Captain Midnight evades the FCC in low-speed chase (video)

Okay, so there was this movie called On the Air Live with Captain Midnight. Maybe you remember it. It was played a lot in the early 1980s on USA's "Night Flight" weekend program. The basic plot: high school dropout starts a pirate radio station in his van, evades "Uncle Charlie" (the FCC). That's pretty much all you need to know. It's not exactly Dostoevsky here.

So in the middle of the movie there's this really weird scene where the pirate radio guy is lying to his parents about his having a legitimate job at a real radio station. And to call his bluff, his mom asks him to play her a song the next time he's on the air. Meanwhile, an FCC agent (played with some really weird line-readings by the late great John Ireland) is roaming around town, trying to locate his transmitter to shut him down.

This leads to the following scene, where Captain Midnight is driving really slowly around a parking lot, with the FCC on his tail. (Naturally, they bugged Uncle Charlie's car, so they know exactly where he is at all times.) So here you've got a pirate radio station guy playing some easy listening music for his mom, while they're being slowly chased by the FCC, and all of this causes the pirate station's engineer to have what can only be described as a huge spazz fit. (For maximum effect, please watch this video late at night.)

Comments

[K]

Boy, that's some serious vintage Tektronix gear in John Irelands ride. WTF is it, a curve tracer? Also, a scope with a broken timebase isn't gonna help our hero track the bad guys. But a simple signal strength meter as what Ireland was wielding would indeed have located his bug, sans geiger counter noises.

For what it's worth, the real FCC uses three vans to triangulate on you...

[Tim]

Haha great!

The plot sounds very similar to Christian Slater's Pump Up the Volume: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100436/

[chuckheston]

Radio Free Steve, the 1999 unintentional remake?
http://www.radiofreesteve.com/

[You]

In the CB days, people "running power" (illegal levels) were paranoid about those FCC vans. One could consider using a mobile studio, on wheels, and broadcasting randomly. However, some of the pirates would infringe upon AM stations, not a good idea.