittery. It was blippy,
like you said. The background was this weird sort of
horizontal and diagonal lined moving around thing. And that was
all part of this, at the time, sort of futuristic look.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
He was also really sarcastic and really catty. And he
was really... He poked fun at censorship. And he was
just kind of like a cult hero, just the character itself, right?
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
The awesome thing about him is in the real world
of 1984, we didn't have any kind of computers that
could generate a CGI host. So they actually used like prosthetics. Yeah.
Like there was a four-hour process to put Matt Frewer
into the Max Headroom makeup. So it's the guy acting,
and they mess with the video a little bit, but
(09:27):
it wasn't a CGI version of a guy. It was
a guy acting like he was a CGI version of himself.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Right, which is why, for instance, if Max Headroom, the character,
were to appear on, say, David Letterman, which he did,
it would be Letterman interviewing a TV screen.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Right.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Which is what they did.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
But it was actually Matt Frewer in another studio.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
He was probably just.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Backstage.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Backstage being broadcast.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
And it's really like, as a kid, I did not
get all of it.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
No, I just thought it was a.
I didn't really know what it was because I'd never
seen the show. I thought he was the Coke guy.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Right. And I think I'd seen the show a little bit.
I was like, this is way too grown up for me.
But I think I just kind of took it on
faith that he was computer generated or something like that.
I didn't really think about it much. But now as
an adult looking back, I'm like, that... is brilliant and
really difficult. And the fact that they did this and
pulled it off as well as they did, it's a
(10:27):
pretty amazing thing, right? And you can kind of understand
how Max Headroom, with all that information now, became this
kind of cult icon, especially among cyberpunks at the time.
And what?
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Just keep saying cyberpunk.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
So let me, I'm not like a, particularly well-versed in
what constitutes cyberpunk, but it's like pornography to a Supreme
Court justice. I know it when I see it, right?
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
So if you watch the Max Headroom show, you're like, yeah,
that's cyberpunk. Robocop is supposedly cyberpunk, right? It's like a
bleak technological future where people are controlled by, almost down
to their minds by the government or some corporation or
some amalgamation of the two. That's pretty cyberpunk, right? So
(11:19):
at the time, you had what are called geeks and nerds,
but they are not really what you would call a
geek or a nerd today, right? Somebody who wears like
glasses that don't actually have prescription glass in them.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Do people do that?
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Some people do.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
I did that in the fourth grade.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Well, then you were a geek, apparently.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
No, I was a prep and I wore those little
tortoiseshell round uh preppy glasses because that was a cool
look yeah and actually went in it's it's one of
my least proud moments fashion wise yeah is actually bought
fake glasses and wore them around do you have photos
of this i'd really have to dig through some boxes.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
I think i speak for everyone when i say start digging.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Dig yeah it was not my proudest moment yeah i'd
like to see that picture all right so um.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
At the time, people who were geeks and nerds, that
whole culture was very much derided and pushed around. I mean,
look at Revenge of the Nerds, right?
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Like they came out on top.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
I watched a little bit of that just the other night.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
This is probably the earliest celebration of nerd culture. It
was not something that was like venerated or subscribed to
by anyone who wasn't a genuine nerd or geek at all.
And these were a very rarefied group of people who
really knew what they were doing with computers at a
(12:43):
time when almost no one else did.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah, early adopters across the board.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Very much so, right? So Max Headroom's kind of a
cult hero to this guy. And that kind of sets
up what happened on November 22, 1987, in a little
town called Chicago, Illinois.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
The city of industry.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
The city of angels.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
The city that doesn't ever sleep.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Never.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
The Windy City.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
That's it. There you go. Of all time.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
The Windy City of all time. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
So that sets the stage. We know who the character
of Max Headroom was. Then at 9.14 p.m. Wait, wait, wait. Yes.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Are you sure I set the stage?
Speaker 2 (13:24):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Did we set the stage fully here?
Speaker 2 (13:27):
It looks nice. All right. Let's do it. So at
9.14 p.m. on that November night in Chicago.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Four days before Thanksgiving. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
So everyone was in that frame of mind. Right. Put
yourself there.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
I think that that helps a lot. It helped me
at least. Sure. Okay.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Football season's going on. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
As a matter of fact, just that very day, the
Bears had beat the Lions.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah. Which, you know, it was a long time ago
because the Bears won a football game.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Oh, ouch. I know. The people in the Windy City
of All Time are not going to be happy with
you for that.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
The Windy City of All Time. Oh, and there's a
sportscaster on local Channel 9. uh, Dan Roan, our way in.
And he was, he was going over the highlights of
that football game. Then all of a sudden, right in
the middle, the, the broadcast signal goes, right. It makes
(14:20):
those noise, uh, noises. And then over at WGN, the
control room, they were like, what's, what's going on here.
We have no idea what this is.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
I think the exact quote was a girl.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
So, um, What happened was they eventually, what they were
doing at the time was, and this is how, we're
not going to go into the weeds here on how
broadcast signals work.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
No.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
But what they did back in the day was they
broadcast microwave transmissions to antennas at the top of the
tallest buildings of whatever city that they were in.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
For local TV.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
For local TV, which is, I mean, there was cable
at the time, but local TV still kind of ruled.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
In the, well, sort of in the late 80s.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Right. So like.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Starting to segue to cable.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Yeah, for sure. Cable is, you know, kind of a thing.
But you if you were a local TV station, you
still have pretty big market share.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
For sure.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Right. Especially WGN in Chicago. I mean, it's like Chicago Station.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
So what I think you're saying is that in a studio,
whatever they're recording or shooting or playing on their their
little videotapes. They're beaming that from the actual studio to
a transmitter, say, atop a very tall building, and that
just kind of bounces around to other transmitters, and that's
how everybody in Chicago gets their WGN signal, right?
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Right. So all of a sudden, during the sportscast, it
skitzes out, and then all of a sudden you see
a guy in a suit wearing a Max Headroom mask, and.
There was no audio. That was, I guess, the problem
with this first intrusion. It was called a broadcast intrusion. Yeah.
(16:03):
But you couldn't hear anything. But I'm sure it was
certainly distressing to a viewer to see this kind of
weird thing happen.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Especially a viewer who wanted to know what the heck
happened between the bears and the lions that day.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
And the whole thing lasted, I think, like 11 seconds
or some very short amount of time.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah, this was a short one.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Before the WGN engineers went... And switched to the backup
transmitter and I guess transmitted on a slightly different signal.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
And brought the broadcast, the sportscaster back on. And Dan
Roan was like, if you're wondering what just happened, so
am I. Right. There's a chuckle in between. I wasn't
going to do my impression of it.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
You should.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
But it's good. You should watch it. Like somebody, just
go look it up.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Right. So federal investigators, the FCC that is, was called
in to investigate. Um, what technically is, well, not technically,
it's a crime to do so. And then just a
few minutes later, they thought, well, this is probably coming
from inside the building. And so that's the first place
they started looking.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
They said the intrusion's coming from inside the building.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
They didn't find anybody though. I mean, it was, as
you'll see, after we explained further, it would make sense
that you would look in the building.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Right. For something like this.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Inside job.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
It apparently was not an inside job, at least as
far as the WGN engineers search was concerned.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
So that was at 9.14. About two hours later, I
think at 11.15, on another channel in Chicago, WTTW, which
was the PBS station.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
They were airing an episode of Doctor Who called The
Horror on Fang Island.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Fang Rock.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Fang Rock.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
The Horror of Fang Rock.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
You have to say it like that, though.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
The Horror of Fang Rock.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
And this is the Tom Baker Doctor.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Okay. That's the only one I recognize.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Oh, really?
Speaker 1 (17:57):
He's 70s, right?
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Hey, I'm no Doctor Who guy, so don't embarrass me.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
It looked like the 70s, what they cut in on,
looked pretty 70s. It didn't look 87. So who knows?
Speaker 2 (18:07):
I would think it would be 87.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
I'm guessing it was a rerun on PBS. That's what
I think.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
All right.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
We'll find out. Oh, man, we are going to find
out too, aren't we?
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Yeah, that would have been super easy to check.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
At any rate, in the middle of this Doctor Who episode,
it suddenly cuts out again. And now you've got what
appears to be the full run of this Max Headroom intrusion.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yes. Instead of 30 seconds, this one was a minute
and 22 seconds. And right now, I would say if
you are somewhere where you can pause and go to
a video, online video carrier of your choosing. And type
in Max Headroom incident. Uh-huh. Spend the next minute and
22 seconds watching it.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
We'll wait.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
And we'll wait.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
We'll just insert a minute and 22 seconds of silence here.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
How about this? Let's take a break.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
And then we'll come back and then we'll talk about
exactly what happened during that minute and 22 seconds.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Okay. Okay, we're back.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Did you watch it?
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Are you talking to me?
Speaker 2 (19:31):
No. Oh, okay. I was looking at you.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
I'm guessing that people did watch it. A few people did.
Smart ones did. Because this is really tough to describe
and we're going to try. But it's something you really
have to see yourself.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Yeah, in here. It's genuinely disturbing. sitting in an office
years later, watching it. And I can imagine if I
was at home, I would have probably been a little
freaked out.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
You found it disturbing? Yeah. I found it hilarious in
like a really juvenile way.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah, it creeps me out.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
It was like watching David Byrne on acid at a
talking head show. That's what I think of when I
saw that. You know?
