The Time ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force’ Shut Down Boston

The Big Picture

• Aqua Teen Hunger Force‘s twelfth season is now streaming on Max, marking the show’s first full new season since 2015.
• In 2007, a marketing campaign featuring the show’s Mooninite characters caused a panic in Boston and briefly shut down the city.
• Boston officials blamed the Cartoon Network and their parent company, Turner Broadcasting System, and TBS eventually settled for $2 million and issued apologies.

The twelfth season of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the iconic cartoon about a trio of fast food mascots living in New Jersey, has just begun streaming on Max. The show originally aired as part of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim program block and was an omnipresent part of the culture for much of the 2000s, but this is the first full new season since 2015.

However, Aqua Teen has always been more than just a TV show. A series of YouTube shorts entitled Aquadonk Side Pieces was uploaded to the Adult Swim channel in 2022, the same year as the direct-to-video feature, Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm. Yet, certainly, the show’s most memorable piece of ancillary content is the “Boston Mooninite Panic,” an actual historical event in which an Aqua Teen Hunger Force guerrilla marketing campaign accidentally touched off a law enforcement crisis and briefly shut down the city of Boston.

Who are the Mooninites, and Why Do They Hate Boston?

To understand what happened, you first need to understand the Mooninites, Ignignokt and Err (voiced by series creators Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro). The pair were introduced as antagonists in the show’s fourth episode. At this early point in Aqua Teen, the show was still going through the motions of its original concept, and the show’s main characters Frylock, Master Shake, and Meatwad – an anthropomorphic order of french fries, milkshake, and uncooked meatball – were also detectives for hire. (The show would soon abandon this idea and become a show where every plot was a series of random, funny non-sequiturs.) The Mooninites were alien visitors from the moon. Space tourists with nothing but contempt for Earth and her inhabitants, the pair show up now and then to run some scam. Usually, it involves tempting the sweet and innocent Meatwad to rebel against authority, commit crimes, and smoke cigarettes.

The Mooninites character design is based on the enemies from the primitive arcade game Space Invaders. Their bodies and faces are made of blocky pixels, and they’re two-dimensional. Ignignokt, the leader, is large and green, and Err, the sidekick, is small and pink. Their differing personalities are marked by their eyebrows. Ignignokt, a pathological liar who projects a false confidence, has eyebrows four pixels long, innocently arching up. Err, a hostile, insult-spewing monster, has eyebrows five pixels long, pinched in a perpetual scowl. A typical “Mooninite episode” of Aqua Teen ends with the pair’s scam being thwarted, and the two of them scurrying back to the moon in their spaceship. At this point, the Mooninites will furiously give the Earth the finger, which is represented as a long line of pixels. Their middle fingers get many pixels longer when they’re extra mad.

Everything that Aqua Teen Hunger Force stands for – selfish, rebellious, anarchy – the Mooninites stand for, times a thousand. So you can see why, when Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters was released, in 2007, Ignignokt and Err would make excellent advertising mascots. That was the thought had by Interference, Inc, a marketing company hired by Cartoon Network to build word of mouth. Because the Mooninites design was simple and blocky, it could be faithfully replicated on the glowing pegs of a LiteBrite. And so, dozens of simple glowing Mooninite signs were created on makeshift pseudo-LiteBrites, and distributed to locally hired contractors in ten American cities. The magnetic signs depicted Ignignokt and Err flipping the bird and were to be planted in heavily visible areas, surreptitiously, overnight, to create a sense of mystery. This guerrilla marketing scheme worked as planned, by and large. But it went off the rails in Boston.

How did the ‘Mooninite Panic’ Get Started?

In Boston, Interference, Inc. hired a local artist, Peter Berdovsky, to set up the light-up signs around Boston. Berdovsky hired his friend Sean Stevens, and both were paid $300. A third friend filmed the two of them affixing the signs onto metal surfaces. They posted the video a few years later, and it’s pretty cool footage. You don’t get too many chances to watch two men skulk across empty city streets hanging cartoon nightlights at the end of a long wooden hook. It was the night before January 31, 2007.

