Aliens Steal Cable



""We have long studied your puny Terran broadcasts and analysed every detail of your primitive speech. Now, take me to your leader. Take me to ... Tinky Winky.""

- Dave Langford, SFX

""Hey! I'm on Earth! Oh...but it's nothing like on TV.""

- M'gann, Young Justice

For about a hundred of our Earth years, our planet has been a noisy little mudball when it comes to radio signals. A very common plot amongst science fiction authors is to depict aliens as having made contact with Earth culture via stray TV broadcasts.

One bit of science that these writers surprisingly get right consistently is that radio signals propagate at light speed. Given that on TV distances are conveniently measured in light years, it's an easy conversion formula: aliens 50 light-years from Earth are just now getting TV signals sent in the late 1960s, thus the visitor that shows up, having skipped the intervening distance via Faster-Than-Light Travel, will talk and dress like a flower child in an attempt to fit in. Hilarity Ensues, or it provides a vital clue to the protagonist that something isn't quite right about this guy.

There are some major technical problems with this concept, but most writers will ignore them. The fact that we have not been receiving any of their transmissions if they have radio technology is also a cause of Fridge Logic. Maybe they all read books on their planet. (An actual, more valid scientific theory is they've developed a different form of communication that doesn't depend on radio broadcasts, and all of their surviving transmissions from when they did have already passed us by. Yet another theory is that radio emissions from stars drown out all of the artificial signals.)

Regardless, misunderstandings and misinterpretations about Earth culture and human behavior from tiny snippets of old sitcoms are comedy gold especially if it means they expect earth to be like that, if they learn their English from it it justifies Aliens Speaking English and so the concept keeps coming back up. Compare Alien Arts Are Appreciated.

Anime and Manga

 * A major plot point in Super Dimension Fortress Macross, starting with the Miss Macross pageant and culminating in the battle against the Bodolza fleet. It neatly sidesteps the distance and signal strength issues by having the transmission come from the titular ship, and the Zentradi warships chasing it are (in astronomical distances) a stone's throw away.
 * In the Sentai anime Shinesman, the ditzy female villain once asks about the heroes, but she's got the completely wrong idea about them. A nearby mook admits, when a smarter villain asks, that they didn't have enough footage of the actual heroes so they had to fill in the blanks in their report with examples from a sentai tv-series.
 * The Keronians from Keroro Gunsou seem to be well-acquainted with Earth culture. In an early chapter of the manga, Natsumi is surprised when Keroro takes offense to being compared to Q-taro the Ghost (Slimer in the Tokyopop translation): "How dare you compare me to that overeating ectoplasmic idiot?!"
 * Evidently, Pekopon (Earth) is an entertainment Mecca and produces most of the galaxy's highest rated TV shows.
 * In Haiyore! Nyaruko-san, Earth entertainment is popular amongst aliens.

Comic Books

 * Book four of 2000AD's Nemesis the Warlock is set in the Gothic Empire, populated by a race of shapeshifting aliens who received the first large scale radio transmissions of the 1920's. They promptly based their society on what they thought was Earth's pre-1914 Golden Age, particularly on Victorian society and the British Empire (even with their own version of Jack the Ripper).
 * This trope is a part of the origin of The Savage Dragon. He was
 * In the X-Men books, the residents of the Mojoverse have had their dreams bombarded with TV transmissions from Earth for thousands of their years (time works differently in their dimension). Sort of like the Star Trek Iotians, this exposure turned them into a Dimension of Hats organized around emulation of television, to the point that their Dimension Lord is whichever network executive has the best ratings.

Newspaper Comics

 * Ziggy at least twice had aliens show up referencing Star Trek: one set who, like the Thermians from Galaxy Quest, didn't realize it was fiction and wanted to join the Federation ("Take us to Captain Kirk!"), and a couple of others who decided to complain to Ziggy about how silly the plots were getting "lately."

Film
"David Drumlin: ...'36 Olympics was the first television transmission of any power that went in to space. That they recorded it, and sent it back, is simply a way of saying "hello, we heard you." Michael Kitz: Or, ", you're our kind of people.""
 * Spaced Invaders has Martians hearing Orson Welles' famous reading of The War of the Worlds and thinking that the rest of the army is on earth, so they go to find them.
 * Explorers.
 * The Thermians in Galaxy Quest take the fictional events of old television shows seriously, calling them "historical documents." Besides thinking that the main characters really are space explorers (as opposed to the actors who played them), they weep for "those poor people" stranded on Gilligan's Island. Justified, although not without some Fridge Logic, by the fact that it is explained that the Thermians have no concept of acting, or even pretending (they were only recently introduced to the concept of deception).
 * In Contact, the extraterrestrials in the Vega system receive the first transmission strong enough to reach outer space -
 * The scientists of the film also point out that the aliens could not possibly have understood the historical context of the transmission (or even what was being said) and state that their transmitting it back would simply have been to show that it had been received (as well as to carry the blueprints). They mock the idea held by the government and military officials that it must mean they've made contact with

