Those “bizarre image-things” are Moiré patterns, check this LINK to see it in action… just in case get some aspirins before opening the page.
By the way, the 4D logo it´s amazing… 
I would also think the stripes would have to be much smaller and closer together than a zebra’s or a referee’s for this to happen… Besides, doesn’t B&W TV have more contrast than color, which would make a zebra pattern even more clear?
Don’t take it badly, astro; I was trapped by this too.
Despite the helpful nature of Snopes and the lesson to be learned by such claims on a site, I always thought this somewhat irresponsible of them and felt that it put matters not back to “Square One”, but to “Square Two”, if you know what I mean.
The stripes have to be the same order of magnitude as the pixels. So for a zebra to strobe, it would have to be pretty far away from the camera. And I think that higher contrast would make the effect even more visible. Vector based imaging programs such as Adobe Acrobat would probably cut down on this, but of course they wouldn’t be applicable to an analog signal. I wonder if compression formats such as MPEG would smooth out this effect.
Hey Ale thereare some neat things on the index of that site… Index
The bizarre image things are examples of aliasing. The stripes and checks on shirts are to close together to be approximately reproduced at the resolution of your TV screen.
One time Johnny Carson wore a jacket on the tonight show that looked strange on TV because of a weird pattern . He said that he needed to change jackets because of the problem so they brought out a different jacket to him. A woman in the audience yelled out “Can I have the first jacket?” and he said “Yes, come up here and get it” and so they brought her up on stage and gave her the jacket.
It’s interesting how they were quick to stop problem fabrics from being on TV, yet the actual chyrons they used freely at the time were blinding, what with the bold colors contrasting with a muted background, the frequency vibration that often (and still does sometimes) occur, etc.
Eegba in an interesting and amusing twist, the Snopes article about the urban legends TV show is incorrect:
Mostly True Stories is not, in fact, the TV show on which a team of investigators conduct elaborate experiments. That show would be Mythbusters, which appears to longer exist. It ran on the Discovery Channel. 
Don’t think it’s called for to knock Snopes.
I mean c’mon, how could anybody fall for such obvious exaggeration. The Ryan, you had me rollin’ with the bunch of dogs tied together thing. Did anybody else get the joke?
He was kidding! Really!
Truth is that b/w broadcasts will actually resolve detail better than a colour broadcast, well at least in Europe with its PAL tv system, I can’t speak for US tv systems all that much but much of what follows will apply.
The reason is that the colour information had to be carried within the bandwidth of the whole tv picture, which meant it had to ‘overlap’ the picture information.
What happened was that it was decided to insert a supressed carrier, whose centre frequency is transmitted within the composite signal.
The tv set recieves the whole lot, and by detecting the colour carrier centre frequency, is able to resolve the colour information.
Unfortunately due to things like harmonic interferance etc, this means that high detail high contrast images pick up moire patterns within them.
If you still can pick up test pattern signals, you will see a series of boxes somewhere on it with differant gradations.You will see that on a colour tv set, it will only be able to resolve the first three boxes maybe four, but on a true b/w set(not a colour set with the colour turned down) it will resolve most is not all of the graded sections.
This part of the test card was used by tv engineers to set up the tuner section, and is still used by station engineers to set up transmitters
Specifically, a palomino saddlebred.
Quoth TexGuy:
Believe it. About six or seven years back, the Villanova University pep band wore referee-striped uniforms. Some of the basketball games were televised, and occasionally, they would show a shot of the band as they were cutting to commercials. We showed up as a tangled mess of Moire patterns. Of course, this was part of the reason that we chose those uniforms in the first place. Unfortunately, the camera crews quickly caught on to this, so we showed up on TV less than we should have.
Thanks, although to be fair, I got it from the Simpsons (they had a more elaborate explanation in which horses were tied together to get cows, dogs for horses, and cats for dogs).
Another interesting TV effect is that some shows have a black background (for example, Charlie Rose). When they have guests wearing all black, the guest looks like a disembodied head floating in midair.
I cut my teeth on message boards over at snopes. They are the ultimate best at what they do.
But, I can see where astro was fooled. As have been many others. And it might be the only point on which I disagree with snopes. The “lost legends” sections does more harm than good. The stories get into the wild.
I think that a debunking site should take instruction from Doctors. “Do no harm.”
Again, I support snopes 110%. They are the best. But they continue to make a mistake on this, just because, one assumes, it flatters the ego.
My personal opinion, only.