Episode 449: Good Evening From Captain Midnight

What the HELL Were You Thinking?

Show Notes Episode 449: “Good Evening From Captain Midnight”

This week Host Dave Bledsoe was found trapped on the 8th floor fire escape of his building after drunkenly trying to install an illegal cable hook up.(Which is odd since he doesn’t own a TV, but again, he was drunk at the time.) On the show this week we travel back to the golden age of satellite dishes when millions of Americans had a big ass dish in the front of their trailer homes.

Along the way we discover that Dave’s parents TRIED to teach him valuable skills as a child but he just wanted to become a podcaster. (He CLAIMS he was very ahead of his time!) Then we dive into a brief history of all the ways one could get a television signal into your home. (Many of them are kind of illegal) Then we take you to the brief heyday of free pay cable channels if you had a couple of thousand dollars for a satellite dish. (A surprising number of people went for it!) Finally we explain how HBO ruined it for everyone and what one man would do in the name of justice. (Briefly interrupt HBO’s signal in the middle of the night.)

Our sponsor this week is Mega Dish, because bigger is BETTER! We open the show with news coverage of Captain Midnight and close with Luca Carpenter’s space obsession..

Show Theme: Hypnostate Prelude to Common Sense

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Closing Music:https://youtu.be/5s1pGVCawKs?si=PMo4aYojvt7EEeWn&t=8

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Citations Needed:

Wikipedia Telstar Sattelites

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar#:~:text=Telstar%201%20launched%20on%20top,was%20launched%20May%207%2C%201963.

Deep Dish: For a short period in the early 1980s, giant satellite dishes ruled the land.

https://tedium.co/2015/08/27/early-satellite-dish-history/

TUNING INTO SATELLITE TV

https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/14/business/tuning-into-satellite-tv.html

SATELLITE DISHES SURVIVE GREAT SCRAMBLE OF 1980S

https://web.archive.org/web/20171007120130/https://www.deseretnews.com/article/81378/SATELLITE-DISHES-SURVIVE-GREAT-SCRAMBLE-OF-1980S.html?pg=all

Signal to Noise dot net archive: The Story of Captain Midnight

https://archive.robertianhawdon.me.uk/sites/~ian/pages/signal_hijacking/captain_midnight_hbo/

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