"Kimar: They sit in front of the video set all day watching those ridiculous Earth programs. It confuses them! Tom Servo: Especially Twin Peaks."
 * Of course, in the original book, we learn that the aliens specifically chose to beam back that transmission because they did understand the cultural context and wanted to warn us against following that particular route.
 * The Contact scenario also avoids the difficultly of decoding it, as they could have just been retransmitting it without knowing even what kind of signal it was.
 * We know that they must have decoded it, because they didn't just send it back unaltered. It was sent back with the original frames alternating with the data frames containing the design data for The Machine. This was likely the first signal they were able to pick up that was high enough bandwidth for this to be feasible.
 * Don't forget Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, which was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000.


 * The Three Stooges in Orbit. The Martian videophone accidentally starts broadcasting Earth television, rapidly convincing the Martian Big Bad that rather than conquer the Earth, it would be better to wipe it from existence.
 * Scary Movie 3
 * Variant: In the first Transformers live-action film, Optimus Prime and the Autobots learned English from the Internet. Thus, you have Optimus Prime saying "My bad".
 * In the novelization of the movie, Optimus first tries to address Sam in Mandarin. The explanation given is that this is the language spoken on Earth by the most humans, completely leaving aside the fact that most international communication does in fact take place in English, to say nothing that the most cursory scan of the surrounding transmission waves would make it obvious that they were in an English-speaking locale.
 * And poor Bumblebee, after getting his voicebox crushed by Megatron, has to rely on radio broadcasts to talk with anyone.
 * The Riff Trax of the film has a little fun with this concept. Optimus demands to be taken to "King Schnappi".
 * In Highlander II: The Quickening it can inferred this is the case from the alien General Katana's fondness for pop culture references. Apparently there isn't a lot to do on Zeist.

Humor

 * Dave Barry makes fun of this in several in his columns. The best example is when he theorizes that aliens developed a fondness for bad TV commercials and threatened the government to keep playing them, which is why so many bad commercials are on air.

Literature
"Tobias: Music? You mean like MTV? You were watching music videos on the Andalite home world?"
 * In the novel version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that are going to turn Dave into the Star Child first calm him by giving him a mock-up of a hotel suite. They don't get all the details right, though: he's disturbed when he notices drawers won't open and the books are part of the bookcase. What happened becomes clear when he turns on the TV and sees a scene from a movie set in a hotel suite exactly like the one he is in.
 * Animorphs used a version of this, albeit without the "long distance" part (but, interestingly, still using the trope as an Homage to 1980s TV): the body-snatching aliens first visit Earth in 1991, and panic upon discovering, while in orbit, news reports indicating that humans have mastered Faster-Than-Light Travel and Energy Weapons. They quickly realize that it's not real, and conclude that human indulgence in escapism makes us an even better target.
 * They decide to land in Hollywood, (instead of New York, Washington Dee Cee, or Ellay) because it is obviously the most important due to the amount of times it is mentioned in the decidedly factual parts of television broadcasts.
 * Also contains a quite literal version - Aximilli steals cable, and records everything for later reference. His excuse is to screen for Yeerk propaganda (which actually works several times), more often than not, he watches soap operas and 'These Messages' which he finds more amusing than most other shows.
 * Not to mention that Andalite kids apparently watched (or rather, pretended to watch while basically doing anything but) human television. They watched the news, entertainment, and...


