The Cartoon That Shut Down Boston

If you’ve ever been stuck in traffic on a highway, you know how frustrating it can be. But imagine being stuck because the police have closed the road — not for an accident or construction, but because they think there might be a bomb nearby.

But that’s not what happened in Boston on January 31, 2007. It wasn’t an accident, construction, or a bomb. It was an alien invasion. Officials only thought it was a bomb.

Well, kind of. Let’s start with a photo.

That image, via Boston.com, shows the underside of an overhang somewhere in downtown Boston from January 15, 2007, two weeks before everything went nuts. As you can see, there’s a glowing something-or-other positioned below the elevated roadway, seemingly hovering in midair. And no, that wasn’t supposed to be there, at least according to Boston officials. For days, no one noticed. But when someone did and called the authorities, panic set in.

The attacks of 9/11 were still somewhat fresh in the minds of the public and more so for law enforcement. And when a report about the above came in, the Boston PD went into high alert. As Boston-dot-com noted in the above-linked story, Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis — in an internal memo — noted that “throughout the day, the department was tracking several suspicious reports from across the city, nation, and world. [ . . . ] There were also reports of several terror suspects arrested in Britain, a suspicious package in the Washington D.C. Metro, and, at around 1 p.m., a call from Boston Medical Center about a pipe bomb, allegedly left by a man who proclaimed ‘God is warning you that today is going to be a sad day,’ before leaving the scene.”

The Boston PD did not take any chances. Police swarmed the scene. Parts of Interstate 93 — the main highway in the area — were shut down, as were parts of Boston’s subway system. Marine traffic on the Charles River into Boston Harbor was blocked. Helicopters circled the area. The bomb squad came into disarm the device before anyone got hurt.

And then, as CBS Boston reported, the terrifying discovery turned out to be “nothing more than a guerrilla marketing campaign” — specifically, a promotion for an upcoming movie based on the Adult Swim cartoon “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”

The devices in question were about three dozen 18-inch square LED signs depicting a “Mooninite,” one of the show’s recurring characters. The Mooninites are pixelated alien creatures who, in their cartoon form, antagonize the show’s main characters — a talking milkshake, a floating box of fries, and a meatball. The signs were placed by two artists, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, as part of a marketing campaign. The plan was simple: put up quirky, glowing signs in urban areas to generate buzz for the film among the show’s young, internet-savvy fanbase. The signs had been up for two to three weeks before anyone else noticed them — and they’d been placed in nine other cities, including Austin, Los Angeles, and New York, without incident.

As NPR reported, the incident exposed a generational divide. Younger adults who recognized the cartoon character thought the police response was absurd. Authorities, though, weren’t as amused, to say the least — and had the “perpetrators” arrested. The two men were charged with placing a hoax device and disorderly conduct, though even the judge seemed skeptical that they intended to cause panic. They eventually pleaded not guilty but agreed to perform community service and issue a public apology. Turner Broadcasting, the parent company of Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, also apologized and agreed to cover the cost of the investigation, which totaled about $2 million.

The marketing campaign worked, though. As for the signs themselves, some ended up on eBay, reportedly selling for thousands of dollars. And fans of the show, embracing the absurdity, started selling T-shirts. One popular design shows a Mooninite with the saying “Never Forget 1-31-2007,” and another declares that “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” was, indeed, “the bomb.” As for the movie itself, well, it, too, kind of bombed — it grossed about $5.5 million on a $750,000 budget, but that doesn’t include the $2 million in fines.

Bonus fact: In 2013, Adult Swim canceled a show called Metalocalypse after four seasons, despite promises from showrunners that the fifth season would be the final one and tie up loose ends. The showrunners tried to get fans to start a write-in campaign, urging Adult Swim execs to keep the show going. The TV network executives came up with a unique and snarky response, as The Wrap recounted:

Adult Swim, with its typical trolling attitude, has struck back. They have put up a petition form promising to add their signature to the Change.org petition to bring back the show if they get enough signatures. The catch? The form asks for at least 125 words why the show should be brought back and has to be faxed to the network’s offices, with the note that “Adult Swim’s endorsement of this petition — in no way whatsoever — will bring back ‘Metalocalypse’”. The site has even put up a live stream of their fax machine receiving petitions and throwing them into a bin.

The show never came back.

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