Speaker 2 (20:11):
All right. So let's describe the scene here. Okay.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
So you got Max Headroom. Well, actually a dude wearing
a rubber mask. A rubber Halloween mask of Max Headroom.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
And this is just genius to me. So you mentioned
earlier about how the Max Headroom had like these kind
of grid lines behind him at all times. And they
kind of moved and adjusted and they were different colors.
To simulate that, these guys had like a piece of
corrugated metal, shiny metal. Yeah. And I guess they had
(20:43):
it attached somehow to something that rocked it back and forth.
And they kind of... Somebody was clearly rocking it back
and forth here or there erratically. And it really does
a good job of... It gets the point across.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
That it looked like the Max Edrum TV show.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Yeah, the background.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
And the character. Yes.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
But again... I would say that this person was very,
very clearly on acid.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Well, I think what disturbs me, I need to make
it clear, it is definitely funny and stupid. But what
disturbs me is the sound of the voice, which is
all garbled. It's really like on YouTube it has subtitles, thankfully,
because it's hard to make out. And a lot of
times it just says, can't, you know, understand what he's
saying or whatever. And the garbled quality and just the
(21:27):
random weirdness that's going on. It's not like, It was
creepier to me than if V for Vendetta dude had
to come on. Guy Fawkes had to come on and said,
you know, we are coming into your thing to tell
you this about this.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
This was just so weird and all over the place.
It was creepy to me.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Yeah. Yeah. I see what you mean. Like you're watching somebody.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
It's nonsensical.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Somebody's brain slightly damaged. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
I felt like I was watching somebody lose their mind.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Totally get that. Um, And here's what the guy did
that would make you feel like he lost his mind.
This is the weird thing to me. It's very targeted
toward WGN, right? Almost so much so that some people
would say, this is clearly somebody who had a grudge
against WGN. He makes fun of the Bulls sportscaster, the
(22:21):
guy who worked for WGN at the time. He makes
reference to how he just made a masterpiece for the greatest—
world's newspaper nerds, which was a messed up version of
WGN's call letters stand for world's greatest newspaper.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
He wields a rubber penis.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Yeah, that's one. Although it was great. In almost every article,
it was referred to as a marital aid. Did you
see that?
Speaker 2 (22:46):
No, but I actually guessed it on Strickland's tech stuff
like four years ago. And we covered this and I
called it a marital aid.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Did you? Okay.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
So I wanted to keep it clean. Sure. But then
I realized that saying the word penis is OK.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Well, it's clinical. I mean, we did a puberty episode.
Surely we have the chops to say penis. But marital
aid is hilarious, especially in this context. Like this crazy
dude on acid wearing a Max Headroom mask has a
marital aid. No, he doesn't. That's not what that is
in that context.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Yeah. And that's a new T-shirt, by the way.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
What?
Speaker 2 (23:24):
We have the chops to say penis.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
There you go. That's a band name.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Let's go ahead and say some of the direct quotes. Yes, let's.
So he comes on and he goes, he's a freaking nerd.
I think I'm better than Chuck Swirsky, freaking liberal.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
That's a really good impression of this.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
And Chuck Swirsky was the- The Bulls guy. Yeah, the
sports announcer.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
And this is a time too when the Bulls were,
this is the Jordan Pippen era still.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Well, still, it was at the beginning of it.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Was it 87? I thought it was in the middle
of it. Was it the beginning?
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Pretty early-ish, let's say.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
I wish these days that I would have been more
cognizant and more into basketball than I am now.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
See, that's when I was the most into it was Bird, Jordan, Magic.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
I would have liked to have watched some of those games.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Yeah, it was good stuff. Because that's when the Hawks
were good back then.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, back then.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Dominique.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Hey, shout out to Kent Bazemore. You know, he listens
to this show.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
No way.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yeah, he's a fan.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
How'd you find that out?
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Twitter?
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Man, I love Baz.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
I know. How do you not love Baz?
Speaker 2 (24:33):
He's awesome.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Man, he's bright red right now.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
That's so cool.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
All right.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
So Chuck Swirsky's freaking liberal. He's wielding the rubber penis.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
The marital aid.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
The marital aid. He drops that. Then he picks up
a new Coke. Well, you can't really tell if it's
a Pepsi. Oh, was it? OK, I couldn't really tell.
He picks up a can and but he says, catch
the wave, which is the new Coke slogan.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Then he starts humming. It's so random. Then he starts
humming the theme song to the 60s show Clutch Cargo.
Which is weird in and of itself. Sure.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
That's that one where it's like animation, but for the mouths,
it was just like a human mouth moving. That's disturbing.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Yeah. If you've seen Pulp Fiction, the scene where Bruce
Willis was a kid and Christopher Walken comes in with
the wristwatch scene, that Clutch Cargo is playing on TV
when he's watching it.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
But it is weird looking. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
So you would say, why did he do the Clutch
Cargo theme? Well, again, this is a WGN thing, and
apparently that's where you saw it as a kid in Chicago.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Okay. So he says also, your love is fading. I
still see the X, which apparently is something from the
last episode of Clutch Cargo.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Yeah, that was the big X or something.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
And then he says what you were talking about earlier,
I just made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest
world newspaper nerds.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
But he should have said world's greatest newspaper nerds.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
WGN.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Right. Which you might find confusing as I did too.
But apparently the Chicago Tribune Company owns WGN TV. So
they call themselves world's greatest newspaper TV.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Right. WGN. It's all coming together.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Ipso facto. There you go.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Then finally toward the end, the camera cuts to a
different angle, uh, This one has the dude bent over
with his bare butt hanging out. His face is now
off screen, but he's holding the mask still out like
his head is in it, but it's not. There is
a person, I say woman, but I don't know, but
(26:42):
a person in like an Annie Oakley dress. Is that
what it was?
Speaker 1 (26:45):
I didn't get that.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yeah, it looked like a prairie bonnet ensemble, but the
bonnet kind of hides the face, so you don't know
if it's a man or a woman.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
And they are spanking... The bear butt with a fly swatter.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Right. And he's worried about them coming to get him.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
They're coming to get me. Yeah. And then he says,
come get me and uses a bad word.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
B word.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
The B word. And then it goes back to Doctor Who.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Yeah. Just like it came in. went out it just
and it's like gone.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Can you imagine seeing that live and that.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Well the people who saw it live the next thing
they would have heard was the doctor saying something like
uh oh he died of an electric shock must have
died instantly yeah and then and everybody's just sitting there
like their mouths hanging open.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Well it was dr who too so it was probably
a bunch of chicago nerds yeah watching pbs yeah so
all right my imitation was okay but let's just play
at least like a All right.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
So you did a pretty good impression. I think everyone
can agree now, right? It's so strange. So this was
an enormous thing, right? Like, people were watching this and were... aghast, agog.
Some people probably thought it was funny. WGN's reporting on
it all over the place the next couple of days.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah, the newspapers had picked it up.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah. There's this one, there's a compilation of WGN broadcasts,
or it may even be more than just WGN, of
people in the street being interviewed. What do you think
about this? And one guy's like, it's kind of like
hooligans throwing a brick through your window, you know, to
get your attention. There's a little kid who's like very,
(28:38):
very funny. The star of the news, though, was this
one Doctor Who fan, this lady who is not at
all amused by this. And I just want to play
her little segment, OK?
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
It annoyed some viewers.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
I just thought it would be just a slight mess up.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
But that in the middle of the tape, it's going to.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Be.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
We're going to have to tape over it.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I just think that's the funniest thing out of the
whole the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Well, another guy said he wanted to smash his TV.
He was so angry.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Yeah, I didn't see that guy. I saw that in
the Pasternak article.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
So funny.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Yeah, he was mad. So there was a lot of
mixed reaction, but the voice from on high that came
from the FCC, who you said were called in pretty quickly.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
They were like, this is no laughing matter. You might
think it's funny. It's not very funny. Okay, it's kind
of funny, but not really. And you can get a
$ 100, 000 fine and a year in jail for this kind
of thing. So stop doing it.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
But at this point, by this point, it was actually
a federal offense. It was a felony.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
A felony offense.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Wait, what was that?
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Dazed and confused.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Tampering with the mailbox is a felony offense.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
I was like, wait a minute. I know that from somewhere.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
So the FCC gets involved in this. This is really
interesting in this article.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
The FBI got involved too.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
FBI was involved. Chicago PD, like there was, they were
looking into it. Apparently the, man, it has become obvious
to me that I say the word apparently a lot.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Really?
Speaker 1 (30:07):
A lot. I was listening to an episode, QAing an episode,
and I was like, stop saying apparently, Josh.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Yeah, I've started to, after 10 years, I've started to
notice some things about my own self.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
It's like a tick.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
I try to just avoid it.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
I try to too. Normally I can, but man, it
just came welling up into my awareness. Well, apparently- Apparently,
I'm going to have to get over it. At any rate,
there were a lot of different agencies working on this,
but the trail went cold pretty quick. And you remember
how you said that the WGN engineers started looking around
(30:43):
the station? Yeah. I think what they were looking for
was this. Somebody... physically patching in to the transmission network,
the cables.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Wearing a Max Hedren mask.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
And yeah, either playing a videotape, which it seems pretty obvious.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
It was pre-taped, yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
It was pre-taped. Or doing something like in a studio.