 * In the novel Lacuna some Toralii understand English before encountering the Humans (and, given the book's content, probably Mandarin as well). How they learned the language is a bit of a mystery but it's probably this.
 * When the Tripods Came by John Christopher had aliens stealing television—and then using it to take over the world.
 * In the Doctor Who Past Doctor Adventures novel Synthespians™, human colonists in the future do this with broadcast from Earth. It's pointed out that until they had the help of the, the shows were so degraded it was like watching it through a snow storm.
 * In the short story "On a Clear Day You Can See All the Way to Conspiracy" by Desmond Warzel, the aliens not only listen to local AM radio, they call in.
 * I Married an Earthling! uses this as its premise.
 * Phule's Company: In the novel No Phule Like an Old Phule, the Zenobians revere a figure called L'Vis which is actually from an old broadcast of.
 * Adrift Among The Ghosts by Jack Chalker, in which an alien race sentenced a criminal to criss-cross space at just the right distance from Earth to intercept and record historic radio and TV broadcasts. Why was this considered a punishment? Because it forced him to relive our nuclear holocaust over and over and over and over...
 * In the Transformers: Shattered Glass prose stories, the Transformers tune into broadcast signals to study Earth culture in preparation for traveling there, with some Transformers adopting aspects of Earth culture they find appealing. Unfortunately, they also believe based on old scifi serials that Earth's weaponry is primitive compared to their own, which leads to them arriving at Earth and getting shot down by a nuke they weren't expecting. Oops.
 * The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gives us Ford Prefect, who calls himself that due to having originally learned about Earth culture by watching TV and coming to the conclusion that cars were the dominant species.
 * Also in Mostly Harmless, the Grebulons, a group of aliens who have lost their memories, fill their cultural vacuum by watching TV from their base on the 10th planet of our solar system.
 * Parodied in "The Holy Stomper vs. the Alien Barrel of Death". The aliens who pick up human soap operas and professional wrestling are a lost cult on a generation ship, and they base their entire new culture on the shows—but have no idea what they mean. Factor in their inhuman appearance, and their own broadcasts become utterly bizarre.
 * Spoofed in Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers by Harry Harrison. Every alien race the heroes come across has "listened to your radio broadcasts" and learnt fluent English for one reason or another.
 * The Antheans in The Man Who Fell to Earth observe Earth this way; in the movie adaptation protagonist Thomas Jerome Newton, once he's established himself there in the guise of a human businessman, appears in a television ad for his Mega Corp that reaches his family as a greeting of sorts. At the end,.
 * The Rambosians from Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crime series originally came to Earth to find out why Fawlty Towers never got a third season.
 * The alien invaders of The Killing Star ultimately decide that humankind is a threat because they
 * In three books starting with Surfing Samurai Robots (1988), Mel Gilden told of Zoot, from the planet T'toom. T'toom has been picking up our radio broadcasts and managed to figure out our languages (speaking English became the "In" thing). They didn't decode TV signals, though, so there's uncertainty what Earthpeople look like. Zoot, who's fascinated with Philip Marlowe, decides to actually visit Earth. Arriving at Malibu, California, Twenty Minutes Into the Future, he makes friends with the beach crowd and then ... well, he calls himself "Zoot Marlowe, from Bay City" and acts as a private eye, complete with plenty of metaphors and similes that'd make Chandler proud. Possibly because this is so cool, people don't pay much attention, certainly not hostile attention, to the fact that Zoot is humanoid but clearly not human.

