Stuff You Should Know - Selects: The Max Headroom Affair

Episode Date: February 18, 2023

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. Find out all about it in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What's up y'all this is Questlove and you know at QLS I get to hang out with my friends Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Umpink, Bill and we you know at Questlove Supreme like to nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and creatives. People that we feel really deserve that attention. We learn, we laugh, we fall down rabbit holes. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I am Rosie O'Donnell and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me Rosie O'Donnell on iHeart.

Mostly this part of my life is just about moving forward and I thought what a wonderful way to do it with good friends across a tiny table and just have a heartfelt conversation. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Hi everyone this is Chuck on a Saturday I want you to open your mind, I want you to go back in time, jump in the way back machine and join me because it's June 5th 2018 in my mind's eye and on that date we talked about one of my favorite podcast titles and favorite incidents in the United States history, the Max Ed Room Incident.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, there's Chuck Bryant and Jerry Rowland. What do you think pretty good, it's pretty good and this is Stuff You Should Know. Josh Ed Room. Thank you. You've been, I saw you over there with your earbuds today, you were working on this all day weren't you? I watched season one episode one of Max Ed Room, like the last 10 minutes is still pending.

But it's crazy like Max Ed Room himself doesn't show up until like 40 minutes into the first hour long episode, but when he does, it's dynamite. So what are we talking about? We're talking about Max Ed Room. That's right, a huge shout out at the beginning of this to vice.com, specifically Motherboard. Specifically Alex Pasternak. 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?

Yeah, I don't think they like to talk about that or acknowledge it publicly. You don't think? I don't think so. You don't think it was mutually beneficial? I'll bet you can't find those on Motherboard anymore. I'm trying to remember. I'm sure they were like, I think I wrote one about driving a stick shift versus automatic or something weird.

That's a big one. Yeah. We started out with an old fashioned recipe, I think. Yeah, that was you. They were like, let's do better than this guys. We said no. And then they said, we got our own people. Yeah.

We'll let somebody come in and go straight for you. Yeah. So that Motherboard article is 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 gras, coup de gras, of Max Hedrum incident articles. Yeah. It actually-

Really good job. It, Pasternak like very exhaustively investigated it and turned up new information, got new, a new understanding of it, and basically contributed to the mythos of it himself. Yeah. It's a way to go, Pasternak. Right. And what we're talking about is, if you don't know who Max Hedrum at all is, we're about to set that up.

Yeah. Let's talk about Max Hedrum. But if you were alive during the 1980s, then you probably know who Max Hedrum is because weirdly for a brief few years, it was kind of a big pop culture thing. About four years by my calculations. Yeah. So starting in 1984, there was a movie called Max Hedrum Colon, so you know, it's an important movie, 20 Minutes in the Future, right?

And it was a kind of a cyberpunk movie, Dystopian Future, very Terry Gilliam, Brazilian. And it was, I haven't seen that one, but it was basically where the character of Max Hedrum was born, right? Yeah. 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 Hedrum was a pop culture sensation. He was a pitchman for New Coke.

Oh, man. 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? Was it, did it say, here's a little story, a need to tell about a New Coke on the scene that he loves so well? That was exactly word for word how that ad went. So let's back up a little more, right?

Okay. Let's see what Max Hedrum is for the kids. Because I guarantee it, about 80% of our audience are like, what's the 80s? What's New Coke? Yeah. Who's Run DMC? Well, that's probably not true. But what, so what was Max Hedrum?

He was billed as like the first virtual talk show host, right? Correct. Okay. Yeah. So he was played by a guy named Matt Fruehr, who out of prosthetic makeup had that look anyway, very chiseled, square jawed. He was not bald, but had, was he balding, had very shortish? He had a receding hairline.

Okay. But he kept it really, really short. So he kind of looked bald. 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. Yeah. They're like, oh, that guy, not the painter, the other one, the love interest.

I don't think I knew that. I never watched Murphy Brown though. Oh man. I hope it was him. I'm pretty sure it was him. Yeah. I'm really liking 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. Yeah. So the whole premise of the TV show, the last, 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. Yeah. So in addition, the network 23, that Matt Fruehrer's character, and later Max Headroom who became his alter ego, worked for, were putting these things called blipverts out.