But they would have to physically patch into WGN's transmission network.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Yeah, it's like when a car doesn't work and I
open the hood thinking I'm going to see A squirrel
gnawing on a cable that's in two pieces now.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Right.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
And frayed at the ends.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Right. Now imagine that squirrel wearing a Max Headroom mask
and being on acid. Okay. With a marital aid.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
So, and at first the FCC and the FBI and
anybody who was in the know basically said this was
a very sophisticated attack. It would have required a very, very,
some very expensive equipment. Yeah. A lot of electricity. There's
(31:49):
not a lot of ways that they could have done this.
But later on in the Pasternak article, and this is
one of the ways Pasternak contributed to this whole thing,
he talked to one of the FCC investigators. And this
guy basically did away with that whole viewpoint that had
lasted for almost 30 years. That it had to have
been somebody with $ 100, 000 piece of equipment and $ 10, 000 worth
(32:09):
of electricity over the minute and a half. He was saying, no,
you could probably have gotten the equipment needed for this
new for 10 grand at the time.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Or you could have probably bought it for use for
just a fraction of that. And it would have taken
very little electricity. It would have just taken some know-how
and good positioning, really.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah. Basically, he was like, it could have been done
with like the size of a direct TV dish today.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
And all they would have had to do was get.
In a high enough location in between, like literally, because
they're beaming waves. They're beaming microwaves through the air. So
he's like, all they had to do was get in
between the original studio and that initial tower on top
of the, I think it was the John Hancock building.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
For WGN, yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
Yeah. And have a stronger signal.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Right. So even just like a slightly stronger signal.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
So you remember how WGN has their studio... transmission shooting
up to the John Hancock building.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
And then that transmitter shoots it out to everybody else
in Chicago.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
What, what, what, what I think you're saying is like,
if somebody was on the roof of another nearby building
and they just shoot a transmission, their own max headroom
transmission at a stronger, a stronger weight or no, a
stronger amplitude. That's what it is of the same frequency.
You just overpower it, cancels out what WGN's doing, and
(33:41):
instead it transmits your max headroom thing.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
And they would be closer to that broadcast tower.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Ostensibly.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Yes. So that would mean that it required far less
electricity than you would think or that they originally thought
and far less equipment too. They also had a pretty
good idea of where these people would have had to
have done it because after they got shut out of WGN,
They turned their attention to WTTW, the PBS station, and
(34:09):
they hijacked their signal. Well, WTTW shot their studio link
to the Sears Tower.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
So this would have been somebody who was on a
roof somewhere that had a clear view of the John
Hancock building and the Sears Tower and could transmit to
either one of them. But that's basically what they think happened.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah. And the guy you were talking about, Dr. Michael Marcus,
who at the time was the assistant bureau chief in
the FCC's Field Operations Bureau. He was the lead investigator,
and he said that the guy in Chicago that was
sort of in charge wasn't super, like... He was just
sort of used to traditional FCC investigations. He wasn't one
(34:49):
to go knocking on doors and... as to, like, investigate
some kind of weird, kind of maybe creepy criminal dudes.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Who may or may not have a marital aid in
his apartment.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Just smack him on the head with it. And then
they also... Nobody was being hurt. No one got hurt.
In the end, it was almost a victimless crime. So
they didn't throw a ton of resources at it. They
were kind of like, listen, if you want to go
investigate this, that's great. You should. But we're not going
to assign a team of 12 people to try and
(35:24):
crack this case of a bunch of nerds. who did
a weird thing for a minute and 20 seconds.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
And I think the longer it went on and there
was no more of these intrusions from these guys, the
fewer and fewer resources they had to work with, and
it just kind of fell to the wayside. But what's
interesting is in the beginning they said it would take
somebody with a very expensive piece of equipment, a lot
(35:51):
of electricity, and a lot of know-how. And today the
only one of those that's remaining is a lot of know-how.
There wouldn't have been a lot of people running around
Chicago who would have known how to do something like this.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
So it's kind of surprising, even with very few resources,
that no one has ever been really implicated in this one.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yeah, I don't think we've said. They still don't know
who did this.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
It's an unsolved mystery. Yeah. Like Dennis Farina and Robert
Stack love this one.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Yeah. The FBI, for their take, started concentrating on the
actual video. They had the technology at the time, which
is kind of funny now to think about it. But
they're the only ones who had the technology at the
time to actually make enhanced frames of this videotape and
print out, you know, pictures, enhance them. And they were
(36:45):
kind of focused on this upper right-hand quadrant, as they say,
where the Annie Oakley was spanking with a fly swatter.
I don't know why they were so into that. But
they said, you know, we're trying to get clues on
the actual location of the people who made the tape,
not necessarily where they broadcast it from, but where did
they shoot this thing to begin with? There was very
little to go on aside from that spinning corrugated metal.
(37:08):
And that could have been literally anywhere because it's a
really tight shot.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
It really is. Yeah. And there was very little evidence
given in the video.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Yeah. I mean, it says that they were looking at
industrial warehouses and things, but that could have been in
an apartment building.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
Living room.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
I mean, it wasn't like the door was attached to anything.
It was freely spinning. Yeah. Back and forth. It did
make sense. Not the best lead, right? No. So over time,
and again, this is weird too. It's not so weird
that the FCC or the FBI didn't find who did
this if they weren't really looking very hard. Yeah. What's
really weird is that no one has been like, it
(37:44):
was these guys. I was there. I know these dudes.
It was these guys.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Statute of limitations is done. Like, who cares?
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yeah. After 1993, these guys would have gotten off scot-free
because the statute of limitations for this one was five years, right?
Speaker 2 (37:59):
I'm shocked that no one later said, hey, that was me. Right.
I'm soy bomb.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
No one's done that, right? Yeah. There was some, so
very early forum, like message board stuff took the form
of bulletin board services, I think.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Really early geek culture, like Matthew Broderick dialing something with
his phone and then putting it on that weird little
Commodore 64 thing, the modem, yeah, to transmit the dial
tone over the telephone system. So that's the level of
technology that these people were dealing with. But they were
(38:39):
communicating with each other over this proto-internet, these bulletin board systems.
And two days after this, A guy named The Chameleon
posted basically what you and I said about how all
it took was these guys to go up on a
tall building and overwhelm the WGN and the WTTW studio links.
(38:59):
And ipso facto, I'm a big fan of that, by
the way, this intrusion was successful, right? Two days, not
two years, not a year ago, two days after it.
Somebody was on there explaining how it went down. So
somebody knew this, right? But only two theories have really
(39:20):
ever come to light as to who it was. One,
you can basically just throw right out. And the other one,
it turns out to have been a dead end.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah, the first one that you're talking about that doesn't
really hold water was a, and this was a rumor
online for a while. It was a musician named Eric
Fournier or Fournier.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Fournier.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Fournier.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
I had a friend in preschool, I think, named Fournier.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
That's how it was spelled? F-O-U-R-N-I-E-R.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
Actually, I don't know how it's spelled. I couldn't spell
back then.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
So this guy was in a band, and he did
this weird, super creepy YouTube series called Shea St. John. S-H-A-Y-E.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Did you watch it?
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Love it.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Yeah, I knew that you would love it. I love it, dude.
It's right up your alley.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
But this is genuinely unsettling, too.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
I'm with you on that.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
So it kind of fit in that he was doing
these weird things. He had this band. They were in Bloomington, Indiana,
not too far from Chicago.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
The Blood Farmers.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah, the band was the Blood Farmers. And they did
these weird music videos and they thought this is the
kind of guy that would have done that. And the
thinking was that he went to go broadcast one of
their weird music videos as a broadcast intrusion. but chickened
out at the last minute because they would have been found. Sure.
And then ended up just improv-ing. That part makes a
little sense because it definitely seems improv-ed.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
It does, but it was also videotaped, remember? So that
means he would have had two videotapes with him.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
What do you mean?
Speaker 1 (40:53):
So if he was going to play the music video
and said, I'm not going to do that, he would
have had to have brought this other videotape and played
that as a backup. The other thing is apparently, see,
I just said apparently again. Alex Pasternak from Motherboard contacted
some of Furnier's friends.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Because Furnier died in 2010, but his friends were like,
absolutely not. Even some of the blood farmers were like,
it wasn't him. Yeah. Like, I know what you're saying,
and yeah, he did the whole Shea St. John thing.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
But this was not him. It was not quite there.
He didn't know what he was doing with any broadcast
stuff or video editing or anything like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
So this other one, to me, seems pretty promising.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Uh, so we flash forward to when did this actually happen?
Was this like by the time Reddit to come around?
Wasn't it on Reddit?
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Yeah, I think it was about 25 years after. So
it would have been in 2007. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
So there's this guy.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
2012, 13. Okay. Sorry.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
There was this guy named from Chicago named Bowie Pogue.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
P-O-A-G.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
I didn't have any friends with that last name. when
I was a kid.
Speaker 2 (42:03):
And he was one of the kids hanging around those
BBSs in the 80s in Chicago. From the sounds of it,
he was on the younger side. He was 13. And
even as a 13-year-old geek was very much intimidated by
the older geeks in that crowd. And so it wasn't boisterous.
