Bah, we had the “parental control box” which could have been easily picked with a bobby pin, but the 'rents did such a poor job of hiding the key, and the porn on vhs they got from a friend who had satellite, it didn’t really matter in the least.
When you’re raising four boys, protection means zilch.
My favorite phrase of Eucker’s that I use all the time and yet nobody else seems to recall it: “I must be in the front row!”
JFC that’s one of my favorite ads ever. I must be in the front roooooowwwwww…
I remember OnTV. I used to try to watch Blackhawks games on there. Maybe that’s why my eyes are so bad now…
Dammit, can’t believe I’m now “of a certain age”.
Meh. Quatre Saisons was part of the basic cable package hereabouts…
Could have been worse: you could have been watching the Dead Things or the Maple Laffs. Back then, those would have strained anyone’s eyes, scrambled or not.
While I am certainly old enough to remember scrambled video, what I don’t remember is ever trying to videotape the scrambled signal. How did this survive?
There were probably several people wanting to videotape the scrambled signal, for various reasons.
Well, that’s how you end up with four boys in the first place.
I did, and the signals were well scrambled, but with the right combination of TV settings and cable box settings, I could get clear sound and messed-up hold on the video.
Oh yeah. The horizontal hold! I haven’t heard that term in years. Now I remember desperately tweaking that little knob that protruded through a hole in the back of the set trying to see if it could override the scrambling. I probably convinced myself that it did.
Sucks to be someone 30 years behind. If you haven’t seen it by now you aren’t going to get around to it.
Oh, bet on the Royals in the '85 World Series!
He bet against them two years ago 
To this day, I say that whenever I can pull into the first space in a parking lot. I get a similar response.
Maybe we should carpool.
I remember those days. As a young tinkerer I was able to figure out how to move the dial just right on those old manual cable boxes to get the premium channels to unscramble. After enough time doing this, I think I wore down the detenting mechanism enough to make it really easy to manipulate pretty reliably.
I never really looked into why it worked, but I have a feeling that in these old manual dial analog cable boxes it was more a matter of each channel being tuned a specific way within the box itself (which of course was sealed shut with no visible screws) so the scrambling was actually the channel being enough out of phase so that the picture was mangled. By messing with the dial I could get it in phase enough that the picture would be clear.
From a sexual fairness and equality stance, that scene should have included a bit more Judge Reinhold penis.
Since nobody’s said it… This was on Boing Boing a few years ago!
When I was growing up it was like commenters above said: Squiggly video but normal colours and unscrambled audio.
It was fun listening to some movies before we actually subscribed to the channels and I could watch them.
In the house I grew up in, the smut was kept in a locked briefcase.
A three-digit combination lock can be cracked in a very short time if you’re sufficiently motivated.
Huh so it was
Because you’re using it wrong. The first (nearest to the entrance) space is the “front row.” The Uecker gag is that he is getting kicked out to a much worse seat, but is blithely delusional about it.
Don’t know for sure, but it looks like an inverted video signal, with an out-of-band control signal to enable/disable a video switch that would occasionally bypass the inverter. Without the enable/disable switch, it would have been too easy to steal the signal by just inserting an inverting amplifier in the TV baseband.
There was also an over-the-air pay channel in Chicago in the 80’s broadcast on UHF channel 44. They inserted a ~22 kHz sine wave in baseband channel that was just off the vertical sync pulse. I remember a pirate design that used a PLL to recover the jamming signal so you could beat it against the jammed signal and recover the unjammed video. Eventually, they also added a control signal to enable/disable the descrambling boxes because so many people had pirate decoders. I also remember that the local electronics store curiously had a 4’x2’ section of their display wall with just the right parts to build your own pirate descrambler. I guess they got tired of leading people on tours around the store to collect the parts.
