[HN Gopher] Cartoon Network channel errors (1995 - 2025)
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Cartoon Network channel errors (1995 - 2025)
Author : Pikamander2
Score : 96 points
Date : 2025-12-22 09:01 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cnas.fandom.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cnas.fandom.com)
| pjerem wrote:
| But how ?
| BrentOzar wrote:
| And why?
|
| Sometimes it's just amazing to look at how much dedication
| someone put into a list like this, and wonder what they do with
| this information. It's inspiring (to me at least.)
|
| In a park near my hotel, there's an elderly gentleman who uses
| a giant brush to paint calligraphy on concrete walkways every
| morning. He paints it with water - so it gradually evaporates
| over the course of the next hour or so. I admire his work in
| the same way I admire this web page.
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| The table of events reminded me of an SCP article, except
| without any sort of buildup towards something supernatural.
| hulitu wrote:
| > And why?
|
| Exercise for Jira. /s
| gosub100 wrote:
| I am guessing someone who works at the station shared some
| internal documents.
|
| I remember in the mid 90s watching Nickelodeon before school
| and they played an entire 30m block of commercials instead of a
| program. They probably lost the tape or something.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I can imagine that it used to be valuable information for
| advertisers or respectively for the channel as preparation
| for advertisers complaints.
| smitelli wrote:
| There are definitely outside organizations whose sole
| responsibility is to monitor TV/radio broadcasts and
| nowadays even podcast sponsor breaks to ensure that ad copy
| is inserted as agreed. (Source: I was contracted to do some
| of that work for a time.)
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| If people are watching your work closely enough to document
| errors in it, and they care enough to make a wiki page, you're
| doing truly great work.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Preach.
|
| And now compare to modern endless stream of junk that flows
| into oblivion.
| cr125rider wrote:
| Yes exactly. And this is an incredibly short list. Great
| engineering over there.
| ekropotin wrote:
| To be fair, there is no way to know if the list is complete
| or not.
| crumpled wrote:
| It almost certainly isn't. Some TV engineers are
| discovering the list right now and biting their tongues.
| crumpled wrote:
| I completely agree.
|
| But as a person in charge of keeping a brand new (volunteer) FM
| station running smoothly, this is horrifying. I feel every
| technical problem physically in my body.
|
| It's not them, it's me.
| tt_dev wrote:
| Hats off to you sir
| haritha-j wrote:
| TIL that showing a screenbug on the screen was an absolute pain.
| Also TIL what a screenbug is.
| weinzierl wrote:
| TIL that a dog is a bug
| DoctorOW wrote:
| This is the rare opportunity I get to flex my broadcast
| experience. Generally these are setup in a chain:
| Playlists -> Playback -> Character Generator (draws the bugs,
| coming up next, and other graphics overtop), -> (other stuff)
| -> Network feed
|
| > _July 16, 2023: About 17 minutes into the 1:00pm airing of
| the Teen Titans Go! episode "And the Award for Sound Design
| Goes to Rob / Some of Their Parts", the feed blacked out for
| six seconds, then the screenbug disappeared for the rest of the
| episode. The screenbug returned during the 1:30pm airing of the
| episode "Cat's Fancy". _
|
| This sounds to me like the character generator failing and the
| playback being taken directly to air.
| mobilene wrote:
| I completely understand the kind of mind that would catalog such
| a thing.
|
| This wouldn't be my thing to catalog, but I'm glad somebody did
| it.
| ashleyn wrote:
| As a kid i remember being fascinated by technical difficulties
| screens, EAS tests, etc. Generally anything that unwittingly
| revealed the technical aspects of running a broadcast station.
| This was before we really knew how to use the internet even, so
| for many years, I'd wonder what a screen saying "No Access
| Card" or "Coriogen Eclipse" meant. When we learned about
| Google, it was suddenly a very educational experience to google
| these things and learn what was going on behind the scenes. I'm
| a software engineer today, but surely the nearest parallel
| universe version of me grew up to be a broadcast engineer.
| hn773746483 wrote:
| On Toronto's public transportation, TTC, occasionally the
| upcoming bus stop ticker would flash diagnostic
| information(?) and "64K RAM" instead of the upcoming stop
| name. Doesn't seem like there's a wiki page about these
| faults yet.
