A pretty esoteric topic, I grant you. But the other day, I pulled out a dusty old VHS tape with some episodes of the mid-80's anthology series Amazing Stories.
One story featured a whiz-kid high school guy who builds a super-duper TV antenna for a school project. He and his friends are amazed at the reception he gets (as far as China on the first try), but the best is yet to come. He eventually picks up TV from some distant alien civilization that has apparently been monitoring our old 1950's TV shows, and do their own copies of I Love Lucy, Burns and Allen, etc. The aliens decide to visit Earth to meet their TV idols, and hijinks ensue. (They even meet Milton Berle, and try to get him to go back to their planet with them.)
Yeah, it's a silly premise, but mildly amusing. (Best line is when the aliens are depressed, and one of the kids asks what's wrong with them. "Oh, they've been inconsolable ever since we told them that Lucy and Desi split up...") And, of course, it's rife with inaccuracies of physics, RF propagation, and time. But it's fun.
So, what other TV shows or movies incorporated some sort of weird or unusual TV reception as a part of the plot? Only one that immediately comes to mind is "Poltergeist" (the little girl communicating with the spooks via the "snow" on the TV set). Of course, an example of unusual radio reception might be the 1950 film "The Next Voice You Hear," in which God begins communicating to the world through their radio sets. (I guess TV was too new to also have God overriding Uncle Miltie or something. I've often wondered why that plot was never remade for the modern era; e.g., God overriding radio, TV, internet, cellphones, etc. to deliver a message to the world. They've remade just about every other old movie and TV show; I guess they just haven't gotten around to this one yet...)
One story featured a whiz-kid high school guy who builds a super-duper TV antenna for a school project. He and his friends are amazed at the reception he gets (as far as China on the first try), but the best is yet to come. He eventually picks up TV from some distant alien civilization that has apparently been monitoring our old 1950's TV shows, and do their own copies of I Love Lucy, Burns and Allen, etc. The aliens decide to visit Earth to meet their TV idols, and hijinks ensue. (They even meet Milton Berle, and try to get him to go back to their planet with them.)
Yeah, it's a silly premise, but mildly amusing. (Best line is when the aliens are depressed, and one of the kids asks what's wrong with them. "Oh, they've been inconsolable ever since we told them that Lucy and Desi split up...") And, of course, it's rife with inaccuracies of physics, RF propagation, and time. But it's fun.
So, what other TV shows or movies incorporated some sort of weird or unusual TV reception as a part of the plot? Only one that immediately comes to mind is "Poltergeist" (the little girl communicating with the spooks via the "snow" on the TV set). Of course, an example of unusual radio reception might be the 1950 film "The Next Voice You Hear," in which God begins communicating to the world through their radio sets. (I guess TV was too new to also have God overriding Uncle Miltie or something. I've often wondered why that plot was never remade for the modern era; e.g., God overriding radio, TV, internet, cellphones, etc. to deliver a message to the world. They've remade just about every other old movie and TV show; I guess they just haven't gotten around to this one yet...)