Who is the max headroom pirate

Chicago television has a rich and colorful history. But few moments are quite as colorful—or bizarre—as the incident that happened to this very station in It was Nov. Indeed, toward the end of the second signal, the imposter exposed his bare bottom to an accomplice who spanked him with a fly swatter. The next morning, WTTW engineers tried to figure out what had happened, and how.

WTTW broadcast engineer Al Skierkiewicz said they knew the culprit had to be someone with pretty sophisticated technical knowledge. So, was there one killer hawk, multiple hawks, or none at all? Suddenly, the picture cut out and a man in a Max Headroom rubber mask appeared on screen.

For almost two full minutes, this entity controlled the WTTW airwaves. Hijacking a television transmission is no easy feat. It takes a lot of technical knowledge combined with highly specialized equipment and an immense power source.

Instead, the surviving footage suggests that once the signal was hijacked, Max largely improvised — including pulling down his pants to expose his posterior so a woman could spank him with a flyswatter. The FCC opened an investigation — pirating television signals was a pretty serious offense — but they were confident the man behind the mask could be identified and brought to justice.

That never happened. In , journalist Pam Zekman and her colleagues kept receiving complaints from small business owners that city inspectors were demanding bribes either to facilitate permits or to ignore code violations. So Zekman pitched an idea to her editor at the Chicago Sun-Times.

If they wanted to break this story, they needed to catch the corrupt inspectors in the act. Zekman and investigator Bill Recktenwald of the Better Government Association assumed the identities of Pam and Ray Patterson, a married couple looking to buy a bar. They did some renovations and opened for business under a new name: The Mirage Tavern. Right away, everyday corruption appeared.

This is the Tribune's original report about the prankster, who has never been identified. An off-color skit starring a bare-bottomed imitator of television character Max Headroom showed up on Chicago-area TV screens Sunday night, evidently the work of a sophisticated video pirate with an unsophisticated sense of humor.

Officials of the Federal Communications Commission were not amused as they searched Monday for clues to the identity of the pirate, who somehow managed to override the signals of two television stations in two hours. Who" at p. Two hours earlier, the "Max" character made an unauthorized second appearance in the middle of a newscast on WGN Channel 9 , but was zapped by an alert engineer before the imposter could do anything offensive.

Television engineers speculated that the stations had been victimized by a practical joker with an expensive transmitter. They said it would take extremely high-powered equipment to squeeze out the microwave signals that carry the programs from the stations' Northwest Side studios to downtown skyscrapers, where they are retransmitted to television sets throughout the Chicago area.

A character wearing a Max Headroom mask gyrated for almost half a minute but did not make audible sounds. Strutzel said an engineer quickly changed the frequency of the signal that was transmitting the news show to the Hancock building, thus breaking the lock established by the video pirate.

Sports reporter Dan Rohn apologized for the interference and continued the sports report.