Live Action TV

 * The Adventures of Pete and Pete: Big Pete befriends a boy who dresses like he's from the 1950s, and who is obsessed with Johnny Unitas and the the 1958 NFL Championship Game, which is credited with putting the NFL in the public consciousness and essentially making pro football "big", which featured Unitas leading the Colts to a 23-17 overtime victory over the New York Giants.
 * Star Trek: The Original Series' Trelane, the eponymous "Squire of Gothos", wasn't receiving radio signals, but clearly was limited by speed-of-light transmission when he thought that 18th-century fashions and behavior were the latest things for Earth people, there on his planet some 600 light years from Earth. Then again, he was merely a child from a race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens and might be excused from making such a mistake.
 * In another episode ("A Piece of the Action"), it was discovered that the people of Iotia had based their entire culture on a book left behind by an earlier survey ship: "Chicago Mobs of the 20s." Hilarity Ensues when Kirk, Spock, Bones and even Scotty have to deal with cliche gangsters, curious local customs and slang, and the enigma of manual transmission.
 * The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "First Contact" had an interesting reversal of this trope; here, the Federation monitors an alien civilization who are about to become capable of interstellar travel, and when introducing one of their head scientists to the greater galaxy notes that, among other things, they've been looking at their radio transmissions to learn more about them, causing her to comment, "I hope you don't judge us by our popular entertainment!"
 * Also Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "The Royale", the crew finds a planet with weird simulation of a cliche '30s-style gambling casino. As it turns out, aliens had accidentally made a few humans crash many years ago and tried to construct the only survivor a surrogate home based on the novel he had with him. Bad luck for him - he hated the book.
 * Amazing Stories did this one in a episode called "Fine Tuning".
 * In the Tales from the Darkside episode "Distant Signals," a mysterious, eccentric investor brings together the cast and crew of a 20-year-old private eye TV series, which was cancelled before it got a proper ending, so the story can finally be resolved. The investor turns out to be the representative of an alien race who had been following the show. (In the original short story, the private eye show was a western.)
 * Similar to the Transformers example above, the aliens in The Greatest American Hero spoke to the main characters through piecing together radio signals in their car. Also, in the episode "Operation Spoilsport," the aliens repeatedly played the song "On the Eve of Destruction" to indicate to the titular hero that a nuclear war was about to start.
 * The Strangerers, a comedy serial by Rob Grant (one half of the Grant/Naylor partnership that created Red Dwarf) takes its concept directly from this trope - the aliens assume a 1950s identity, and tumble into all manner of jolly japes as they wrack their brains to remember this strange human practise of 'walking' and the lift for their hotel bedroom.
 * The Babylon 5 spinoff Crusade: In the episode "Visitors From Down the Street", which abounds in X-Files references, the crew of the Excalibur pick up two agents from an alien world who are looking for proof of a government cover-up. They show pictures of Mount Rushmore and old Earth blimps. They also dress in Earth fashions from 200 years go (i.e., from the time period at the time of the show's shoot). One of them can speak English because of information stolen from the conspirators. The Reveal: Years before, the government had found itself in a time of social unrest similar to The Sixties. Upon discovering Earth broadcasts, they used them as part of a truly Magnificent conspiracy; manufacture appropriate "evidence", then dispatch The Men in Black to suppress it. The resultant subculture of Conspiracy Theorists absorbed the government's critics and kept them wasting their time chasing "aliens" rather than engaging in civil disobedience. Every crime the government committed afterward was thus blamed on "Outsiders" who secretly manipulated their civilization, permitting them to do as they pleased. The main government agent upholding the conspiracy credits and thanks the Humans for cigarettes as he smoked one in victory. Captain Gideon ordered probes loaded with the Interstellar Encyclopedia and sent to the alien world to crack the cover-up.
 * In Lexx, aliens are tipped off to the existence of life on Earth by Marconi's experiments with transatlantic radio.
 * In Doctor Who, while no aliens have been explicitly said to have discovered Earth because of our TV and radio, they certainly do enjoy it. The Master is particularly pleased by our invention of The Teletubbies.
 * He was also somewhat enamored with The Clangers some decades previously.

Music

 * The Filk song "Extra-Terrestrial Outrage" by Diana Gallagher has aliens arrive in the late 21st Century to declare war on Earth ... because they're angry about the cancellation of Star Trek: The Original Series.
 * The Split Enz song "oor Boy" frames this trope in a romantic context.

Tabletop RPG

 * In the "Scared Spirits" supplemental adventure for the Ghostbusters Frightfully Cheerful RPG, the PKE-stealing aliens learned English by watching television broadcasts and speak "Madison Avenue-ese." That is to say, they are constantly spewing slogans from TV commercials. For some reason, any human they "zombify" by draining them of PKE also talks like this.

Video Games

 * The Scrin frequently gather data from human networks in Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. At the beginning of the Scrin campaign, . In an interesting subversion of this trope, the Scrin expect from experience that Tiberium drove humanity to near-extinction but after, they tap into military frequencies and eventually conclude that humanity is fragmented yes, but they're also "warlike to the extreme". Finally, the Supervisor intercepts the cutscene where and realizes they've been duped into invading at least a century earlier.

Web Comics
"Jean: Bob, real aliens have never heard of Star Trek! Aliens: (standing on some device with a tape drive) Blasphemy!"
 * Schlock Mercenary is probably the lone example to go for plausibility. Aliens with FTL travel probe the radio spheres created by inhabited planets. They're not even trying to decode the signal, just confirm the presence of one to study its most distinctive feature: Every radio sphere found in Andromeda is in fact a radio shell...
 * Aaron Williams has a few one-shot comics playing with this. If aliens steal the show, they may as well give some feedback. And if they don't want to see it, spam still gets through.
 * Zip and Zap of the Bog World "constantly monitor our transmissions. They cannot understand why we keep allowing people like Michael Jackson and Monica Lewinsky to be our rulers".
 * The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob has an awkward incident:


 * The above-mentioned aliens are, in fact, the title characters from Melonpool and Zortic, both of whom are obsessive Trekkies.
 * The webcomic Zortic kicks off with two aliens who find out they're perfect for each other because share a love of old Earth television broadcasts.
 * Aliens in Luke Surl comics steal internet. And plan the First Contact accordingly.
 * The Aliens (they are actually called that; they are from the planet Alien) from the Walkyverse are dopey pop-culture junkies who are obsessed with human television and movies.
 * Irregular Webcomic had Martians monitoring traffic of the latest Earthling satellite. It's Nigerian, so the joke on what they received is fairly obvious.

