Hi David!
I'm assuming that you went to AMT through your AOL newsgroup reader, and you downloaded a bunch of garbled text that was supposed to be a video clip. If that's not the case, forget the rest of this:
AOL has stopped decoding binaries in newsgroups (I may be wrong on that, but it's stopped in some at least). What you are seeing is the encoded format of the post, before it is decoded into the original format of a movie file. There are tools to decode these binary posts, but anyone I've ever suggested that to became very confused.
I'd reccomend easynews.com for your newsgroup services. Check them out, you will see how easy it is.
Steve 🙂