It took a second attempt at hijacking the TV signal for viewers to hear what the people behind the Max Headroom mask had to say. Like in a tale of modern horror, the ghost of Headroom used to pop into broadcasts, sharing snarly, sometimes off-beat jokes with a pinch of social commentary.
Headroom's hacker friend preserved his brain and uploaded it to the network, making the former journalist a digital entity. In the TV show, Max Headroom was a journalist who was assassinated over digging dirt on the corporation that owned the TV station he worked at. In reality, the computer-generated appearance of the character was created with prosthetic makeup put on by Canadian-American actor Matt Frewer. The original show featured a fictional 'artificial intelligence' character. The culprit was wearing a mask imitating Max Headroom, a fictional British TV character. "Well, if you're wondering what's happened, so am I," sports anchor Dan Roan commented once the stations' engineers managed to get the regular broadcast back on-air. It was unclear whether the character had anything to say, as a screeching digital noise accompanied the interruption.īaffled, WGN-TV's engineers cut off the intrusion by changing the signal frequency linking the broadcast studio to the station. A ten-second black screen interrupted the broadcast at first, followed by a creepy-looking masked person in front of a corrugated metal background.
The first intrusion occurred during the sports segment of Chicago's WGN-TV newscast and lasted for about 25 seconds. And the more you read about the hack, the stranger it gets. From a modern perspective, the Max Headroom hack looks like a scene from a hacker flick like Mr.