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Doctor Who and The Video Pirates

22 Jul

July 22, 2011

I love pirates! Love ’em! I have always wanted to be a pirate. Man, who wouldn’t? My family has a rich naval tradition and even to this day I still feel the allure of the open water. If I didn’t get violently seasick I may actually step on a boat once in a while.

But there are many different kinds of pirates. They don’t all have to take off in ships and try to capture cargo. I think it may be more feasible for me to become a pirate broadcaster.

I am not talking about broadcasting music from an old warehouse. There is too much of that nonsense where I live. Drive through some parts of Brooklyn and tool around the dial and you’ll find that, depending on where you love, there are anywhere from 1 to 19 different pirate stations blasting Jamaican music with the bass and echo pumped up to 15 like those guys in the Red Stripe commercials, just a lot less fun. The FCC makes a half-hearted attempt to shut them down but they are not that easy to find and they just pop up somewhere else. The fines for these things rarely seem to get paid and no one really gets in trouble. The only victim? Me. I can’t drive down the Belt Parkway listening to my iPod without island drums leaking through. At some spots on my ride the pirate audio is three times louder than the regular stuff it overrides.

What I would really like to be, and this is the sort of thing that the FCC is serious about and can land you in some hot water, is a pirate TV broadcaster.

Check this out:

That is from Chicago and it is interrupting a pretty good episode of Doctor Who. It is one of the more infamous cases of television piracy. What was it about? What was the point? Who cares, it’s funny!

From wikipedia, which I wish would get taken over by pirates. Then they’d have an excuse:

The first occurrence of the signal intrusion took place during WGN-TV (channel 9)’s live telecast of its primetime newscast, The Nine O’Clock News. During Chicago Bears highlights in the sports report, the station’s signal was interrupted for about half a minute by a video of a person wearing a Max Headroom mask, standing in front of a swaying sheet of corrugated metal, which imitated the background effect in the Max Headroom TV and movie appearances. There was no audio, only a buzzing noise. The hijack was stopped after engineers at WGN switched the modulation of their studio link to the John Hancock Center transmitter.

The incident left sports anchor Dan Roan flustered, saying, “Well, if you’re wondering what happened, so am I.”

Later that night, around 11:15 p.m., during a broadcast of the Doctor Who serial Horror of Fang Rock, PBS station WTTW (channel 11)’s signal was hijacked using the same video that was broadcast during the WGN-TV hijack, this time with distorted audio.The person in the Max Headroom mask appeared, as before, this time saying, “That does it. He’s a freakin’ nerd,” before laughing and jeering, “Yeah, I think I’m better than Chuck Swirsky. Freakin’ liberal.”

The unidentified man continued to utter random phrases, including New Coke’s advertising slogan “Catch the Wave” while holding a Pepsi can (Max Headroom was a Coca-Cola spokesperson at the time), then tossing the can down, and making an obscene gesture with a rubber extension over his middle finger (the gesture was cut off at the bottom of the screen due to the close-up of the camera) then retrieving the Pepsi can, and saying “Your love is fading,” before removing the rubber extension, then began humming the theme song to Clutch Cargo, and stating that he had “made a giant masterpiece for all the greatest world newspaper nerds” (the call letters WGN are an abbreviation for “World’s Greatest Newspaper,” in reference to the Tribune Company’s Chicago Tribune). He then held up a glove, said “my brother is wearing the other one,” and put the glove on. He then took the glove off, adding that it was “dirty.”

The picture suddenly cut over to a shot of the man’s lower torso. His buttocks were exposed, and he was holding the now-removed mask up to the camera while being spanked with a flyswatter by an unidentified accomplice wearing a dress, as the man exclaimed They’re coming to get me!”. The transmission then blacked out and cut off, and the hijack was over after about 90 seconds.

WTTW, which maintains its transmitter atop the then-Sears Tower, found that its engineers were unable to stop the hijacker. According to station spokesman Anders Yocom, technicians monitoring the transmission “attempted to take corrective measures, but couldn’t.” “By the time our people began looking into what was going on, it was over,” he told the Chicago Tribune. WTTW was able to find copies of the hijacker’s telecast with the help of Doctor Who fans who had been taping the show.

Believe it or not, this is a very, very rare occurrence. In fact, there seem to be only three events in the US. This is taken very seriously. Fines range from $100,000 to $250,000 and up to 10 years in jail so kids, don’t try this at home.