One of the signs, which was powered by a visible series of D-Batteries held in place by electrical tape, was hung on a supporting stanchion for Interstate 93 where the highway passed over the street. The morning after, that placement caused a passerby to worry that the mysterious sign might be a bomb designed to collapse the highway. A series of calls led the Boston Police Department bomb squad to arrive, and eventually, the street was a full circus of fire trucks, helicopters, and news vans. The highway was shut down as a precaution. The bomb squad disabled the sign, but would not describe it to the press – leaving open the possibility that it might have been a bomb. The highway was reopened at 10 AM that morning.

The caution and confusion of that moment are understandable. It was 2007, a time and an atmosphere that Boston city officials later described as “post-9/11.” The historical period that Americans were calling “The War on Terror” was still ongoing. George W. Bush was President of the United States, American troops still occupied Iraq, and Osama bin Laden was still at large. On the other hand, six years had passed since 9/11 — enough time that the memory of the attack was beginning to blend with the countless representations and reflections of the event in TV and movies. These included depictions of terrorism that attempted to be “realistic,” but also movies like 28 Days Later and Vanilla Sky that were felt to distort 9/11 through a fantastical genre filter. So, while it might seem obvious in hindsight that a terrorist attack would probably not have a cartoon alien mascot, it’s possible to understand the confusion.

However, events in Boston got even more out of hand. After the first Mooninite sign was destroyed, I-93 was reopened. But as a result of the press the first sign had received, the police began to receive anxious calls about the numerous other Mooninite signs planted across the city, on storefronts, bridges, and subway platforms. Though the original sign was clearly not an explosive device, the city still proceeded as if the others might be. Two bridges were shut down, and the coast guard shut down boat traffic on the Charles River. It wasn’t until 3:00 pm that day that someone finally recognized the characters on the signs from Aqua Teen Hunger Force (or, more cynically, that one of the many people who recognized the Mooninites finally said something to their superior.) By the time the Mooninite signs were verified to be nothing more than a marketing stunt, the city’s panicked reaction had become a nationwide spectacle.

What Was the Aftermath of the ‘Mooninite Panic’?

No one was harmed as a result of Boston’s reaction to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force marketing campaign. But the city of Boston was pretty embarrassed, especially since none of the other cities in which the same campaign was employed reacted in this way. Rather than laugh off the event, or take responsibility for the overreaction, Boston officials blamed the Cartoon Network, and their parent company, Turner Broadcasting System, insisting that they should have been able to foresee the panic their campaign would cause. Officials insisted on calling the marketing campaign a “hoax” despite the fact that the panic caused was unintentional.

Boston mayor Tom Menino vowed to sue TBS, and eventually, TBS agreed to pay a $2 million settlement, which was divided between the Boston Police and the Department of Homeland Security. Turner and Interference Inc. issued apologies, and Jim Samples, the executive vice-president who oversaw the Cartoon Network, resigned, citing “the gravity of the situation that occurred” in his resignation letter. A parody episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, titled “Boston,” was produced, but Cartoon Network backed out of airing it. (It eventually leaked online.)

Berdovsky and Stevens were the only people jailed for their role in the chaos, under a War on Terror-era statute that made it a crime to intentionally create panic through a terrorist hoax. As the two were nothing but hired hands, and did not have any criminal intention, this does seem pretty outrageous. However, it has a certain amount of symmetry, as the Mooninite saga began with Meatwad getting arrested as a result of a Mooninite scheme. Like Meatwad, the pair spent a night in jail. And, in a press conference during which the pair talked goofily about their haircuts (because their lawyer had told them not to talk about the case), Berdovsky and Stevens displayed a Meatwad-like innocence. The two would be sentenced to community service. A few years later, the city hired Berdovsky to create a New Year’s Eve electronic show, as a sign of truce.

The “Mooninite Panic” of 2007 seems like a relic of the past. It’s hard to imagine anyone calling the cops on the Mooninites today. (No one freaks out when the Minions pull one of their many marketing stunts!) But, the police still react strangely to non-existent dangers. So does the government. What begins as a somewhat reasonable “abundance of caution” gives way to a hallucinatory performance of what is known as “security theater.” Fans of the show, and supporters of Berdovsky and Stevens, introduced the phrase “1-31-07. Never Forget.” A joke, but not really.

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