Biggins was born in Queens, New York, and moved to Florida at a young age shortly after his parents divorce. He got the nickname Blackout and made his debut as a performer on Piper High School high school radio station WKPX in Sunrise, Florida when he was just 13. While in radio class and when he first went on the air, lightning struck the transmitter antenna. The lightning strike blew the antenna in half, causing an electrical blackout in the school for several hours, and bringing the radio station down for over 6 months. The students held fundraisers to fix the antenna and other repairs. Since he was the only person on the air when this happened, his teachers and fellow students started calling him by the nickname Blackout and it stuck.
Biggins is best known on the internet as his Blackout persona, and for being the first to stream prank calls in real time with realaudio 1.0, and then later releasing streaming videos and a live streaming radio show far before shoutcast or social media sharing networks such as youtube, facebook, myspace, or any other media sharing sites existed. His website Blackout.com was registered on July 25, 1995 and contains thousands of hours of his original material from pre 1995 on to the present, all streamable and free. Some of the older material is still in the old Real Audio format but can be played using a multi-codec player such as VLC media player.
Blackout has hundreds upon hundreds of prank calls and sketches, most of which have only been released for limited times during his live radio show or on his website. All of Blackout's material has been or is currently offered free on his site. He has mostly been financially supported by fan donations and by several different corporate sponsors and friends who helped keep the site going for so long and in paying for the extreme bandwidth costs. While currently there is nothing for sale from his site (the store is still there but the order links don't work), he did put out three albums for sale of what he considered to be some of his best prank call material:
A follow up CD released about a year later that is considered a much darker album, with pranks that take on a slightly more serious, if not somewhat harassing, tone at times compared to most of Blackout's other pranks which are more along the styles of theatre of the absurd or Surreal humour. The tracks on The Insanity Volume II are as follows:
In addition to the actual standard audio tracks, this album is a Mixed Mode CD that had an additional 4 hours of original material that could be played when inserted into a computer cd-rom drive. In addition, Blackout signed most of these discs and very few are in circulation. Blackout's last official album that was released and sold on a physical CD medium was entitled:
It is one album with one track, wholly dedicated to one single 45-minute recording that is a series of prank calls to one family with a son named Quan, where Blackout takes on the roles and voices of four characters in real time, trying to convince Quan that a battle is still raging somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam, and that Quan must come and join his brother and fight. Blackout plays four different characters during the call and often talks to himself as the characters with some taking sides with Quan, and some against him. The characters that Blackout improvises on the spot are: Master Shredder, an ancient Ninja master from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fame, Matt Cheddar, a young boy whose name is a play on the name Master Shredder, Joanna, the Southern Loving Bell operator, and John Dandel, the police officer and authority figure who holds a form of phone court to solve the mystery of who is prank calling whom. The Quanicles was very well received and garnered a huge fan base and very positive reviews from prank call fans and popular humor sites around the world such as I-mockery.com. The Quanicles can be found in several forms all over the Internet and on YouTube as well as the original 45+ minute series of calls on Blackout's official site. Many prank call aficionado sites list The Quanicles as one, if not the, greatest prank-crank call series ever made, or at least have it in their top ten lists of greatest pranks of all time. While Blackout did sell these albums, they were in very limited numbers and the material on them was always available for free on his official site and still is at the current time. His manic energy and character switching style in these calls has been compared by several reviewers and magazines to that of radio host Phil Hendrie and actor-comedian Robin Williams.
Blackout and his website / radio show was the main focus of an 8 page South Florida's New Times. and has also been commented on and interviewed in many local, national, and international magazines, newspapers, and websites. The first world wide notability being a full color full page review/interview in the 1998 internationally distributed UK based magazine .NET (a magazine very similar at the time to WIRED magazine). Issue 44 Spring 1998, page 13 has the article, and additionally Blackout.com has held the number 2 humor spot since 2002 to current (2010) in the largest selling actual printed (2 million + copies) internet guide book of all time: Harley Hahn's Internet Yellow Pages. Harley Hahn's review of Blackout is as follows: "Every time I visit Blackout's Box I end up laughing and laughing out loud. This Web site features crank phone calls made by a wonderful, talented actor. These recordings are, by far, the funniest such calls I have ever heard. If you need a good laugh right now, you know what to do." Blackout has also been involved in numerous notable pranks that have garnered national attention such as when he prank called actor Christian Slater and kept him on the phone for almost an hour after he got the actors's phone number from Paris Hilton's leaked sidekick phone device. This call received notice from shock jock Howard Stern's show where Howard Stern was quoted as saying, "this dude who runs an internet radio show broke Christian Slater's balls for 45 minutes...it was hysterical." He was also on Good Morning America live from Times Square promoting the Blue Man Group,but as one of his characters - Trumpet the complimentary Dinopup. In the Good Morning America segment, Trumpet complains that he hates New York because, "it's too expensive." In 2007, Biggins worked in the movie Film Contest? in which several filmmakers are competing to win a 5 million dollar budget to make the movie of their dreams. Biggins plays the character Milton Butterfly, one of several competing film makers vying for the 5 million dollar prize. He is credited as actor Michael Biggins in the film, but thanked as Blackout in the official film credits and on IMDB. Ironically, in the movie, the character he plays, "Milton Butterfly," is an eccentric Willy Wonka looking type DJ / Film Maker. The film won Best Feature in the 2009 Delray Beach Film Festival.
Biggins is best known on the internet as his Blackout persona, and for being the first to stream prank calls in real time with realaudio 1.0, and then later releasing streaming videos and a live streaming radio show far before shoutcast or social media sharing networks such as youtube, facebook, myspace, or any other media sharing sites existed. His website Blackout.com was registered on July 25, 1995 and contains thousands of hours of his original material from pre 1995 on to the present, all streamable and free. Some of the older material is still in the old Real Audio format but can be played using a multi-codec player such as VLC media player.
Blackout has hundreds upon hundreds of prank calls and sketches, most of which have only been released for limited times during his live radio show or on his website. All of Blackout's material has been or is currently offered free on his site. He has mostly been financially supported by fan donations and by several different corporate sponsors and friends who helped keep the site going for so long and in paying for the extreme bandwidth costs. While currently there is nothing for sale from his site (the store is still there but the order links don't work), he did put out three albums for sale of what he considered to be some of his best prank call material:
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It is one album with one track, wholly dedicated to one single 45-minute recording that is a series of prank calls to one family with a son named Quan, where Blackout takes on the roles and voices of four characters in real time, trying to convince Quan that a battle is still raging somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam, and that Quan must come and join his brother and fight. Blackout plays four different characters during the call and often talks to himself as the characters with some taking sides with Quan, and some against him. The characters that Blackout improvises on the spot are: Master Shredder, an ancient Ninja master from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fame, Matt Cheddar, a young boy whose name is a play on the name Master Shredder, Joanna, the Southern Loving Bell operator, and John Dandel, the police officer and authority figure who holds a form of phone court to solve the mystery of who is prank calling whom. The Quanicles was very well received and garnered a huge fan base and very positive reviews from prank call fans and popular humor sites around the world such as I-mockery.com. The Quanicles can be found in several forms all over the Internet and on YouTube as well as the original 45+ minute series of calls on Blackout's official site. Many prank call aficionado sites list The Quanicles as one, if not the, greatest prank-crank call series ever made, or at least have it in their top ten lists of greatest pranks of all time. While Blackout did sell these albums, they were in very limited numbers and the material on them was always available for free on his official site and still is at the current time. His manic energy and character switching style in these calls has been compared by several reviewers and magazines to that of radio host Phil Hendrie and actor-comedian Robin Williams.
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