January 31, 2007. A guerilla marketing campaign for an upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force turns into a Boston bomb scare. I watched it happen.
From February of 2003 through August of 2009, I was the midday host at Boston’s legendary WBCN. So I was on-air as this situation started playing out. Right around 2 p.m., as I was yielding the studio to the Toucher & Rich show, Fred Toucher and I noticed the news was reporting a number of unidentified electronic devices in and around the Boston area.
The news showed one: it was a Lite-Brite rendition of a Mooninite, one of the character’s from Adult Swim’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force TV show. Fred and I knew this. Rich also knew this. Unfortunately, no one in the local or national news world or on the BPD seemed to know this. So all hell broke loose, despite our best efforts at BCN to spread the word.
Remembering the Mooninite Boston Bomb Scare
Every year, on January 31st, that Mooninite Lite-Brite image makes the rounds. And every year, we all have a laugh at the utter ridiculousness of it all. The panic. The ineptitude. Of course, that’s all coming from the perspective of someone who wasn’t necessarily in on the joke, but was in the know as to why it was a joke.
Fittingly, just last week, Adult Swim announced the return of Aqua Teen Hunger Force for a 12th season. Frylock, Master Shake, and Meatwad will all be back and voiced by the voice actors who brought them all to life for the first time back in 2000: Dave Willis, Dana Snyder, and Carey Means. You can read more about that here. Keep scrolling to relive the comedy and the horror of the Mooninite Invasion of Boston on January 31, 2007. Different times. More innocent times. Kind of. But not really.