I’ve made references to “EBS Specials” a number of times on this blog, and every time I do, someone asks me what it is. Rather than explain it every time I bring it up, I decided to give it its own page.
EBS, of course, refers to the Emergency Broadcast System, which existed between 1963 and 1997 as a way for the President of the United States to take over every radio and TV station in the country to speak to us in case the Russians were coming to blow us all to Kingdom Come. The FCC, the agency responsible for developing the EBS as well as the agency responsible for regulating radio and TV stations in the US, required the “voluntary cooperation” of radio and TV stations to test their preparations for this eventuality once a week, on a random day and time (between 8 AM and local sunset), or face a huge fine.
Naturally, broacasters hated it, because it deprived them of a little over a minute’s advertising revenue. They did everything they could to get the FCC to allow them to conduct the test before 8 AM or late at night, when they were broadcasting their ration of public service announcements and no one was watching. Naturally, the FCC, being a government agency and therefore unaccustomed to listening to, much less accepting, the requests of those it is intended to regulate, refused. So the broadcasters would generally run the test at a time when they wouldn’t lose too much revenue, i.e. during the game shows and soap operas in the middle of the afternoon, or during the cartoons in the late afternoon. Kids watching the cartoons would have something like this pop up between the bumper for the commercial break in the middle of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” and the commercials for “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” action figures.
Kids, in the days before remote controls, would then get up off the couch and run like heck to the TV and change the channel, if they weren’t frozen in fear. Many kids, myself included, were frightened by the test.
As I mentioned, radio stations were also required to “voluntarily cooperate” and follow the same regulation. In Chicago, we had two Top 40 stations, WLS and WCFL. Once a week, each station would conduct its EBS test, and everyone listening would tune in the other station (another reason station managers hated them). If the song playing on the other station was, say, “Seasons In The Sun” by Terry Jacks or an equally awful tune (it is, I’m sorry, get over it), many people would tune back and listen to the rest of the test.
An EBS Special, therefore, is a song so awful that you’d rather listen to an obnoxious attention signal and an ominous message written by the FCC.
A side note…
Several attempts were made over the years to set the EBS test script to music and make it entertaining, such as this one, from WHEN, Syracuse, New York.
Or this one, by the Conception Corporation comedy team.
Naturally, the FCC was none too pleased, and threatened to fine any stations that used them. No fun, I tell ya…
The Sound of One Hand Typing 
The fire drill bells at school used to terrify my son (who is in his late 20’s now) when he was young. I wonder how he would have dealt with CONELRAD. I am 65 and I think I still suffer some PTSD from some of the duck and cover drills of my early school years.
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Yeah, EBS tests, fire drills, and a whole bunch of other weird things scared me.
There are a couple of YouTube videos that demonstrate the nationwide CONELRAD drills they used to conduct:
We complain now when they conduct a national EAS test, but at least they’re testing it, and I never heard any complaints about CONELRAD. The Emergency Broadcast System was never actually tested nationwide, at least not on purpose: there was that Saturday morning when they sent the wrong test out and activated it, and most TV and radio stations ignored it, because they always sent a test out at that time on Saturday morning…
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Oh yeah, I remember those irritating EBS tests! Debbie D and I probably listened to the same ones, her listening to them on the Buffalo stations and me living there (Niagara Falls, although a separate market for Arbitron (and I think Neilsen) ratings, was part of the Buffalo DMA). I lived in Town of Niagara, which was Niagara County and Buffalo was in Erie County. A hop, skip and a jump away from each other…I used to jump that county line ALL THE TIME because Niagara County bars closed at 3am but Erie County bars didn’t close until 4am so as if we weren’t buzzed enough, we do last call in Niagara Co and then zoom across town to the Erie Co bars to catch the band’s last set of the night and last call there… And then that still wasn’t time to go home and we’d go over to Sambos for breakfast (and don’t you know the waitstaff just hated having a deal with a bunch of inebriated fools, just so we could get home in time for the sunrise…. Ah, those were the days.
EBS though, not amusing. Hated that noise. It was like the loud air raid drills we’d have in school where we’d all have to get under our desks and cover our heads when that horn blasted…
Michele at Angels Bark
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Fire drills used to scare the pants off me… We had this really loud buzzer that would really startle me, even when they told us it was coming. I was scared of everything back then.
I spent a couple of weeks in Pierre, South Dakota (one of those happenin’ garden spots) early in my traveling days. The town of Fort Pierre was on the other side of the Missouri River and in a completely different time zone, so when the bars closed in Pierre everyone would get in their cars and drive across the river… The guy I was working with talked me into going to a bar that was having Ladies’ Night. That’s when I learned that if a bar is advertising Ladies’ Night and there were a bunch of semis parked in the lot, the truckers were the ladies…
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So that’s what that is!
I’ve seen references to these in a few places around the ‘net, but I never knew until now what they were referring to.
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You find a lot of EBS tests on YouTube, as well as EAS tests (the current emergency warning system) and even a few CONELRAD (the older and even more ominous system). It was a part of the culture.
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They were scary. And they are STILL scary.
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I watch them now on YouTube (they’re a whole genre out there) and I laugh at how silly it was that I was so scared by them, and evidently I’m not alone. The current system (EAS) isn’t that scary (although I’m older), but it’s kind of unnerving when they run the test at night and it wakes you up.
Do you remember CONELRAD?
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Hahaha! Thanks for the explanation. I do remember seeing those on the BuffaloTV channels we get. (Only 90 minutes’ drive from here.)
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