He was sort of like, hey, I'm kind of hanging
out here and not saying much and don't notice me.
(42:25):
I just want to ingratiate myself.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
You guys can get me drunk for laughs if you want.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
And at a party in 1987, he remembers this– he
described him as a small, peculiar man that he thought
was about in his 30s. And he had an older brother.
They lived in Chicago.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
So Pogue is describing these two guys who were in
the same scene with him.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Correct.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
Right.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah. And he had– they lived with his girlfriend downtown–
about 10 miles from downtown Chicago.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
And they had the know-how. They were super into computers
early on.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
He said he went to their apartment and it was
just like, it looked like a computer hoarder mess of
wires and computers and equipment.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Like Neo's apartment.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
Yeah. Why not?
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Or what was the other one he was in before
the Matrix?
Speaker 2 (43:15):
Johnny Mnemonic? Yes. Yeah. Bill and Ted? Yeah. Johnny Mnemonic.
That's cyberpunk. Yes.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Right? Yes, it is.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
All right.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
You could probably make the case that the Matrix is
as well. All right.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
Sure. So he described him as a stocky guy with
tinted lens glasses in his early 30s, an odd dude.
His brother, he said he described as just kind of normal.
But he said that he didn't make the connection at
the time, but at a party on November about the
same day, midday on November 22nd, he was at a
(43:50):
gathering of these dudes at the brother's apartment and he
heard them say something about doing something big. Later that night,
they went to Pizza Hut and he's like, what are
you guys talking about? What's the big thing? And they said, hey,
don't ask questions, but just watch Channel 11 tonight.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Right.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
On that same day. And I don't know how he
didn't put it together.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
That's the one thing that really strikes me is fishy.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
But he said that years later, now when he looks
at it, he's like, even with that mask on, I
see the body. I see what's going on. I hear that.
And it's that guy.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Right.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
To me.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
But 25 years later. Yeah. He was there that day.
They tell him to watch that night.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
I know.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
And he didn't put it together for 25 years. That,
to me, is the one fishy thing.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
Well, and he has been called out as fishy. Sure.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
I'm sure he knows that it's kind of fishy.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
Yeah. So the guy, the motherboard, Pasternak, reached out and
he said, can you still get in touch with these
guys all these years later? He said he sent them
messages via Facebook. I don't even know if they saw him.
They didn't get back. Then in a last-ditch effort, he
sent them a certified mail. He found out where they lived.
Never heard anything back. And he was like, hey, it's
(45:02):
clear that these guys don't want to be talked to.
Speaker 1 (45:03):
Right. So you want to take a break?
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
Damn, it's like being Joshua.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
So that's where it stands right now. Like nobody knows
who is behind it still to this day.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
Crazy.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
It is crazy. And as a result, this Max Headroom
hack has taken its place in like the pantheon of
geek culture and of hacker culture. And rightfully so, you know.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
It's legendary in its own way.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (45:52):
I got nothing else on this one. Cool, man.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Well, if you want to know more about Max Headroom, uh,
you should start by checking out this amazing, uh, motherboard
article by Alex Pasternak. And since I said amazing, it's
time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
I'm going to go with, uh, I'm going to go
with the, the almond brothers eat a peach from emojis.
I don't know if this is true, but it's fun.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (46:19):
Uh, wanted to talk about when, uh, Josh talked about
the almond brothers band factoid, um, Because I think it's
actually a cool factoid. Dwayne Allman was once asked by
a reporter what he was going to do for the
war effort in Vietnam. And his response was, I'm going
to eat a peach for peace. Dwayne died not long
after that album. And Eat a Peach was released posthumously.
(46:43):
So he contends, Jesse Gaudette, that that is where the
album title came from. And that Eat a Peach was
not Eat a Butch.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
He or she, I guess. Jesse could go either way.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
Yeah. As always, keep up the good work. I'm currently
brewing beer and listening. Tell me where to mail some bottles.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
Or come pick them up in Salt Lake City.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
All right. We'll do both.
Speaker 2 (47:06):
Sounds like a challenge. Right.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
They're too heavy.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
You can't pick them up. Thanks a lot, Jesse. Appreciate that,
even though I still think I'm right. If you want
to contend that something one of us said was incorrect,
we'd love that stuff. You can tweet to us at
Josh M. Clark, SYSK Podcast, or Movie Crush. You can
hang out with us on Facebook.com slash StuffYouShouldKnow or slash
(47:31):
Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email
to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. And as always, join us at
our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com.
Here is a classic episode that covers a single event
that happened on one night in 1987 in the great
city of Chicago, where someone wearing a Max Headroom mask
took over a local TV station for several minutes. And
when I put it like that, it sounds pretty inconsequential,
but it was such a big deal that the feds
got involved. And even better, it's a mystery that's still
(00:26):
not fully solved today. And it's weird. Welcome to Stuff
You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Chuck Bryant and Jerry Rowland. What
(00:51):
do you think? Pretty good?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
It's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
And this is Stuff You Should Know.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Josh Headroom.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
I saw you over there with your earbuds today. You were...
Working on this all day, weren't you?
Speaker 1 (01:02):
I watched season one, episode one.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Oh, really?
Speaker 1 (01:05):
In full? Of Max Headroom. Like, the last ten minutes
is still pending.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
But it's crazy. Like, Max Headroom himself doesn't show up until, like,
40 minutes into the first hour-long episode. But when he does,
it's dynamite.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
So what are we talking about?
Speaker 1 (01:22):
We're talking about Max Headroom.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
That's right. A huge shout-out at the beginning of this
to vice.com, specifically... Motherboard.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Specifically, Alex Pasternak.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Yeah, who wrote the article on Motherboard. And we actually,
we used to blog a little bit for them back
in the day. Remember that?
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Yeah, I don't think they like to talk about that
or acknowledge it publicly.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
You don't think?
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I don't think so.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Oh, I think it was mutually beneficial.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
I'll bet you can't find those on Motherboard anymore. I'm
trying to remember. I'm sure they were like.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
I think I read one about driving a stick shift
versus automatic or something weird.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
That's a big one. Yeah. We started out with an
old fashioned recipe, I think.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, that was you.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
They were like, let's do better than this, guys. And
we said no.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
And then they said, we got our own people.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Yeah. We'll let somebody come in and ghostwrite for you.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
Yeah, so that motherboard article was the basis. And from
what I found, I mean, we used a lot of
different sources on this, but this article entitled The Mystery
of the Creepiest Television Hack is sort of the culmination,
like the coup de grace.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
Coup de grace?
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Sure. Of Max Headroom incident articles.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
Yeah, it actually.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Really good job.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
Pasternak very exhaustively investigated it and turned up new information,
got a new understanding of it, and basically contributed to
the mythos of it himself. So way to go, Pasternak.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Right. And what we're talking about is... If you don't
know who Max Headroom at all is, we're about to
set that up.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, let's talk about Max Headroom.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
But if you were alive during the 1980s, then you
probably know who Max Headroom is because, weirdly, for a
brief few years, it was kind of a big pop
culture thing.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
About four years by my calculations.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
So starting in 1984, there was a movie called Max Headroom... colon,
so you know it was an important movie, 20 Minutes
in the Future.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1 (03:27):
And it was kind of a cyberpunk movie, dystopian future,
very Terry Gilliam, Brazil-ish. And it was, I haven't seen
that one, but it was basically where the character of
Max Headroom was born, right?
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
And I think it actually formed the basis for the
TV show later. In between the later TV show that
you and I are more familiar with, And that movie,
Max Headroom was a pop culture sensation. He was a
pitchman for New Coke.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Oh, man.
Speaker 1 (03:59):
I went and watched an old ad. He was in
an ad with Run DMC pitching New Coke. And I
was like, doesn't get any more 80s than this. But
it was actually a pretty cool ad, right?
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Was it? Did it say, here's a little story I
need to tell about a new Coke on the scene
that you'd love so well?
Speaker 1 (04:16):
That was exactly word for word how the ad went. Yeah.
So let's back up a little more, right? Okay. Let's
describe what Max Headroom is for the kids. Because I
guarantee about 80% of our audience are like, what's the 80s?
What's New Coke?
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Who's run DMC? Well, that's probably not true. So what
was Max Headroom? He was billed as like the first
virtual talk show host, right?
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Correct. Okay. Yeah. So he was played by a guy
named Matt Frewer. who, out of prosthetic makeup, had that
look anyway, very chiseled, square-jawed. He was not bald, but
had— was he balding? He had a receding hairline. Okay, but
he kept it really, really short, so he kind of
looked bald.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Yeah. Here, this will explain it to all the kids
at home. He was a colleague of Murphy Brown on
the Murphy Brown television show. They're like, oh. Oh, that guy.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
I got you.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Not the painter. No. The other one, the love interest.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
I don't think I knew that. I never watched Murphy Brown, though.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Oh, man, I hope it was him. I'm pretty sure
it was him.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Well, he's been around. He's still acting today. Sure. But, yes,
he played the character of Max Headroom, and the TV
show Max Headroom was actually pretty far ahead of its time,
tonally speaking.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Yeah. So the whole premise of the TV show, his
big last great gasp, that was actually the most serious
of all of it, was where... In the future, TV
networks controlled the world.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
And the station, the Network 23, that Matt Frewer's character
and later Max Headroom, who became his alter ego, worked for,
were putting these things called blipverts out.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah. His character's name was Edison Carter at first. Right.
