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The Nonsense thread


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This was a television broadcast interruption, breaking into WGN-TV and WTTW on November 22, 1987. The only way to sum this up in a single sentence is to say that a man was dressed as Max Headroom and crazy in ways most crazy people can only longingly aspire to.

For those not familiar with him because you don't remember the 80s, Max Headroom was a CGI character with a distorted, electronic, stuttering voice. The background was constantly moving in a dizzying descent into pure madness. He did Coca-Cola ads and even had his own TV show back in the day. As bizarre as that sounds--it was the 80s, you had to be there--the intruder somehow made this infinitely creepier.

 

The two stations, WGN-TV and WTTW, were interrupted within two hours. The first, the intruder interrupted the WGN nine o'clock news to announce to the world he had a screw loose. Unfortunately for him, there was only a buzzing noise accompanying the video. Then on the PBS station WTTW, Doctor Who was interrupted by the same video, though this time with audio. And it went for a horrifying minute and a half.

 

I've always had a theory of who did this. I don't want to put him on blast incase it was him, but there was a group of punk rocker types that made a lot of zines and videos in the late 80's-early 90's. One of them went on to produce some documentaries, music videos and whatnot. Interesting word is that he had a high-level video production/broadcasting day job. They always said whoever hijacked that channel was someone familiar and with access to broadcast equipment. Any Chi-town old school punker would probably have the same guess as mine as to who did it...

 

Whoever it was, after the statute of limitations are up if not already, it'd be cool to hear their story of how and why they did it.

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