He said he was in the company of brothers “J’ and “K” the same evening, and they suggested he tune into WTTW later. In 2010 a Redditor said he knew who did it, providing what he hoped would be enough detail to be believed, although he refused to name anyone involved just in case it landed them in court.
#Max headroom mask full#
And once we have determined that, we will make sure that the full extent of the law is carried out.”Įven though the offense carried a maximum penalty of $100,000 and prison time – the law had changed since the Captain Midnight jamming of HBO the previous year – several people over the years have laid claim to the stunt. The organization’s Phil Bradford told the media, “It is very serious and we’d like to inform anybody who is involved in this type of thing that it is serious and that we will take every step that we can to find out who is doing it. "People started asking me, ‘Well, so in the upcoming election, who are you who are you taking in 1988?’ You know, ‘What are your views on this, this and this?’ You know, I just want to be a guy, just a guy on the street." The Federal Communications Commission launched a criminal investigation, but the perpetrators were never identified. "I had a couple of friends tell me … ‘You better seek protection.’ Whoever did this had to be pretty smart and sharp to do what he did," he recalled. Swirsky found himself at the center of media attention for all the wrong reasons. I really didn’t understand this whole Max Headroom phenomenon. “‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Max Headroom!’ ‘Yeah, what about Max Headroom?’ ‘Well, I mean, he mentioned you!’ I said, ‘What’d he say?’ ‘He said you were a freakin' liberal.’ … I thought it was a practical joke!. “‘Hey, did you just hear … ’ or ‘Did you see?’” he was asked. In 2019 Swirsky told the Endless Thread podcast that he was inundated with calls after the interruption, which he didn't watch. And probably a combination of at least two of those in order to pull this off.” “And as the content got weirder, we got increasingly stressed out about our inability to do anything about it.” Colleague Al Skierkiewicz added that “it had to be a broadcast engineer, a satellite engineer or a ham radio operator. “All of a sudden we don’t have Doctor Who on the air-we have this Max Headroom mask,” he said. WTTW broadcast director Paul Rizzo later recalled his horror as the moment unfolded. Together, the event made headlines across the world and became known as the Max Headroom signal hijacking – even though the Headroom element was nothing more than a mask. A little earlier, local news station WGN-TV experienced a 30-second outage when the same figure appeared, although no sound was broadcast at that time. It was the second intervention of the evening. “Oh, do it!” were the last words heard as the hack ended and replaced by Fourth Doctor Tom Baker back in the lighthouse, announcing, “As far as I can tell, a massive electric shock – he died instantly.” He put on a glove, saying his brother had the other one, made a comment about “world newspaper nerds” and then said, “Whoa! They’re coming to get me!” as he disappeared off-screen and was replaced by a man bending over, revealing his naked ass, which was then slapped by a woman. He’s a frickin’ nerd!” followed by references to local sports commentator Chuck Swirsky, Headroom’s recent commercial for Coca-Cola and words that were difficult to follow. In those seconds, the masked man spoke apparent gibberish, starting with, “That does it. But it wasn’t really Headroom, played by Matt Frewer, who recently found fame with the character that hosted from “20 minutes into the future.” It was someone wearing a Headroom mask, who proceeded to clown around on the hacked airwaves for about 90 seconds.
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