Speaker 1 (06:01):
And he was like an investigative journalist. Yeah. So he
starts looking into these blipverts because the problem with blipverts,
they are 30-second ads compressed into three seconds, and it's
meant to keep you from changing the channel. The problem
is that everybody watched so much TV by this time,
they didn't move around, which meant that all of the
(06:22):
electricity generated by their nerve endings wasn't burned off, is
how the show explained it. So when their brains were
assaulted with these blipverts, they kind of short-circuited, and all
of that electricity that was just hanging around their bodies
because they weren't moving at all during the day made
them explode. The network really liked blipverts, and they didn't
(06:43):
want to get rid of them, so they decided to
instead get rid of Edison Carter.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Yeah, and the TV advertising at the time, or advertising
in general, sort of, not only did TV rule the world,
but the ads behind it was really the driving force.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
It sounds very familiar.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
It does. Everyone's like, I'd take a blipvert.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Give me a three-second ad on the podcast.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
Guys, it'll blow you up.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
So what ended up happening was the character of Edison
Carter eventually was– there was an incident, not the Max
Headroom incident, where he was left in a coma in
an episode.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
The first episode.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Oh, yeah, the pilot, of course. And the last thing
he sees before falling into a coma is a sign
that said Max Headroom colon 2.3 meters. Mm-hmm. And so
that's how he got the name Max Headroom.
Speaker 1 (07:37):
Right. It was in like a parking garage. And it
was basically saying this is the overhead clearance is the
way it's put in the United States.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Right. So that's the name Max Headroom, right?
Speaker 2 (07:46):
But he was an AI character.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
Right. So the evil TV network got a hold of him,
uploaded his brain. And they originally did this with the
intent of bringing Edison Carter because, again, he was like
their star reporter. Yeah. Bringing him back in virtual form.
So they created an artificial intelligence. Well, it was kind
of glitchy and blippy and it looked weird. So they
(08:10):
threw it out. Well, some pirate broadcasters got a hold
of this database that Max Headroom lived on and they
started broadcasting with him and Max Headroom was born.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
That's right. And you said glitchy and blippy. And that, kids,
explains your intro when you went Josh.
Speaker 1 (08:30):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
I was doing my Max Headroom impression. Thank you for
explaining that.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
Yeah, that bears... Josh was... He's okay, everybody. So that's
what Max Headroom did. It was jittery. It was blippy,
like you said. The background was this weird sort of
horizontal and diagonal lined moving around thing. And that was
all part of this, at the time, sort of futuristic look.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
He was also really sarcastic and really catty. And he
was really... He poked fun at censorship. And he was
just kind of like a cult hero, just the character itself, right?
Speaker 2 (09:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
The awesome thing about him is in the real world
of 1984, we didn't have any kind of computers that
could generate a CGI host. So they actually used like prosthetics. Yeah.
Like there was a four-hour process to put Matt Frewer
into the Max Headroom makeup. So it's the guy acting,
and they mess with the video a little bit, but
(09:27):
it wasn't a CGI version of a guy. It was
a guy acting like he was a CGI version of himself.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Right, which is why, for instance, if Max Headroom, the character,
were to appear on, say, David Letterman, which he did,
it would be Letterman interviewing a TV screen.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Right.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Which is what they did.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
But it was actually Matt Frewer in another studio.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
He was probably just.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Backstage.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
Backstage being broadcast.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
And it's really like, as a kid, I did not
get all of it.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
No, I just thought it was a.
I didn't really know what it was because I'd never
seen the show. I thought he was the Coke guy.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Right. And I think I'd seen the show a little bit.
I was like, this is way too grown up for me.
But I think I just kind of took it on
faith that he was computer generated or something like that.
I didn't really think about it much. But now as
an adult looking back, I'm like, that... is brilliant and
really difficult. And the fact that they did this and
pulled it off as well as they did, it's a
(10:27):
pretty amazing thing, right? And you can kind of understand
how Max Headroom, with all that information now, became this
kind of cult icon, especially among cyberpunks at the time.
And what?
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Just keep saying cyberpunk.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
So let me, I'm not like a, particularly well-versed in
what constitutes cyberpunk, but it's like pornography to a Supreme
Court justice. I know it when I see it, right?
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
So if you watch the Max Headroom show, you're like, yeah,
that's cyberpunk. Robocop is supposedly cyberpunk, right? It's like a
bleak technological future where people are controlled by, almost down
to their minds by the government or some corporation or
some amalgamation of the two. That's pretty cyberpunk, right? So
(11:19):
at the time, you had what are called geeks and nerds,
but they are not really what you would call a
geek or a nerd today, right? Somebody who wears like
glasses that don't actually have prescription glass in them.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Do people do that?
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Some people do.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
I did that in the fourth grade.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Well, then you were a geek, apparently.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
No, I was a prep and I wore those little
tortoiseshell round uh preppy glasses because that was a cool
look yeah and actually went in it's it's one of
my least proud moments fashion wise yeah is actually bought
fake glasses and wore them around do you have photos
of this i'd really have to dig through some boxes.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
I think i speak for everyone when i say start digging.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Dig yeah it was not my proudest moment yeah i'd
like to see that picture all right so um.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
At the time, people who were geeks and nerds, that
whole culture was very much derided and pushed around. I mean,
look at Revenge of the Nerds, right?
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
Like they came out on top.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
I watched a little bit of that just the other night.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
This is probably the earliest celebration of nerd culture. It
was not something that was like venerated or subscribed to
by anyone who wasn't a genuine nerd or geek at all.
And these were a very rarefied group of people who
really knew what they were doing with computers at a
(12:43):
time when almost no one else did.
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah, early adopters across the board.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Very much so, right? So Max Headroom's kind of a
cult hero to this guy. And that kind of sets
up what happened on November 22, 1987, in a little
town called Chicago, Illinois.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
The city of industry.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
The city of angels.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
The city that doesn't ever sleep.
Speaker 1 (13:07):
Never.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
The Windy City.
Speaker 1 (13:10):
That's it. There you go. Of all time.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
The Windy City of all time. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
So that sets the stage. We know who the character
of Max Headroom was. Then at 9.14 p.m. Wait, wait, wait. Yes.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
Are you sure I set the stage?
Speaker 2 (13:24):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Did we set the stage fully here?
Speaker 2 (13:27):
It looks nice. All right. Let's do it. So at
9.14 p.m. on that November night in Chicago.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Four days before Thanksgiving. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
So everyone was in that frame of mind. Right. Put
yourself there.
Speaker 1 (13:40):
I think that that helps a lot. It helped me
at least. Sure. Okay.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Football season's going on. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
As a matter of fact, just that very day, the
Bears had beat the Lions.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Yeah. Which, you know, it was a long time ago
because the Bears won a football game.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Oh, ouch. I know. The people in the Windy City
of All Time are not going to be happy with
you for that.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
The Windy City of All Time. Oh, and there's a
sportscaster on local Channel 9. uh, Dan Roan, our way in.
And he was, he was going over the highlights of
that football game. Then all of a sudden, right in
the middle, the, the broadcast signal goes, right. It makes
(14:20):
those noise, uh, noises. And then over at WGN, the
control room, they were like, what's, what's going on here.
We have no idea what this is.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
I think the exact quote was a girl.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
So, um, What happened was they eventually, what they were
doing at the time was, and this is how, we're
not going to go into the weeds here on how
broadcast signals work.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
No.
Speaker 2 (14:44):
But what they did back in the day was they
broadcast microwave transmissions to antennas at the top of the
tallest buildings of whatever city that they were in.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
For local TV.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
For local TV, which is, I mean, there was cable
at the time, but local TV still kind of ruled.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
In the, well, sort of in the late 80s.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Right. So like.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Starting to segue to cable.
Speaker 1 (15:05):
Yeah, for sure. Cable is, you know, kind of a thing.
But you if you were a local TV station, you
still have pretty big market share.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
For sure.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Right. Especially WGN in Chicago. I mean, it's like Chicago Station.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (15:17):
So what I think you're saying is that in a studio,
whatever they're recording or shooting or playing on their their
little videotapes. They're beaming that from the actual studio to
a transmitter, say, atop a very tall building, and that
just kind of bounces around to other transmitters, and that's
how everybody in Chicago gets their WGN signal, right?
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Right. So all of a sudden, during the sportscast, it
skitzes out, and then all of a sudden you see
a guy in a suit wearing a Max Headroom mask, and.
There was no audio. That was, I guess, the problem
with this first intrusion. It was called a broadcast intrusion. Yeah.
(16:03):
But you couldn't hear anything. But I'm sure it was
certainly distressing to a viewer to see this kind of
weird thing happen.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
Especially a viewer who wanted to know what the heck
happened between the bears and the lions that day.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
And the whole thing lasted, I think, like 11 seconds
or some very short amount of time.
Speaker 2 (16:20):
Yeah, this was a short one.