Web Original

 * In Agent To The Stars, not only is this trope played straight, it's the basis for the story. Having received Earth's TV broadcasts, the aliens decide that the real power on Earth is Hollywood, and make their first contact with Hollywood's biggest agent.
 * Wait, it isn't?
 * In addition to their beliefs in the power of Hollywood, they're also unpleasant to human senses in many ways. In other words, they smell really bad and look really ugly. They would not get a good reception if they just landed on the White House lawn and their agent is intended to thwart the typical human reaction.
 * In Chaos Fighters II: Historical Chronicles-Beyond The Earth, this trope is used to explain why people in Vertrifo speaks English. They steal cable using magic, though.

Western Animation
"Lrrr: This is ancient Earth's most foolish program. Why does Ross, the largest friend, not simply eat the other five? Ndnd: Perhaps they are saving that for Sweeps."
 * The Soviet cartoon "An Old Record" is about aliens borrowing a few records to listen (and, through some strange technology, view, too).
 * Futurama, as usual, played with an old Sci Fi chestnut. Lrrr, of the planet Omicron Persei 8, 1000 light-years from Earth, commonly watches early 21st century Earth TV. His first appearance, with an invasion fleet, was because Fry thrashed WNYW's transmission console, cutting the signal when the Grand Finale of the Ally McBeal-esque program Single Female Lawyer was being broadcast.
 * Lrrr and his wife Ndnd are also apparently big fans of Friends... well, sort of, anyway:


 * The primitive female-only Amazonian tribe claim that what they know about males comes from ancient legend and subscriptions to Cosmopolitan.
 * Kim Possible: Warmonga, an amazonian Green-Skinned Space Babe from a race of compulsive conquerors, declares Dr. Drakken to be a figure from her native mythology based on his odd blue skin color after seeing him on a TV broadcast. The show was an American Idol parody called "American Starmaker", and his appearance on it was in a previous episode. Unlike other examples, she didn't wait for the broadcast to reach her home world, she happened to be about 1 light year away on patrol when she picked it up.
 * The Junkions in the animated The Transformers movie apparently learned English from watching Earth TV broadcasts. Which explains lines like "Steady as she goes, Bob! Snoopy visitors get mud in the eye, by and by! Film At Eleven!", and the battle cry "Destroy Unicron! Kill the Grand Poobah! Eliminate even the toughest stains!"
 * The key difference between Movie!Bumblebee and G1!Junkions is that the Junkions are capable of saying anything but choose to parrot TV and radio clichés with their own voices, whereas Bumblebee, who can no longer speak (or speak well, at least), hacks together bits and pieces of actual audio clips from the radio.
 * Kup is implied to watch Earth television as well, but less so than the Junkions. Fitting for his "old guy" image, the way he uses TV phrases (knowing only basic ones) is akin to an old man trying to use new slang.
 * Used very literally in Transformers Animated. Bumblebee and Sari pirate cable in order to watch illegal street races.
 * Scooby Doo and the Alien Invaders used this in an interesting meta-story way; an alien flower-child (due to having studied American pop-culture via its 1960's broadcasts and assuming it represented basic human behavior) became the Love Interest for Shaggy, who, having been Totally Radical when Scooby-Doo was originally on, and not having changed in the interim, was a perfect match.
 * Played with in Aqua Teen Hunger Force, in which the Plutonians are literally stealing the cable of Master Shake and company. They have a cable splitter patched through a "Fargate" to their spaceship, and use the "Universal Remonster" (a teddy bear with remote controls for arms and legs) to control it.
 * Inverted in the South Park episode "Canceled", where Cartman's anal probe picked up an advertisement for the intergalactic reality show "Earth". Of course, it was broadcast in an alien language, so the scientist Jeff (Goldblum) had to translate it into English.
 * Inverted in Drawn Together as well, where the house steals cable from Captain Hero's home planet.
 * The first thing Johnny Bravo does after becoming king of an entire planet of Green-Skinned Space Babes is convincing them to install Cable TV. After seeing Mel Gibson on TV, the girls immediately lose interest in him.
 * In Young Justice, Miss Martian based her form and personality on a short lived Saved by the Bell style sitcom called Hello Megan!

Real Life

 * Maybe inverted with the "Wow! signal"—or maybe not.
 * Not exactly extraterrestrials, but in the depths of the Cold War some kids in Russia and Eastern Europe were able to receive communications from an alien culture - western pop music on Radio Luxembourg or the American Forces Network.