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1. #Max headroom wttw pirating incident serial#
2. #Max headroom wttw pirating incident series#
3. #Max headroom wttw pirating incident tv#

The Museum of Classic Chicago Television.

"Television's Most Infamous Hack Is Still a Mystery 30 Years Later".

#Max headroom wttw pirating incident tv#

"Thirty years later, "Max Headroom" TV pirate remains at large". "30 years later, Max Headroom hijack mystery remains unsolved". "30 Years Later, Notorious 'Max Headroom Incident' Remains a Mystery". Captain Midnight broadcast signal intrusion.Southern Television broadcast interruption.We got all kinds of calls about it," said Giangreco. "A lot of people thought it was real – the pirate cutting into our broadcast. Not long after the incident, WMAQ-TV humorously inserted clips of the hijacking into a newscast during Mark Giangreco's sports highlights. Īccording to Motherboard, the incident became an influential "cyberpunk hacking trope". WTTW received numerous phone calls from viewers who wondered what had occurred for the duration of the intrusion. The Max Headroom incident made national headlines and was reported on the CBS Evening News the next day. WTTW was able to find copies of the hijacker's telecast with the help of Doctor Who fans who had been taping the show.Īn investigating FCC engineer quoted at the time said the perpetrators of the intrusion faced a maximum $100,000 fine, up to a year in prison, or both. "By the time our people began looking into what was going on, it was over," he told the Chicago Tribune. According to station spokesman Anders Yocom, technicians monitoring the transmission from WTTW headquarters "attempted to take corrective measures, but couldn't". WTTW, which maintained its transmitter atop the Sears Tower, found that its engineers were unable to stop the hijacker due to the fact that there were no engineers on duty at the Sears Tower at the time of the hijacking. After a few moments of static, viewers were returned to the Doctor Who broadcast. He then exposed his buttocks, saying "they're coming to get me", while a female figure spanked him with a flyswatter.

#Max headroom wttw pirating incident series#

After singing "your love is fading", humming the theme song to the 1959 TV series Clutch Cargo, and saying "I still see the X" (a reference to last episode of that show) he said he had "made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds" (WGN's call letters stand for "World's Greatest Newspaper"). The masked figure made a reference to WGN sportscaster Chuck Swirsky, whom he called a "frickin' liberal", held up a can of Pepsi while saying "Catch the wave" (a slogan from an ad campaign for Coca-Cola featuring the character Max Headroom), and held up a middle finger (inside what appeared to be a hollowed-out dildo ).

#Max headroom wttw pirating incident serial#

Later that night, during a broadcast of the Doctor Who serial Horror of Fang Rock on local PBS station WTTW, the signal was again interrupted by video of the Max Headroom impersonator, this time with distorted audio. WTTWįile:Max Headroom broadcast intrusion.webm įollowing the incident, sports anchor Dan Roan commented, "Well, if you're wondering what's happened, so am I", and joked that the computer running the news "took off and went wild" he then repeated his report of the day's Chicago Bears game. The hijack lasted 28 seconds, and was stopped after engineers at WGN switched the broadcast frequency of their link to the transmitter atop the John Hancock Center. For 15 seconds, the screen went black, then displayed a person wearing a Max Headroom mask and sunglasses, accompanied by a buzzing sound and swaying in front of a rotating corrugated metal panel that mimicked Max Headroom's geometric background effect.

The first signal intrusion took place during the sports segment of a live broadcast of WGN-TV's The Nine O'Clock News. File:WGN-TV 'Max Headroom' Incident" (1987).webm