Speaker 1 (16:21):
Before the WGN engineers went... And switched to the backup
transmitter and I guess transmitted on a slightly different signal.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:30):
And brought the broadcast, the sportscaster back on. And Dan
Roan was like, if you're wondering what just happened, so
am I. Right. There's a chuckle in between. I wasn't
going to do my impression of it.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
You should.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
But it's good. You should watch it. Like somebody, just
go look it up.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Right. So federal investigators, the FCC that is, was called
in to investigate. Um, what technically is, well, not technically,
it's a crime to do so. And then just a
few minutes later, they thought, well, this is probably coming
from inside the building. And so that's the first place
they started looking.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
They said the intrusion's coming from inside the building.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
They didn't find anybody though. I mean, it was, as
you'll see, after we explained further, it would make sense
that you would look in the building.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Right. For something like this.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Inside job.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
It apparently was not an inside job, at least as
far as the WGN engineers search was concerned.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
So that was at 9.14. About two hours later, I
think at 11.15, on another channel in Chicago, WTTW, which
was the PBS station.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
They were airing an episode of Doctor Who called The
Horror on Fang Island.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Fang Rock.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
Fang Rock.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
The Horror of Fang Rock.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
You have to say it like that, though.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
The Horror of Fang Rock.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
And this is the Tom Baker Doctor.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
Okay. That's the only one I recognize.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Oh, really?
Speaker 1 (17:57):
He's 70s, right?
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Hey, I'm no Doctor Who guy, so don't embarrass me.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
It looked like the 70s, what they cut in on,
looked pretty 70s. It didn't look 87. So who knows?
Speaker 2 (18:07):
I would think it would be 87.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
I'm guessing it was a rerun on PBS. That's what
I think.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
All right.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
We'll find out. Oh, man, we are going to find
out too, aren't we?
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Yeah, that would have been super easy to check.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
At any rate, in the middle of this Doctor Who episode,
it suddenly cuts out again. And now you've got what
appears to be the full run of this Max Headroom intrusion.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Yes. Instead of 30 seconds, this one was a minute
and 22 seconds. And right now, I would say if
you are somewhere where you can pause and go to
a video, online video carrier of your choosing. And type
in Max Headroom incident. Uh-huh. Spend the next minute and
22 seconds watching it.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
We'll wait.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
And we'll wait.
Speaker 1 (18:57):
We'll just insert a minute and 22 seconds of silence here.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
How about this? Let's take a break.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
And then we'll come back and then we'll talk about
exactly what happened during that minute and 22 seconds.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Okay. Okay, we're back.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
Did you watch it?
Speaker 1 (19:30):
Are you talking to me?
Speaker 2 (19:31):
No. Oh, okay. I was looking at you.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
I'm guessing that people did watch it. A few people did.
Smart ones did. Because this is really tough to describe
and we're going to try. But it's something you really
have to see yourself.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Yeah, in here. It's genuinely disturbing. sitting in an office
years later, watching it. And I can imagine if I
was at home, I would have probably been a little
freaked out.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
You found it disturbing? Yeah. I found it hilarious in
like a really juvenile way.
Speaker 2 (20:02):
Yeah, it creeps me out.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
It was like watching David Byrne on acid at a
talking head show. That's what I think of when I
saw that. You know?
Speaker 2 (20:11):
All right. So let's describe the scene here. Okay.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
So you got Max Headroom. Well, actually a dude wearing
a rubber mask. A rubber Halloween mask of Max Headroom.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
And this is just genius to me. So you mentioned
earlier about how the Max Headroom had like these kind
of grid lines behind him at all times. And they
kind of moved and adjusted and they were different colors.
To simulate that, these guys had like a piece of
corrugated metal, shiny metal. Yeah. And I guess they had
(20:43):
it attached somehow to something that rocked it back and forth.
And they kind of... Somebody was clearly rocking it back
and forth here or there erratically. And it really does
a good job of... It gets the point across.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
That it looked like the Max Edrum TV show.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Yeah, the background.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
And the character. Yes.
Speaker 1 (21:00):
But again... I would say that this person was very,
very clearly on acid.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Well, I think what disturbs me, I need to make
it clear, it is definitely funny and stupid. But what
disturbs me is the sound of the voice, which is
all garbled. It's really like on YouTube it has subtitles, thankfully,
because it's hard to make out. And a lot of
times it just says, can't, you know, understand what he's
saying or whatever. And the garbled quality and just the
(21:27):
random weirdness that's going on. It's not like, It was
creepier to me than if V for Vendetta dude had
to come on. Guy Fawkes had to come on and said,
you know, we are coming into your thing to tell
you this about this.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
This was just so weird and all over the place.
It was creepy to me.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Yeah. Yeah. I see what you mean. Like you're watching somebody.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
It's nonsensical.
Speaker 1 (21:49):
Somebody's brain slightly damaged. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:51):
I felt like I was watching somebody lose their mind.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Right.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
Totally get that. Um, And here's what the guy did
that would make you feel like he lost his mind.
This is the weird thing to me. It's very targeted
toward WGN, right? Almost so much so that some people
would say, this is clearly somebody who had a grudge
against WGN. He makes fun of the Bulls sportscaster, the
(22:21):
guy who worked for WGN at the time. He makes
reference to how he just made a masterpiece for the greatest—
world's newspaper nerds, which was a messed up version of
WGN's call letters stand for world's greatest newspaper.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
He wields a rubber penis.
Speaker 1 (22:39):
Yeah, that's one. Although it was great. In almost every article,
it was referred to as a marital aid. Did you
see that?
Speaker 2 (22:46):
No, but I actually guessed it on Strickland's tech stuff
like four years ago. And we covered this and I
called it a marital aid.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
Did you? Okay.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
So I wanted to keep it clean. Sure. But then
I realized that saying the word penis is OK.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
Well, it's clinical. I mean, we did a puberty episode.
Surely we have the chops to say penis. But marital
aid is hilarious, especially in this context. Like this crazy
dude on acid wearing a Max Headroom mask has a
marital aid. No, he doesn't. That's not what that is
in that context.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
Yeah. And that's a new T-shirt, by the way.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
What?
Speaker 2 (23:24):
We have the chops to say penis.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
There you go. That's a band name.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
Let's go ahead and say some of the direct quotes. Yes, let's.
So he comes on and he goes, he's a freaking nerd.
I think I'm better than Chuck Swirsky, freaking liberal.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
That's a really good impression of this.
Speaker 2 (23:43):
And Chuck Swirsky was the- The Bulls guy. Yeah, the
sports announcer.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
And this is a time too when the Bulls were,
this is the Jordan Pippen era still.
Speaker 2 (23:52):
Well, still, it was at the beginning of it.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
Was it 87? I thought it was in the middle
of it. Was it the beginning?
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Pretty early-ish, let's say.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
I wish these days that I would have been more
cognizant and more into basketball than I am now.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
See, that's when I was the most into it was Bird, Jordan, Magic.
Speaker 1 (24:14):
I would have liked to have watched some of those games.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Yeah, it was good stuff. Because that's when the Hawks
were good back then.
Speaker 1 (24:19):
Yeah, back then.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Dominique.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Hey, shout out to Kent Bazemore. You know, he listens
to this show.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
No way.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Yeah, he's a fan.
Speaker 2 (24:26):
How'd you find that out?
Speaker 1 (24:27):
Twitter?
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Man, I love Baz.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
I know. How do you not love Baz?
Speaker 2 (24:33):
He's awesome.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
Man, he's bright red right now.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
That's so cool.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
All right.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
So Chuck Swirsky's freaking liberal. He's wielding the rubber penis.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
The marital aid.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
The marital aid. He drops that. Then he picks up
a new Coke. Well, you can't really tell if it's
a Pepsi. Oh, was it? OK, I couldn't really tell.
He picks up a can and but he says, catch
the wave, which is the new Coke slogan.
Speaker 1 (24:56):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
Then he starts humming. It's so random. Then he starts
humming the theme song to the 60s show Clutch Cargo.
Which is weird in and of itself. Sure.
Speaker 1 (25:07):
That's that one where it's like animation, but for the mouths,
it was just like a human mouth moving. That's disturbing.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Yeah. If you've seen Pulp Fiction, the scene where Bruce
Willis was a kid and Christopher Walken comes in with
the wristwatch scene, that Clutch Cargo is playing on TV
when he's watching it.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
But it is weird looking. Right.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
So you would say, why did he do the Clutch
Cargo theme? Well, again, this is a WGN thing, and
apparently that's where you saw it as a kid in Chicago.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Okay. So he says also, your love is fading. I
still see the X, which apparently is something from the
last episode of Clutch Cargo.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Yeah, that was the big X or something.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
And then he says what you were talking about earlier,
I just made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest
world newspaper nerds.
Speaker 1 (25:58):
But he should have said world's greatest newspaper nerds.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
WGN.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
Right. Which you might find confusing as I did too.
But apparently the Chicago Tribune Company owns WGN TV. So
they call themselves world's greatest newspaper TV.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Right. WGN. It's all coming together.
Speaker 1 (26:18):
Ipso facto. There you go.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Then finally toward the end, the camera cuts to a
different angle, uh, This one has the dude bent over
with his bare butt hanging out. His face is now
off screen, but he's holding the mask still out like
his head is in it, but it's not. There is
a person, I say woman, but I don't know, but
(26:42):
a person in like an Annie Oakley dress. Is that
what it was?
Speaker 1 (26:45):
I didn't get that.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
Yeah, it looked like a prairie bonnet ensemble, but the
bonnet kind of hides the face, so you don't know
if it's a man or a woman.