Yeah. His character's name is Edison Carter at first. Right. And he was like an investigative journalist. 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. And the problem is, is that everybody watched so much TV by this time, they didn't move

around, which meant that all of the electricity generated by their nerve endings wasn't burned off as 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. And the network really liked blipverts and they didn't want to get rid of them, so they decided to instead get rid of Edison Carter. 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. It sounds very familiar. It does. Everyone's like, I'd take a blipvert, give me a three second ad on the podcast. Guys, it'll blow you up. So what ended up happening was, 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.

The first episode. 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. And so that's how he got the name Max Headroom. Right. And it was basically saying this is the overhead clearance is the way it's put in the United States.

Yeah. Right. So that's the name Max Headroom, right? But he was an AI character. Right. So the evil TV network got ahold 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, bringing him back in virtual form.

So they created an artificial intelligence. All is kind of glitchy and blippy, and it looked weird. So they threw it out. Well, some pirate broadcasters got ahold of this database that Max Headroom lived on, and they started broadcasting with him, and Max Headroom was born. That's right. And you said glitchy and blippy, and that kids explains your intro when you went to Josh. Oh yeah.

Yeah. I was doing my Max Headroom impression. Thank you for explaining that. 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 line to moving around thing, and that was all part of this at the time sort of futuristic look.

He was also really sarcastic and really caddy, and he was really, he poked fun at censorship, and he was just kind of like a cult hero, just the character itself, right? Yeah. And one 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 at like, there was a four hour process to put Matt Fruehr into the Max Headroom makeup. So it's the guy acting, and then, you know, they mess with the video a little bit, but

it wasn't a CGI version of a guy. It was a guy acting like he was a CGI version of himself. 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, which is what they did. But it was actually Matt Fruehr in another studio. He was probably just backstage being broadcast. And it's really like, as a kid, I did not get all this.

No, I just thought it was a, I didn't really know what it was because I had never seen the show. I thought he was the Coke guy. Right, 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 pretty amazing thing, right? And you can kind of understand how Max Hadroom, with all that information now, became this kind of cult icon, especially among cyberpunks at the time. And what? Just keep saying cyberpunk.

So, so let me, let me, I'm not like a particularly well versed in like what constitutes cyberpunk, but like it's like pornography to a Supreme Court justice. Like I know it when I see it, right? Sure. It's the Max Hadroom show, you're like, 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, at the time, you had what are called geeks and nerds, but they are not really what you would call the geek or a nerd today, right? Somebody who wears like glasses that don't actually have prescription glass in them. Do people do that? That's some people do. I did that in the fourth grade. Well, then you were a geek, apparently.

No, I was a prep and I wore those little tortoise shell round preppy glasses because that was a cool look. Yeah. I mean, it's one of my least proud moments fashion-wise is actually bought fake glasses and wore them around for a while. Do you have photos of those? I'd really have to dig through some boxes. I think I speak for everyone when I say start digging.

Dig. Yeah. It was not my proudest moment. Yeah. I'd like to see that picture. 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?

Yeah, exactly. They came out on top. I watched a little bit of that just the other night. This is probably the earliest celebration of nerd culture. It was not something that was venerated or subscribed to by anyone who wasn't a genuine nerd or geek. These were a very rarefied group of people who really knew what they were doing with computers at a time when almost no one else did.

Yeah. Early adopters across the board. Very much so. Max Hadron is kind of a cult hero to this guy. That kind of sets up what happened on November 22, 1987 in a little town called Chicago, Illinois. The city of industry. The city of angels.

The city that doesn't ever sleep. Never. The windy city. That's it. There you go. Of all time. The windy city of all time. Yeah.

Yeah, so that's at the stage. We know who the character of Max Hadron was then at 9.14 PM. Wait, wait, wait. Yes. Are you sure I set the stage? I think so. Did we set the stage fully here? It looks nice.

All right, let's do it. So at 9.14 PM on that November night in Chicago, four days before Thanksgiving. Yeah. So everyone was in that frame of mind. Right. Put yourself there. I think that that helps a lot. It helped me at least.

Sure. Okay. Football season's going on. Yeah. As a matter of fact, just that very day, the Bears had beat the Lions. Yeah. Which, you know, it was a long time ago because the Bears won a football game. Wow.

I know. The people in the windy city of all time are not going to be happy with you for that. The windy city of all time. Oh, and there's a sportscaster on local Channel 9, Dan Roan, R-O-A-N, and he was going over the highlights of that football game. Then all of a sudden, right in the middle, the broadcast signal goes, it makes those noises, and then over at WGN, the control room, they were like, what's going on here? We have no idea what this is.

