The SMJ Studios Incident

I'm pretty sure most of us are familiar with alleged broadcast interruptions that have happened by hackers. These interruptions showed emergency action notifications or warnings to let us know about something bad about to happen. Then there were those "mysterious" ones that displayed subliminal messages, creepy noises and sometimes even disturbing imagery. One of the best-known incidents with interruption of broadcast took place at SMJ Studios, the company known for making Slimey & SMJ4. This interruption was said to have taken a whole different turn.

The incident occurred on December 18, 2005 while an episode of Slimey & SMJ4 was on commercial break. Right around the end of what appeared to have been a commercial advertising Froot Loops, the screen would cut to black for ten seconds until it popped up a color bar background with text in front of it that read:

"Greetings, people of the world. Prepare to feel free. Signed, an anonymous SMJ employee."

This message stays on the screen for a good eight seconds before cutting to black briefly and begins displaying what could've been intended to induce nightmares. The screen flashed images of extreme closeups of people's faces, which seemed to give off evil terrifying looks. Sometimes the screen would even flash with clips that depicted war, crime scenes, beatings and car crashes that were just too scary to even look at. What was even more strange was that the majority of the hack showed red numbers that were continuous as they moved different directions while occasionally interrupted by the dark imagery displayed on-screen. This went on for about two and a half minutes before ending with ten seconds of the face of a character known as "The Real SMJ4.blend1" embedded on a black background, giving off an evil smile before it showed a five-second message that read:

"Freedom is what always works."

The hack ends by cutting to the next half of the current Slimey & SMJ4 episode playing. Viewers who came across this hack reported of having nightmares just looking at the interruption while also claiming that the numbers found could have been forming a symbol. It was revealed that the hacker was revealed to be a person who never actually worked at SMJ Studios. The police even managed to uncover the secret behind the moving numbers on the hack. Zooming it out revealed what appeared to be a crudely-drawn letter A inside a circle. What those messages in the hack meant was that this man was trying to promote the most horrible crime anyone has ever known - ANARCHY. The hacker was arrested and sentenced to life in prison for taking such actions and promoting anarchism.

To this day, this hack has remained as nightmares for the SMJ Studios team, possibly even more so than the alleged Slimey & SMJ4 adult cartoon special...