Speaker 1 (26:52):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
And they are spanking... The bear butt with a fly swatter.
Speaker 1 (26:57):
Right. And he's worried about them coming to get him.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
They're coming to get me. Yeah. And then he says,
come get me and uses a bad word.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
B word.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
The B word. And then it goes back to Doctor Who.
Speaker 1 (27:09):
Yeah. Just like it came in. went out it just
and it's like gone.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
Can you imagine seeing that live and that.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Well the people who saw it live the next thing
they would have heard was the doctor saying something like
uh oh he died of an electric shock must have
died instantly yeah and then and everybody's just sitting there
like their mouths hanging open.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Well it was dr who too so it was probably
a bunch of chicago nerds yeah watching pbs yeah so
all right my imitation was okay but let's just play
at least like a All right.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
So you did a pretty good impression. I think everyone
can agree now, right? It's so strange. So this was
an enormous thing, right? Like, people were watching this and were... aghast, agog.
Some people probably thought it was funny. WGN's reporting on
it all over the place the next couple of days.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
Yeah, the newspapers had picked it up.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah. There's this one, there's a compilation of WGN broadcasts,
or it may even be more than just WGN, of
people in the street being interviewed. What do you think
about this? And one guy's like, it's kind of like
hooligans throwing a brick through your window, you know, to
get your attention. There's a little kid who's like very,
(28:38):
very funny. The star of the news, though, was this
one Doctor Who fan, this lady who is not at
all amused by this. And I just want to play
her little segment, OK?
Speaker 2 (28:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
It annoyed some viewers.
Speaker 2 (28:52):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
I just thought it would be just a slight mess up.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
But that in the middle of the tape, it's going to.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Be.
Speaker 2 (28:59):
We're going to have to tape over it.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
I just think that's the funniest thing out of the
whole the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (29:04):
Well, another guy said he wanted to smash his TV.
He was so angry.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Yeah, I didn't see that guy. I saw that in
the Pasternak article.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
So funny.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Yeah, he was mad. So there was a lot of
mixed reaction, but the voice from on high that came
from the FCC, who you said were called in pretty quickly.
Speaker 2 (29:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (29:21):
They were like, this is no laughing matter. You might
think it's funny. It's not very funny. Okay, it's kind
of funny, but not really. And you can get a
$ 100, 000 fine and a year in jail for this kind
of thing. So stop doing it.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
But at this point, by this point, it was actually
a federal offense. It was a felony.
Speaker 1 (29:40):
A felony offense.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Wait, what was that?
Speaker 1 (29:44):
Dazed and confused.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 1 (29:45):
Tampering with the mailbox is a felony offense.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
I was like, wait a minute. I know that from somewhere.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
So the FCC gets involved in this. This is really
interesting in this article.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
The FBI got involved too.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
FBI was involved. Chicago PD, like there was, they were
looking into it. Apparently the, man, it has become obvious
to me that I say the word apparently a lot.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Really?
Speaker 1 (30:07):
A lot. I was listening to an episode, QAing an episode,
and I was like, stop saying apparently, Josh.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
Yeah, I've started to, after 10 years, I've started to
notice some things about my own self.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
It's like a tick.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
I try to just avoid it.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
I try to too. Normally I can, but man, it
just came welling up into my awareness. Well, apparently- Apparently,
I'm going to have to get over it. At any rate,
there were a lot of different agencies working on this,
but the trail went cold pretty quick. And you remember
how you said that the WGN engineers started looking around
(30:43):
the station? Yeah. I think what they were looking for
was this. Somebody... physically patching in to the transmission network,
the cables.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Wearing a Max Hedren mask.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
And yeah, either playing a videotape, which it seems pretty obvious.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
It was pre-taped, yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
It was pre-taped. Or doing something like in a studio.
But they would have to physically patch into WGN's transmission network.
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Yeah, it's like when a car doesn't work and I
open the hood thinking I'm going to see A squirrel
gnawing on a cable that's in two pieces now.
Speaker 1 (31:20):
Right.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
And frayed at the ends.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
Right. Now imagine that squirrel wearing a Max Headroom mask
and being on acid. Okay. With a marital aid.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
So, and at first the FCC and the FBI and
anybody who was in the know basically said this was
a very sophisticated attack. It would have required a very, very,
some very expensive equipment. Yeah. A lot of electricity. There's
(31:49):
not a lot of ways that they could have done this.
But later on in the Pasternak article, and this is
one of the ways Pasternak contributed to this whole thing,
he talked to one of the FCC investigators. And this
guy basically did away with that whole viewpoint that had
lasted for almost 30 years. That it had to have
been somebody with $ 100, 000 piece of equipment and $ 10, 000 worth
(32:09):
of electricity over the minute and a half. He was saying, no,
you could probably have gotten the equipment needed for this
new for 10 grand at the time.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:23):
Or you could have probably bought it for use for
just a fraction of that. And it would have taken
very little electricity. It would have just taken some know-how
and good positioning, really.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
Yeah. Basically, he was like, it could have been done
with like the size of a direct TV dish today.
Speaker 1 (32:41):
Right.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
And all they would have had to do was get.
In a high enough location in between, like literally, because
they're beaming waves. They're beaming microwaves through the air. So
he's like, all they had to do was get in
between the original studio and that initial tower on top
of the, I think it was the John Hancock building.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
For WGN, yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
Yeah. And have a stronger signal.
Speaker 1 (33:05):
Right. So even just like a slightly stronger signal.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:08):
So you remember how WGN has their studio... transmission shooting
up to the John Hancock building.
Speaker 2 (33:15):
Yep.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
And then that transmitter shoots it out to everybody else
in Chicago.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
What, what, what, what I think you're saying is like,
if somebody was on the roof of another nearby building
and they just shoot a transmission, their own max headroom
transmission at a stronger, a stronger weight or no, a
stronger amplitude. That's what it is of the same frequency.
You just overpower it, cancels out what WGN's doing, and
(33:41):
instead it transmits your max headroom thing.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
And they would be closer to that broadcast tower.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Right.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Ostensibly.
Speaker 1 (33:47):
Yes. So that would mean that it required far less
electricity than you would think or that they originally thought
and far less equipment too. They also had a pretty
good idea of where these people would have had to
have done it because after they got shut out of WGN,
They turned their attention to WTTW, the PBS station, and
(34:09):
they hijacked their signal. Well, WTTW shot their studio link
to the Sears Tower.
Speaker 2 (34:16):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
So this would have been somebody who was on a
roof somewhere that had a clear view of the John
Hancock building and the Sears Tower and could transmit to
either one of them. But that's basically what they think happened.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
Yeah. And the guy you were talking about, Dr. Michael Marcus,
who at the time was the assistant bureau chief in
the FCC's Field Operations Bureau. He was the lead investigator,
and he said that the guy in Chicago that was
sort of in charge wasn't super, like... He was just
sort of used to traditional FCC investigations. He wasn't one
(34:49):
to go knocking on doors and... as to, like, investigate
some kind of weird, kind of maybe creepy criminal dudes.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
Who may or may not have a marital aid in
his apartment.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
Just smack him on the head with it. And then
they also... Nobody was being hurt. No one got hurt.
In the end, it was almost a victimless crime. So
they didn't throw a ton of resources at it. They
were kind of like, listen, if you want to go
investigate this, that's great. You should. But we're not going
to assign a team of 12 people to try and
(35:24):
crack this case of a bunch of nerds. who did
a weird thing for a minute and 20 seconds.
Speaker 1 (35:30):
And I think the longer it went on and there
was no more of these intrusions from these guys, the
fewer and fewer resources they had to work with, and
it just kind of fell to the wayside. But what's
interesting is in the beginning they said it would take
somebody with a very expensive piece of equipment, a lot
(35:51):
of electricity, and a lot of know-how. And today the
only one of those that's remaining is a lot of know-how.
There wouldn't have been a lot of people running around
Chicago who would have known how to do something like this.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
So it's kind of surprising, even with very few resources,
that no one has ever been really implicated in this one.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Yeah, I don't think we've said. They still don't know
who did this.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
It's an unsolved mystery. Yeah. Like Dennis Farina and Robert
Stack love this one.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Yeah. The FBI, for their take, started concentrating on the
actual video. They had the technology at the time, which
is kind of funny now to think about it. But
they're the only ones who had the technology at the
time to actually make enhanced frames of this videotape and
print out, you know, pictures, enhance them. And they were
(36:45):
kind of focused on this upper right-hand quadrant, as they say,
where the Annie Oakley was spanking with a fly swatter.
I don't know why they were so into that. But
they said, you know, we're trying to get clues on
the actual location of the people who made the tape,
not necessarily where they broadcast it from, but where did
they shoot this thing to begin with? There was very
little to go on aside from that spinning corrugated metal.
(37:08):
And that could have been literally anywhere because it's a
really tight shot.
Speaker 1 (37:12):
It really is. Yeah. And there was very little evidence
given in the video.
Speaker 2 (37:17):
Yeah. I mean, it says that they were looking at
industrial warehouses and things, but that could have been in
an apartment building.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:22):
Living room.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
I mean, it wasn't like the door was attached to anything.