I think the exact quote was, a guh? What? So 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. 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. For local TV. For local TV, which is, I mean, there was cable at the time, but local TV still kind

of ruled in the late 80s, starting to segue to cable. Yeah, for sure. Cable is kind of a thing, but if you were a local TV station, you still have a pretty big market share. For sure. Right? Especially WGN in Chicago. I mean, it's like Chicago station, right?

Absolutely. What I think you were saying is that in a studio, whatever they're recording or shooting or playing on their little video tapes, 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? Right. So all of a sudden, during the sportscast, it skits us 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, 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. Especially a viewer who wanted to know what the heck happened between the bears and the lions that day, and the whole thing lasted, I think, like 11 seconds or some very short amount of time. Yeah, this was a short one. Before the WGN engineers went and switched to the backup transmitter and I guess transmitted

on a slightly different signal and brought the broadcast, the sportscaster back on. And Dan Rohn 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. You should. But it's good. You should watch it. Like somebody, just go look it up.

Right. So federal investigators, the FCC that is, was called in to investigate 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. They said the intrusion's coming from inside the building. Exactly.

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, right, for something like this. Inside job. Apparently it was not an inside job, at least as far as the WGN engineers search was concerned. That's right. So that was at 9.14, about two hours later, I think at 11.15 on another channel in Chicago, and TTW, which was the PBS station, they were airing an episode of Doctor Who called The

Horror on Fang Island. Fang Rock. Fang Rock. The Horror of Fang Rock. You have to say it like that though. The Horror of Fang Rock. Thank you. And this is the Tom Baker Doctor.

Okay. That's the only one I recognize. Oh, really? He's 70s, right? Hey, I'm the Doctor Who guy, so don't. It looked like this. Don't embarrass me. It looked like the 70s, what they cut in on, looked pretty 70s.

It didn't look 87. So who knows. I would think it would be 87. I'm guessing it was a rerun on PBS. That's what I think. All right. We'll find out. Oh man, we are going to find out too, aren't we?

Yeah, that would have been super easy to check. Yeah, 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 Hadroom intrusion. 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 Hadroom Incident, spend the next minute and 22 seconds watching it. We'll wait.

And we'll wait. We'll just insert a minute and 22 seconds of silence here. How about this? Let's take a break. Oh, okay. And then we'll talk about exactly what happened during that minute and 22 seconds. Okay, what's up, y'all, this is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill, and we, you know, at Questlove

Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians, actors, politicians, journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS team supreme. They're like a second family to me. You're a fan of deep diving and music, everything, all monacking your musical history and learning things about hip hop artists and things you never thought, then you're a lot like me,

but you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeart Radio app, at the podcast or wherever you get your podcast. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism.

Narcissists are everywhere and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love bombed by the Tinder Swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did. And that's even way worse than the money you took. But I am here to help.

As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. According to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back. Did you watch it?

Are you talking to me? No. Oh, okay. I was looking at you. 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. And 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. You found it disturbing? Yeah. I found it hilarious in like a really juvenile way. Yeah, it creeps me out. 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?

All right. So let's describe the scene here. Okay. So you got Max Headroom. Well, actually a dude wearing a rubber Halloween mask of Max Headroom. 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 it kind of moved and adjusted and they were different colors.

To do, to simulate that, these guys had like a piece of corrugated metal, shiny metal. And I guess they had 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. That it looked like the Max Headroom TV show. Yeah, the background. And the character. Yes.

But again, I would say that this person was very, very clearly on acid. 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 you can't, you know, understand what he's saying or whatever. And the garbled quality and just the 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 Fox had to come on and said, you know, we are coming into your thing to tell you this about this. Right. This was just so weird and all over the place. It was creepy to me. Yeah. Yeah.

I see what you mean. Like you're watching somebody. It's nonsensical. Somebody's brain slightly damaged. Yeah. I felt like you're watching somebody lose their mind. Right. Okay.

Yeah. Totally get that. 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 was clearly somebody who had a grudge against WGN. Yeah.

He makes fun of the Bulls sportscaster, the 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 staying for world's greatest newspaper. He wields a rubber penis. Yeah. That's one. Although it was great in almost every article it was referred to as a marital aid. Did you see that?

