The Max Headroom Incident

Criminal

Vox Media Podcast Network

True Crime, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.7 • 38.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 November 2020

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One Sunday night in November 1987, something very odd happened in the middle of the WGN nine o’clock news in Chicago. Sportscaster Dan Roan had been talking about the Chicago Bears, when the screen suddenly went black. Then a person appeared, dancing back and forth in front of a moving striped background, and wearing a mask. The mask was the face of a fictional character from 1985 named Max Headroom, who was supposed to be the world’s first computer generated TV host. He supposedly came from our “not so distant future”—a future where the world is run by TV executives. The interruption lasted about 30 seconds. And then, two hours later it happened again on a different channel—WTTW—during a broadcast of Dr. Who. As one television viewer said, it felt like someone threw “a brick through your window.” A little boy said it was “very, very funny.” We speak with Dan Roan, Larry Ocker, Al Skierkiewicz, Jim Higgins, and Matt Frewer. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for this show comes from Krakan.
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0:07.0	It doesn't care where you come from, what you look like, your credit score,
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0:21.3	Don't invest unless you're prepared to lose all the money you invest.
0:25.0	This is a high risk investment and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong.
0:30.0	Hi, it's Phoebe.
0:33.0	One of our favorite things to do is to bring the show out on the road and perform stories live.
0:39.0	We've done it for years now, all over the country.
0:42.0	It's really just a chance for people to see me screw up reading
0:45.4	lines, but we've always thought it was a lot of fun to be able to look out into the audience
0:50.9	and see people's reactions to these stories right away. Maybe they're laughing.
0:56.0	Maybe they've fallen asleep. Depends on the city. Just kidding.
1:01.0	We were planning on going out on a tour right after the coronavirus pandemic began, and we had to cancel that.
1:08.1	We hope we'll get back out there to maybe see all of you one day again soon.
1:13.0	Until then, we thought we'd bring you one of our favorite stories
1:16.3	that we've ever done live.
1:18.3	If you like, you can close your eyes
1:20.9	and pretend you're in a theater somewhere, looking up at a big screen on stage.
1:29.2	On Sunday night, November 22nd, 1987, something very odd happened in the middle of the 9 o'clock news in Chicago.
	...

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