LUCKY SEVEN: SYRACUSE’S PIRATE TELEVISION STATION (1978)

LUCKY SEVEN (1978) – Years before the hacker calling himself Captain Midnight hijacked HBO airtime to protest their high prices and years before the weird Max Headroom parody hack in Chicago came this forgotten incident in the annals of pirate broadcasting.

As many people know, pirate radio stations were often able to operate for months or even years before getting shut down, but pirate television broadcasting was limited to random hacks of a few minutes tops. The exception was Lucky 7, a rogue outfit that operated on the (then) unused frequency for what would have been Channel Seven in Syracuse, New York.

The host for Lucky 7 was a memorable man wearing a gas mask on his face like he was some kind of late-night Horror Host. This figure would introduce the programs and movies being shown on the channel and would also editorialize about the way corporations and the government held a monopoly on the airwaves. 

Not content to merely hack into other television broadcasts for a few minutes the rebels at Lucky 7, who called themselves the Renegade Broadcasting Company, were seen on thousands of tv screens in Upstate New York for roughly eight hours per night. 8 or 10 PM to 4 or 6 AM are often claimed.

Lucky 7 was on the air for one legendary weekend in 1978 – Friday April 14th, Saturday April 15th and Sunday April 16th – from sundown to the wee hours of the next morning. Twenty-five total hours. The fare presented by the video pirates included episodes of Star Trek, The Prisoner, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and The Twilight Zone.

The television episodes were commercial-free, of course, as were the motion pictures aired on the pirate station. Rocky, Annie Hall, The Birds, Steve Martin in Concert and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest are the ones most often cited, but Lucky 7 also snuck in some adult films like Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door and The Devil in Miss Jones.

Only fragments of Lucky 7’s offerings have survived, and those are only brief excerpts from televised news reports of the time, so we’ll never know for sure what all of the Renegade Broadcasting Company’s programming consisted of. 

The rogue channel’s logo was a pair of dice coming up 7 (a 3 on one and a 4 on the other) and that logo was accompanied by a female choir singing Lucky 7’s theme song. The incident made the local and national news, with the FCC threatening fines and jail time when the perpetrators were found.

BALLADEER’S BLOG

To this date they’ve never been found, adding to the mystique of the entire enterprise. Assorted tales are told by people who worked in New York broadcasting at the time about the supposed identity of the culprits.

Anywhere from two to twenty-five students in Syracuse University’s School of Communications are said to have been involved, since the area around the university was where the broadcasts were strongest. Similarly, the choir that sang the Lucky 7 theme song were alleged to be students from Syracuse U’s Crouse Music School.   

The third night of the outlaw station’s programming was the most widely watched. Even though that Sunday night into Monday morning block ended with the host claiming Lucky 7 would be back it never made another appearance.

One of the news reports over the years quoted an unnamed member of the group behind the Renegade Broadcasting Company as saying that they were stunned by the huge public reaction and the nationwide news coverage. They decided to quit while they were ahead rather than risk jail time, thousands of dollars in fines AND the possibility of being blackballed from the broadcasting profession they attended college in hopes of joining.

Thus ended a genuinely daring experiment in television broadcasting. Here in 2025 the saga of Lucky 7 can’t help but make us grateful for the way that the internet has democratized information and entertainment. We can all run our blogs, podcasts or online video channels without the need for elaborate electrical equipment like the pirate broadcasters of the past.