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. Did you? Mm-hmm. Okay. So there you go. I wanted to keep it clean. Sure.

Well, it's a family. But then I realized that saying the word penis is okay. 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. Yeah. And that's a new t-shirt, by the way. What? We have the chops to say penis. So that's a band name. Let's go ahead and use some of the, let's go ahead and say some of the direct quotes. Yes.

So he comes on and he goes, he's a freaking nerd. I think I'm better than Chuck Swarski, freaking liberal. That's a really good impression of this. And Chuck Swarski was the, the, the Bulls guy. Yeah. The sports announcer. This is a time too when like the Bulls were, this is the Jordan Pippin era still. I mean, well, still at the beginning of it.

Was it 87? I thought it was like in the middle of it. Was it the beginning? Pretty early, early-ish, let's say. I wish these days that I would have been more cognizant and like more into basketball than like I am now. See that's when I was the most into it was bird, Jordan, magic. I would like to watch some of those games.

Yeah. Cause that's when the Hawks were good back then. Yeah. Back then. Dominique. Hey, shout out to Kent Baysmore. You know, he listens to this show. No way.

Yeah. He's a fan. How'd you find that out? Twitter? Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Man, I love Bays.

I know. How do you not love Bays? He's awesome. Man, he's bright red right now. That's so cool. All right. So Chuck Swarski's freaking liberal. He's wielding the rubber penis.

The marital aid. The marital aid. He drops that. Then he picks up a new coke. Well, you can't really tell if it's a new coke. No, it's a Pepsi. Oh, was it? Uh-huh.

Okay. I couldn't really tell. He picks up a can and, but he says, catch the wave, which is the new coke slogan. Right. 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. That's that one where it's like animation, but for the mouths, it was just like a human mouth moving. That's disturbing. That was, if you've seen Pulp Fiction, it was the scene where Bruce Willis was a kid and Christopher Walken comes in with the wristwatch scene, that clutch cargo was playing on TV when he's watching it. Right.

But it is weird looking. Right. 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. Yeah. In Chicago. 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. Yeah. That was the big X or something. And then he says, what you're talking about earlier, I just made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds, but he should have said world's greatest newspaper nerds. WGN.

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. Right. WGN. It's all coming together. Ipso facto. There you go.

Then finally, toward the end, the camera cuts to a different angle. 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. So there is a person, I say woman, but I don't know, but a person in like an Annie Oakley dress. Is that what it was? I didn't get that.

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. Okay. And they are spanking the bare butt with a fly swatter. Right. And he's worried about them coming to get him. They're coming to get me.

And then he says, come get me and uses a bad word. B word. B word. And then it goes back to Dr. Who. Yeah. As just like it when it came in, went out and it's like gone. Can you imagine seeing that live? And that while the people who saw it live, the next thing they would have heard was the

doctor saying something like, oh, he died of an electric shock, must have died instantly. And then everybody's just sitting there like their mouths hanging open. Well, it was Dr. Who too. So it was probably a bunch of Chicago nerds watching PBS. So all right. My imitation was okay, but let's just play at least like a couple of lines from the real thing. Yeah.

All right, 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, aghawg. Some people probably thought it was funny, WGN reporting on it all over the place the next couple of days. Yeah.

The newspapers had picked it up. Yeah. There's this one, there's a compilation of WGN broadcasts or it might even be more than just WGN of people in the street being interviewed. What do you think about this? Some guys 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, very funny. The star of the news though was this one Dr. Who fan, this lady who was not at all amused

by this. And I just want to play her little segment, okay? Yeah. Get annoyed, some viewers. I don't know. I just thought it would be just a slight mess up, but that in the middle of the tape, it's going to be, you're going to have to tape over it. I just think that's the funniest thing out of the whole, the whole thing.

Well, another guy said he wanted to smash his TV. He was so angry. Yeah. I didn't see that guy. I saw that in the Pasternak article. So funny. Yeah. He was mad.

So there was a lot of mixed reaction, but the, the, the voice from on high that came from the FCC, who you said were called in pretty quickly. Yeah. 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 hundred thousand dollar fine in a year in jail for this kind of thing. So stop doing it. But at this point, by this point, it was actually a federal offense. It was a felony. A felony offense. Wait, what was that? Dazed and confused. Oh, okay.