It was freely spinning. Yeah. Back and forth. It did
make sense. Not the best lead, right? No. So over time,
and again, this is weird too. It's not so weird
that the FCC or the FBI didn't find who did
this if they weren't really looking very hard. Yeah. What's
really weird is that no one has been like, it
(37:44):
was these guys. I was there. I know these dudes.
It was these guys.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
Statute of limitations is done. Like, who cares?
Speaker 1 (37:51):
Yeah. After 1993, these guys would have gotten off scot-free
because the statute of limitations for this one was five years, right?
Speaker 2 (37:59):
I'm shocked that no one later said, hey, that was me. Right.
I'm soy bomb.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
No one's done that, right? Yeah. There was some, so
very early forum, like message board stuff took the form
of bulletin board services, I think.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Really early geek culture, like Matthew Broderick dialing something with
his phone and then putting it on that weird little
Commodore 64 thing, the modem, yeah, to transmit the dial
tone over the telephone system. So that's the level of
technology that these people were dealing with. But they were
(38:39):
communicating with each other over this proto-internet, these bulletin board systems.
And two days after this, A guy named The Chameleon
posted basically what you and I said about how all
it took was these guys to go up on a
tall building and overwhelm the WGN and the WTTW studio links.
(38:59):
And ipso facto, I'm a big fan of that, by
the way, this intrusion was successful, right? Two days, not
two years, not a year ago, two days after it.
Somebody was on there explaining how it went down. So
somebody knew this, right? But only two theories have really
(39:20):
ever come to light as to who it was. One,
you can basically just throw right out. And the other one,
it turns out to have been a dead end.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
Yeah, the first one that you're talking about that doesn't
really hold water was a, and this was a rumor
online for a while. It was a musician named Eric
Fournier or Fournier.
Speaker 1 (39:38):
Fournier.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
Fournier.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
I had a friend in preschool, I think, named Fournier.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
That's how it was spelled? F-O-U-R-N-I-E-R.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
Actually, I don't know how it's spelled. I couldn't spell
back then.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
So this guy was in a band, and he did
this weird, super creepy YouTube series called Shea St. John. S-H-A-Y-E.
Speaker 1 (40:05):
Did you watch it?
Speaker 2 (40:06):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:06):
Love it.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
Yeah, I knew that you would love it. I love it, dude.
It's right up your alley.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:11):
But this is genuinely unsettling, too.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
I'm with you on that.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
So it kind of fit in that he was doing
these weird things. He had this band. They were in Bloomington, Indiana,
not too far from Chicago.
Speaker 1 (40:23):
The Blood Farmers.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah, the band was the Blood Farmers. And they did
these weird music videos and they thought this is the
kind of guy that would have done that. And the
thinking was that he went to go broadcast one of
their weird music videos as a broadcast intrusion. but chickened
out at the last minute because they would have been found. Sure.
And then ended up just improv-ing. That part makes a
little sense because it definitely seems improv-ed.
Speaker 1 (40:45):
It does, but it was also videotaped, remember? So that
means he would have had two videotapes with him.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
What do you mean?
Speaker 1 (40:53):
So if he was going to play the music video
and said, I'm not going to do that, he would
have had to have brought this other videotape and played
that as a backup. The other thing is apparently, see,
I just said apparently again. Alex Pasternak from Motherboard contacted
some of Furnier's friends.
Speaker 2 (41:10):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
Because Furnier died in 2010, but his friends were like,
absolutely not. Even some of the blood farmers were like,
it wasn't him. Yeah. Like, I know what you're saying,
and yeah, he did the whole Shea St. John thing.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
But this was not him. It was not quite there.
He didn't know what he was doing with any broadcast
stuff or video editing or anything like that. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
So this other one, to me, seems pretty promising.
Speaker 1 (41:34):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (41:35):
Uh, so we flash forward to when did this actually happen?
Was this like by the time Reddit to come around?
Wasn't it on Reddit?
Speaker 1 (41:43):
Yeah, I think it was about 25 years after. So
it would have been in 2007. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
So there's this guy.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
2012, 13. Okay. Sorry.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
There was this guy named from Chicago named Bowie Pogue.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
P-O-A-G.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
I didn't have any friends with that last name. when
I was a kid.
Speaker 2 (42:03):
And he was one of the kids hanging around those
BBSs in the 80s in Chicago. From the sounds of it,
he was on the younger side. He was 13. And
even as a 13-year-old geek was very much intimidated by
the older geeks in that crowd. And so it wasn't boisterous.
He was sort of like, hey, I'm kind of hanging
out here and not saying much and don't notice me.
(42:25):
I just want to ingratiate myself.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
You guys can get me drunk for laughs if you want.
Speaker 2 (42:30):
And at a party in 1987, he remembers this– he
described him as a small, peculiar man that he thought
was about in his 30s. And he had an older brother.
They lived in Chicago.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
So Pogue is describing these two guys who were in
the same scene with him.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
Correct.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
Right.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
Yeah. And he had– they lived with his girlfriend downtown–
about 10 miles from downtown Chicago.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
And they had the know-how. They were super into computers
early on.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
He said he went to their apartment and it was
just like, it looked like a computer hoarder mess of
wires and computers and equipment.
Speaker 1 (43:07):
Like Neo's apartment.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
Yeah. Why not?
Speaker 1 (43:10):
Or what was the other one he was in before
the Matrix?
Speaker 2 (43:15):
Johnny Mnemonic? Yes. Yeah. Bill and Ted? Yeah. Johnny Mnemonic.
That's cyberpunk. Yes.
Speaker 1 (43:21):
Right? Yes, it is.
Speaker 2 (43:22):
All right.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
You could probably make the case that the Matrix is
as well. All right.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
Sure. So he described him as a stocky guy with
tinted lens glasses in his early 30s, an odd dude.
His brother, he said he described as just kind of normal.
But he said that he didn't make the connection at
the time, but at a party on November about the
same day, midday on November 22nd, he was at a
(43:50):
gathering of these dudes at the brother's apartment and he
heard them say something about doing something big. Later that night,
they went to Pizza Hut and he's like, what are
you guys talking about? What's the big thing? And they said, hey,
don't ask questions, but just watch Channel 11 tonight.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
Right.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
On that same day. And I don't know how he
didn't put it together.
Speaker 1 (44:09):
That's the one thing that really strikes me is fishy.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
But he said that years later, now when he looks
at it, he's like, even with that mask on, I
see the body. I see what's going on. I hear that.
And it's that guy.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Right.
Speaker 2 (44:23):
To me.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
But 25 years later. Yeah. He was there that day.
They tell him to watch that night.
Speaker 2 (44:29):
I know.
Speaker 1 (44:29):
And he didn't put it together for 25 years. That,
to me, is the one fishy thing.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
Well, and he has been called out as fishy. Sure.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
I'm sure he knows that it's kind of fishy.
Speaker 2 (44:41):
Yeah. So the guy, the motherboard, Pasternak, reached out and
he said, can you still get in touch with these
guys all these years later? He said he sent them
messages via Facebook. I don't even know if they saw him.
They didn't get back. Then in a last-ditch effort, he
sent them a certified mail. He found out where they lived.
Never heard anything back. And he was like, hey, it's
(45:02):
clear that these guys don't want to be talked to.
Speaker 1 (45:03):
Right. So you want to take a break?
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (45:07):
Damn, it's like being Joshua.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
So that's where it stands right now. Like nobody knows
who is behind it still to this day.
Speaker 2 (45:35):
Crazy.
Speaker 1 (45:35):
It is crazy. And as a result, this Max Headroom
hack has taken its place in like the pantheon of
geek culture and of hacker culture. And rightfully so, you know.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
It's legendary in its own way.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (45:52):
I got nothing else on this one. Cool, man.
Speaker 1 (45:54):
Well, if you want to know more about Max Headroom, uh,
you should start by checking out this amazing, uh, motherboard
article by Alex Pasternak. And since I said amazing, it's
time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
I'm going to go with, uh, I'm going to go
with the, the almond brothers eat a peach from emojis.
I don't know if this is true, but it's fun.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (46:19):
Uh, wanted to talk about when, uh, Josh talked about
the almond brothers band factoid, um, Because I think it's
actually a cool factoid. Dwayne Allman was once asked by
a reporter what he was going to do for the
war effort in Vietnam. And his response was, I'm going
to eat a peach for peace. Dwayne died not long
after that album. And Eat a Peach was released posthumously.
(46:43):
So he contends, Jesse Gaudette, that that is where the
album title came from. And that Eat a Peach was
not Eat a Butch.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
He or she, I guess. Jesse could go either way.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
Yeah. As always, keep up the good work. I'm currently
brewing beer and listening. Tell me where to mail some bottles.
Speaker 1 (47:02):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (47:02):
Or come pick them up in Salt Lake City.
Speaker 1 (47:04):
All right. We'll do both.
Speaker 2 (47:06):
Sounds like a challenge. Right.
Speaker 1 (47:08):
They're too heavy.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (47:09):
You can't pick them up. Thanks a lot, Jesse. Appreciate that,
even though I still think I'm right. If you want
to contend that something one of us said was incorrect,
we'd love that stuff. You can tweet to us at
Josh M. Clark, SYSK Podcast, or Movie Crush. You can
hang out with us on Facebook.com slash StuffYouShouldKnow or slash
(47:31):
Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email
to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. And as always, join us at
our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com.
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