week 4 A sign that does not work: Adult Swim panic

Designed to promote the Turner cartoon Network "Adult Swim" program, hundreds of one-foot tall signs placed in major cities across the United States in the last three weeks caused panic in Boston on January 31,2007, unprecedented since the 1930's Orson Welles' produced "War of the Worlds". The illuminated signs, illustrating the Mooninite characters from the popular Cartoon Network program and resembling crude 1980s era computer graphics, the devices, with their protruding wires, were mistaken as bombs and shut down the city. By combining different images (a cartoon character recognizable to a small segment of culturati and wiring that appeared to many to be a bomb) the designers created a sign mistaken as a terrorist threat.
Or did the signs, perhaps, work exactly as the designers had hoped? One could not have bought as much national publicity for the show.