Tamped around with the mailbox as a felony offense. I was like, wait a minute. I know that from somewhere. So the FCC gets involved in this, this is really interesting in this article. The FBI got involved too. FBI was involved, Chicago PD, like there was, they were looking into it. Apparently the, man, I, it has become obvious to me that I say the word apparently a lot. Really?

A lot. I was listening to an episode, Q-ing an episode and I was like, stop saying apparently Josh. Yeah. I've started to, after 10 years, I've started to notice some things about my own self. It's like a tick. I try to just avoid it. 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, the, 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 the station? Yeah. I think what they were looking for was this. They were physically patching in to the transmission network, the cables.

Wearing a max headroom mask. And yeah, either playing a videotape, which it's, it seems pretty obvious. It was pre-taped. Yeah. It was pre-taped or doing something like in a studio, but, but that they, they would have to physically patch into WGN's transmission network. 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 and frayed at the ends. Right. Now imagine that squirrel wearing a max headroom mask and being on acid, okay, with a marital aid. Yes. 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, a lot of electricity

there's not a lot of ways that they could have done this, but later on in the Pasternak article, and this is, 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, that whole viewpoint that had lasted for almost 30 years, that it had to have been somebody with a hundred thousand dollar piece of equipment and you know, $10,000 worth of electricity over the minute and a half. He was saying, no, you could probably have gotten the equipment needed for this new for $10,000 at the time, 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. Yeah, basically, it could have been done with like the size of a direct TV dish today and all they would have had to do was get at 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 is get in between the original studio and that initial tower on top of the, I think it was a John Hancock building. For WGN, yeah.

Yeah, and have a stronger signal. Right, so even just like a slightly stronger signal. So you remember how WGN has their studio transmission shooting up to the John Hancock building, and then that transmitter shoots it out to everybody else in Chicago. 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 weight, or no, a stronger amplitude, that's what it is, of the same frequency, you just overpower it, cancels out what WGN is doing, and instead it transmits your Max Headroom

thing. And they would be closer to that broadcast tower. Right. Ostensibly. 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 they hijacked their signal, while WTTW shot their studio link to the Sears Tower. 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. 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 a 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 wanting to go knocking on doors and as to like investigate some kind of weird, kind of maybe creepy criminal dudes. He may or may not have a marital aid in his apartment. Just smack him on the head with it. And then they also, you know, 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, we're not going to, 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 crack this case of a bunch of nerds who did a weird thing for a minute and 20 seconds. 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 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. So it's kind of surprising, even with very few resources, that no one has ever been really implicated in this one. Yeah, I don't think we said, they still don't know who did this. It's an unsolved mystery. Like Dennis Farina and Robert Stack love this one.

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 pictures, enhance them, and they were 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're so into that. But they said, 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? Right. There was very little to go on aside from that spinning corrugated metal, and that could have been literally anywhere, because it's a really tight shot. It really is, yeah. And there was very little evidence given in the video. Yeah. I mean, we were looking at industrial warehouses and things, but that could have been in an

apartment living room. I mean, it wasn't like the door was attached to anything, it was freely spinning back and forth. It didn't 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. What's really weird is that no one has been like, it was these guys. I was there, I know these dudes, it was these guys. Statute limitations is done, like who cares? Yeah, after 1993, these guys would have gotten off scot-free, because the statute of limitations for this one was five years, right? I'm shocked that no one later said, hey, that was me. Right.

I'm soy bomb. No one's done that, right? There was some, so very early forum, like message board stuff, took the form of a bulletin board services, I think, BBSs, 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 like transmit the dial tone over the telephone system, right? So that's like the level of technology that these people were dealing with, but they were 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, and so facto, I'm a big fan of that, by the way, this intrusion was successful, right? Yeah. Two days, not two years, not a year ago, two days after it, somebody was on there, explained how it went down. So somebody knew this, right?

But only two theories have really 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. Yeah, the first one that you were 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. Fournier? Fournier. I think he had a friend in preschool, I think, named Fournier, yeah.

That's how it was spelled? F-O-U-R-N-I-E-R. Actually, I don't know how it was spelled, I couldn't spell back then. So this guy was in a band, and he did this weird, super creepy YouTube series called Shay St. John, S-H-A-Y-E. Did you watch it? Oh yeah. Love it.

