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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 part two- The 1940s

12 Jul

July 12, 2011

from July 2, 2007

Bradford B. Jacobs had sold the movie rights to The Big Ape. Literally anyone with a camera could make a Big Ape film because the rights had become so muddied and legally entangled that it was virtually public domain. Bradford didn’t care. He was richer than he could ever imagine and set to become even richer.

Although he sold the movie rights, he still maintained the merchandising rights. As the 1940’s opened there was a Big Ape merchandising bonanza in the making. Unlike other fictional characters, The Big Ape appealed universally. Men, women, children, of all ages loved the Ape and, more importantly, were willing to spend money on him. Businessmen wore Big Ape neckties. Women wore Big Ape embroidered skirts. Children went to school with Big Ape lunchboxes and read from Big Ape textbooks. Even the normally staid Wall Street investor was likely to be seen with a Big Ape pen and pencil set.

There were Big Ape comic books, Big Ape silverware sets, Big Ape costumes, dolls, toys of every type and even expensive Big Ape diamond jewelry. During this time, The Big Ape  also conquered the world of television, hosting The Big Ape Variety Hour. Although TV, still in it’s infancy, was only in a handful of homes, it seemed as though everyone tuned in at 9 pm on the DuMont Network every Thursday evening. Long before The Cosby Show, this was Must See TV.

Films, however, were where The Big Ape shown the brightest. It should be noted, however, that because there was no one central force overseeing The Big Ape, his characterization often varied wildly from film to film. In some he could talk. In others he could fly. In still others he was average height while in others he was over 100 feet tall. The lack of consistency did not deter the audience. Nearly every single one of The Big Ape films produced in this era made huge amounts of money at the box office.

What follows is a list of some of the more notable Big Ape films of the 1940s.

The Big Ape Meets Hitler (1942) This was a propaganda film produced by the U.S. War Department. The Big Ape went behind enemy lines to kill Hitler. In this movie, The Big Ape was portrayed by a marine in a regular uniform, plus a gorilla mask.

The Big Ape Vs. The Little Dinosaur (1944) Largely played for laughs, The Big Ape found himself shrunk down to microscopic size to fight a similarly shrunken dinosaur.

The Big Ape Vs. Doctor Verlucci (1946) Astor Pictures had produced a very popular series of Doctor Verlucci movies in the 1930s and early 1940s. Doctor Verlucci was a scientist who often tried to dominate the world with assorted death rays and giant robots. After six films, the series had run its course. Doctor Verlucci was a villain and again and again he would get to the brink of victory when the hero would finally defeat him in the last reel. The public had just had enough. Looking to turn their fortunes around, the producers turned Doctor Verlucci into a hero and made The Big Ape his nemesis. To show how evil The Ape was, he wore a handlebar mustache and tied a girl to the railroad tracks.

Gorilla of Doom (1947) Wearing a space suit, The Big Ape came from Mars to steal all of Earth’s bananas.

Throughout the 1940s, The Big Ape could be seen virtually anywhere. Bradford B. Jacobs, however, could not. Bradford was busy with first the war effort, then post-war European reconstruction.

General Bruce E. Freedkin, from his Congressional testimony before the HUAC:

            There wasn’t another man like Bradford B. Jacobs. No sir, he was a patriot. Whether it was the bullets he sold the army or the rafts he sold the navy, no one did more for victory than that man. I personally  remember when he visited the front. He brought with him enough ammunition for every soldier to fight for another month. And if the soldiers couldn’t afford the ammo, he was ready to offer a generous line of credit.

While it wouldn’t be accurate to call Bradford B. Jacobs a war profiteer, it wouldn’t be all that far off. While he never sold anything to the enemy, he did keep close at hand a German-English dictionary, “if the need should ever arise.”

During this time he also met the man who would become his right hand. Literally. For a brief period of time Bradford refused to touch anything with his right hand. This was due to a Chinese fortune cookie which Bradford very badly misinterpreted. Reggie Van Der Leek could always be found at the right of Jacobs ready to do anything from shake a hand to lift a fork. This made for some very interesting meals, but BBJ, as Van Der Leek referred to him, was so filthy rich that no one would say a word.

Reggie Van Der Leek eventually became an executive of Jacobs Colossal Studios. JCS had evolved from making pictures to making supplies for the military to making whatever else Bradford could make a few bucks on. Reggie worked very closely with Jacobs as the years went on.

Reggie Van Der Leek, interviewed from his West Texas rest home in 2006:

           Man whee-oh, that BBJ was weird. He insisted on calling everybody “Buck.” I was with him when he met the President and he said “watch it Buck, you’re blocking the buffet.” Hee, we all had a laugh. The President, he wasn’t so amused, but BBJ was more popular with the public so he had to shut up. I once saw a poll around 1948 or so that said that ol’ BBJ would win the Presidency if he ran, so that took the wind out of ol’ Buck’s sails a might.

            Yeah, the public loved BBJ. Of course, he gave them The Big Ape, an’ that woulda been enough for any man, but not ol’ BBJ. He personally came out every Thanksgiving an’ shot a turkey for a poor family. On February ninth it was the anniversary of some relative of his, some ol’ Civil War hero or something. He’d get up in this gray Confederate uniform an’ take out this ol’ rifle an’ take the whole crew down to his family’s ol’ home in Jacobs Landing, West Virginia or someplace. Bought the town presents. Every gol-darned person there got an autographed Big Ape glossy photo.

Reggie wasn’t exaggerating about “the whole crew.” Bradford surrounded himself with a  group of leeches and hangers-on that would make Elvis jealous. (When the two met in 1965, Elvis would profess his jealousy over Bradford’s crew in person.) Many of the people around Bradford had a legitimate business purpose. There were people whose sole job was to film his every move. There were other’s whose sole job was to film the people filming Bradford. There were still other’s whose sole job was to film the people were in the general area of Bradford while he was being filmed. This was not paranoia- in 1948 a crazed Big Ape fan tried to kill Bradford because he imagined that The Big Ape was ordering him to kill.

Other people around Bradford were there because they either amused Bradford, or Bradford thought they might amuse him in the future, or they had amused him in the past.

Bradford also became the host of Gravesend Radio Theater, hosting a series of spooky stories aired over WOR in New York. He didn’t need the money, he did it because he thought it would be fun. In fact, Bradford was motivated by only three things- money, fun, and money, in that order.

As the 1940s ended and the 1950s began, both Bradford B. Jacobs and The Big Ape were poised to make even bigger splashes.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART THREE: THE ADORING PUBLIC

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