| zoky wrote:
| Actually, the Canadian government suppresses it because
| they just _really_ don't want anyone to know how to get to
| 64K RAM, ON.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| What would they be running them on that has so little
| memory these days? Esp32?
| butlike wrote:
| I think I get it too. There's a strange, hard-to-describe
| feeling there for me. It's like a "comfy, but darkly eerie"
| feeling whenever something like a broadcast technical
| difficulty or "Max Headroom"-esque event happens.
|
| Like, I'm sitting comfy watching TV, and there's some technical
| glitch that pulls back the curtain a little bit. It's
| interesting and not as irritating as a bug in say a website,
| because I'm still intrinsically doing the activity I was
| previously (watching television), I'm just now inexplicably
| watching a different broadcast.
|
| Who knows, it might be the dreamlike quality Cartoon
| Network/Toonami/Adult Swim had in the late 90s/early 2000s as
| well. The technical glitches fit thematically with the low-fi
| beats.
| nosrepa wrote:
| My favorite niche catalog is this list of chairs of star trek:
| https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/database/chairs-trek.htm
| kotaKat wrote:
| I'm suddenly reminded of a fairly large channel error from one of
| CN's competitors.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickelodeon_Games_and_Sports_f...
|
| When Nick GAS shut down, somehow, Dish Network had an automated
| loop of the channel that they themselves kept running for about
| 15 months after the channel's demise. I'm curious what systems at
| Dish Network were still running a ghost channel by itself like
| that. Did they just get delivered loops of programming to shove
| on the air from Nick directly and just leave it up? I would have
| figured Dish would have been getting a feed from Viacom that
| would have dropped at the same time as GAS itself.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I suppose it makes sense if your channel doesn't have a lot of
| new or live programming to just send a tape instead of setting
| up a feed.
|
| I always wondered about these types of channels back then, that
| had absolutely no original programming, and very few if any
| commercials. What was the plan with them? Were they just trying
| to keep brand familiarity? Was it so difficult to get a channel
| spot that they didn't want to lose it? But if so, why go
| through all the hassle to get the spot with no income stream?
| kotaKat wrote:
| Weirdly GAS was a popular channel back in the day but was
| offered only on higher tier cable packages (in my market, it
| required _Digital Cable_ , which meant hoping your parents
| were willing to splurge for the extra package, the digital
| box (or boxes)...). I assume the income stream was more being
| delivered from offering GAS as a 'premium' channel, then
| eventually it became an automated vehicle that just got
| lumped into a "bundle" of channels being sold to the cable
| companies (eg "Buy Nick for your customers and we'll throw in
| GAS and Jr") once they stopped providing actual live content
| for it circa 2004-2005.
| drunken_thor wrote:
| Knowing cable companies that was probably until all contracts
| with that channel as part of the subscription ended. They had
| to keep the channel running otherwise they might need to refund
| people.
| Dwedit wrote:
| You mean that channel that plays nothing but "Teen Titans Go"?
| dpifke wrote:
| As someone who has moderated online communities in the past, I
| recognize the value in having a page like this, to which you can
| point people if they want to enumerate such trifles instead of
| discussing the episodes or series themselves. Rather than just
| say such discussion is off-topic, you give them a separate, on-
| topic place to discuss it.
|
| (I don't actually know if that is how this page came about, but
| it seems similar to other wiki pages I've seen used for such a
| purpose.)
| puddnutz wrote:
| I worked for 10 years in broadcast, as a director, IT support,
| and an Engineer.
|
| I love picking errors out of any broadcast, especially with what
| I know now.
|
| Seeing things like this and other documented cases of broadcast
| errors always make me happy because I know how hard it is
| sometimes to be in that line of work and how easy it is to just
| make little blips here and there.
|
| Making errors is how I learned to never get between older people
| and their midday TV dramas. They absolutely know how to get a
| hold of you if they miss a few minutes of Young and Restless!
| SbEpUBz2 wrote:
| Broadcast errors are not only interesting to watch, they also
| made TV feel human and alive. Nowadays, watching most cable
| channels feels like staring at the output of a VLC playlist
| with ten movies on loop.
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(page generated 2025-12-22 23:01 UTC)