Below is the first try on WGN, with the anchor’s reaction.

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The Big Ape- the conclusion

15 Jul

July 15, 2011

from July 7, 2007

Bradford B. Jacobs entered the 1970’s the same way he entered a room- not like he owned the place, but like he didn’t care who owned the place. (Odds were, though, that he owned the place.)

Bradford’s proudest moment happened near the end of 1970. It wasn’t in any way Big Ape related, but in fact related to him. His great-grandson was born. Me.

My earliest memories of great-grandpa are of me sitting on his lap in his screening room in Jacobs’ Landing, watching some of the early Big Ape films. Great-grandpa would bounce me on his knee and make some of the trademark Big Ape grunts and growls just for me. I loved it.

I had all manner of Big Ape toys, Big Ape baby food, and live Big Ape performances on my birthday. I have an entire photo album dedicated to me and The Big Ape.

The films continued, and continued, and continued, but it was the nightly news that brought some of the era’s best Big Ape material. President Nixon authorized the Watergate break-in, and when security cameras showed the thieves wearing Big Ape masks, then the next film practically wrote itself: The Big Ape Meets Nixon. A tense political thriller, it is still required viewing at all college film classes.

Bradford had some of his rare missteps in the 1970’s. He opened a chain of Uncle Wu’s Big Ape Vietnamese Restaurants during the height of the Tet offensive.

Jacobs Colossal Studios also began to produce a series of Great Ape films. The theory was if one giant ape is good, two giant apes are better. Bradford sold a whole slew of Great Ape products, but The Big Ape invariably sold better. The Great Ape today is just a footnote in Big Ape history.

Bradco Confectionary Industries, Bradford’s candy making division, was forced to recall thousands of pounds of Big Ape Vanilla Paw Paws after it was discovered that the soft chewy candy was contaminated with spider eggs. Bradford was forced to close his Tijuana factory when an investigation showed that the entire building was contaminated with spiders. True to form, Bradford tried to make a movie out of this, but the guy in the suit flat-out refused.

Big Ape portrayer Ralph Evans:

           No way was I going in there! Those spiders were everywhere! They were crawling all over the suit, in the fur, in the boots, no way was I going to put it on. I learned my lesson back in 1965 when the suit became full of tadpoles when we made The Big Ape Comes to Frogtown. It was gross! I’d played The Big Ape in over a hundred films, but that was the worst. I once heard about the guy who wore the suit in The Big Ape Follies of 1939. He fell into a vat of caramel and died. No way was I going to die for this. I loved acting, but those spiders were over the line.

Despite a few setbacks, Bradford continued to produce Big Ape films, foods, toys, and medicine right up to his death in 1986.

The effect of Bradford B. Jacobs and his creation on society cannot be overemphasized.

Social Historian and Professor of American History Emeritus at Harvard University, Anderson P. Mitchell III:

            To understand The Big Ape is understand America. To know Bradford B. Jacobs is to know ourselves. No true account of America in the Twentieth Century can be complete without a thorough, in-depth study of those American icons, for as America went, so went The Big Ape. As The United States grew, so too did Bradford B. Jacobs. Usually, Bradford did not follow the trends of his country, he set them. The Big Ape did not merely reflect American culture and values, he was American culture and values.

           Oh, it is easy to dismiss The Big Ape as a man in a suit. Indeed, he was more. He was an astronaut at the height of the Space Race. He was a G.I. at Iwo Jima during WWII. He was a family man when the American family was under attack. He was all things to all people. When heroes were shown to have feet of clay, when Presidents were found to be mortal, when the populace was disillusioned and disheartened, they could look to the silver screen for all they were lacking.

         And in Bradford B. Jacobs himself, America had its leading citizen. Bradford B. Jacobs was bigger than the times. He transcended politics, economics, and social status. He was the true everyman, and if a man could be shown to be the true measure of an American , it was him.

            Not a man or woman can ever forget where they were when the tragic news of Bradford’s disappearance in a hot air balloon over the coast of Australia was broadcast. And though no body was recovered, the national day of mourning did little to settle the nation’s grief. Much like Elvis before him, sightings of Bradford B. Jacobs are reported around the world from time to time.

            And like true folk heroes, from Paul Bunyan to today’s greats, Bradford B. Jacobs has left a legacy that will not soon die.

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