I kind of knew that you would love it, right up your alley, but this is genuinely unsettling too. I'm with you on that. 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. The Blood Farmers. 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, and then ended up just improv-ing. That part makes a little sense, because it definitely seems improved. It does, but it was also videotaped, remember? So that means he would have had two videotapes with him. What do you mean? 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 Fernier's friends, because Fernier died in 2010, but his friends were like, absolutely not. Even some of the Blood Farmers were like, it wasn't him. Like I know what you're saying, and yeah, he did the whole Shea St. John thing, 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, so this other one to me seems pretty promising. 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? Yeah, I think it was about 25 years after. So it would have been in 2007. Yeah, so there's this guy from- Oh no, 2012, 13, sorry.

There was this guy from Chicago named Bowie Pogue, P-O-A-G. I didn't have any friends with that last name, when I was a kid. 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.

I just want to ingratiate myself. But you guys can get me drunk for laughs if you want. And at a party in 1987, 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. So Pogue is describing these two guys who were in the same scene with him. Correct. Right.

Yeah. And they lived with his girlfriend, about 10 miles from downtown Chicago. And they had the know-how. They were super into computers early on. He said, you went to their apartment and it looked like a computer hoarder, mess of wires and computers and equipment. Like Neo's apartment. Yeah.

Why not? Or what was the other one he was in before the Matrix? Johnny Pneumonic. Yes. Yeah. Bill and Ted. Yeah. Johnny Pneumonic.

That's cyberpunk. Yes. Yes, it is. All right. You could probably make the case that the Matrix is as well. All right. 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 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? It's the big thing. And they said, hey, don't ask questions, but just watch Channel 11 tonight. On that same day, and I don't know how he didn't put it together.

That's the one thing that really strikes me as fishy. 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 to me. But 25 years later, he was there that day. They told him to watch that night and he didn't put it together for 25 years. That to me is the one fishy thing. Well, and he has been called out as fishy. Sure.

I'm sure he knows that it's kind of fishy. Yeah. So the guy, the mother pastor neck 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 to, he found out where they

lived, never heard anything back and he was like, hey, it's clear that these guys don't want to be talked to. Right. So you want to take a break? Yeah. Let's do it. Okay. What's up, y'all?

This is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends. Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill, and we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS team supreme. They're like a second family to me.

You're a fan of deep diving into music, everything, all monacking your musical history and learning things about hip hop artists and things you never thought. Then you're a lot like me, but you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio App, a podcast wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup?

Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history

books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts are wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism.

Narcissists are everywhere, and their toxic behavior and words can cause serious harm to your mental health. In our first season, we heard from Eileen Charlotte, who was love-bombed by the Tinder swindler. The worst part is that he can only be guilty for stealing the money from me, but he cannot be guilty for the mental part he did, and that's even way worse than the money he took. But I am here to help. As a licensed psychologist and survivor of narcissistic abuse myself, I know how to identify

the narcissist in your life. Each week, you will hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love-bombing, and the process of their healing from these relationships. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So that's where it stands right now, like nobody knows who is behind it still to this day. Crazy.

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, is legendary in its own way. That's right. You got anything else? I got nothing else on this one. Cool, man. Well, if you want to know more about Max-Headroom, you should start by checking out this amazing

Motherboard article by Alex Pasternak. And since I said amazing, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to go with the Almond Brothers Eat A Peach from Muppets. I don't know if this is true, but it's fun. Okay. I wanted to talk about when Josh talked about the Almond Brothers Band Factoid, because I think it's actually a cool factoid. Dwayne Almond 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, so he contends Jesse Godet that that is where the album title came from, and that Eat A Peach was not Eat A Pie. He or she, I guess. Jesse could go either way. Yeah. As always, keep up the good work.

I'm currently brewing beer and listening. Tell me where to mail some bottles. Okay. Or come pick them up in Salt Lake City. All right. We'll do both. Sounds like a challenge. Right.

They're too heavy. That's right. 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 S-Y-S-K Podcast or Movie Crush. You can hang out with us on facebook.com slash Stuff You Should Know.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove. And, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo,

Umpink, Bill. And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and creatives, people that we feel really deserve that attention. We learn, we laugh, we fall down in rabbit holes. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Suprema! Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell,

on iHeart. Mostly, this part of my life is just about moving forward. And I thought, what a wonderful way to do it with good friends across a tiny table and just have a heartfelt conversation. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup?

Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you

find your favorite shows.