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| - The video waiters at the Cafe 80's in 2015 had behavior patterns similar to those of Max Headroom. Marty McFly, who was visiting from 1985, would not have recognized the pop cultural reference, which was first seen in the United States in the music video for the song "Paranoimia" by Art of Noise, shown on MTV in April 1986.
- Max Headroom is a character, portrayed by Matt Frewer and designed to resemble a computer-generated figure, who originated in a 1985 British music video show. Headroom became ubiquitous in pop culture for a time, appearing in Coca-Cola commercials and in his own 1987 television series, also called Max Headroom.
- Max Headroom is a television series that was so horrible that it was yanked from the airwaves after only two seasons, never to be heard of again (until now). Each episode went on and on, seemingly endlessly, for 57 minutes. Advertisers avoided the show like the plague. Only the U. S. Army had the balls (or the stupidity) to sponsor the show, although more timid advertisers allowed their products to be shown in the series itself as so-called product placements. George Stoned, Rocky Moron, and Annabel Jackass are to blame for the original idea for the series.
- Max Headroom is a fictional British artificial intelligence, known for his surreal wit and stuttering, distorted, electronically sampled voice. The character was created by George Stone, Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton. Max Headroom was featured in a music video programme, a feature film, a dramatic television series and television commercials. Adapted from two Wikipedia articles on the character and the television series, both named Max Headroom.
- Back in the 1980s, it looked like computers were going to be able to do just about anything. It also looked like Japanese businessmen were going to economically conquer the world. And it looked like corporate greed was going to grow and grow until the average citizen was a virtual slave to the mega-corporations who would happily destroy the environment, culture, history, and basic human liberty all in the name of profit. (Come to think of it, that might still end up happening.)
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| abstract
| - Back in the 1980s, it looked like computers were going to be able to do just about anything. It also looked like Japanese businessmen were going to economically conquer the world. And it looked like corporate greed was going to grow and grow until the average citizen was a virtual slave to the mega-corporations who would happily destroy the environment, culture, history, and basic human liberty all in the name of profit. (Come to think of it, that might still end up happening.) Max Headroom, a plastic-coated stammering faux-CGI host full of sardonic wit played by the frankly underrated Canadian actor Matt Frewer, made his debut in April of 1985 in a British one hour pilot entitled Max Headroom: Twenty Minutes Into The Future. Though Max was the star of the show, he was really a very minor character. The story followed intrepid reporter Edison Carter (also Frewer) and his "controller" (i.e. director) Theora (Amanda Pays, who later played fanfic-favorite Phoebe Green on The X-Files) as he attempted to uncover a conspiracy revolving around the Blipvert, a highly compressed advertisement his station had recently adopted, which had the unfortunate side effect of causing some viewers to explode. In his daring escape from security with orders to kill, he is gravely injured when he crashes his motorcycle into a gatepost. A totally unlikable Teen Genius generates an AI copy of Carter's mind to cover up his disappearance, but the copy is somewhat unstable and has a bad stammer. He takes his name from the last thing Edison had seen before his injury: a sign on the gatepost reading "MAX HEADROOM: 2.3 METERS". The pilot wasn't picked up, but the rights to the Max Headroom character were sold to the makers of a music-video program on British television, on which Max appeared later in 1985. The Max Headroom show was the first to play with the music-video format, with Max frequently talking over lousy videos and making jokes, or cutting the video off partway through, a technique later picked up by Beavis and Butthead and other satirical video shows. The character was later picked up by Coca-Cola, for a series of TV spots for New Coke and appeared on T-shirts and mer-*BZZZZZZZZZZT* *BZZZZZZZZZT* Er, we apologize about that. Moving on. Max Headroom was a huge hit, especially in the UK. But it was in the US that the pilot was picked up. Sort of. It was remade by Lorimar in 1987 as the first episode of the Max Headroom TV series, keeping only Frewer, Pays, and Morgan Sheppard (Blank Reg) from the original cast, and substantially rewriting the second half of the movie (but using all the video effects so the money budgeted to effects could be used elsewhere). The Teen Genius was changed from a villain to an unwitting patsy, and Max's role was greatly increased; in the original, Max and Edison never met, and Max spent the rest of the movie as a VJ for a pirate TV station. In the series, he and Edison became partners, breaking the Blipvert story together. Max Headroom strayed back and forth between Black Comedy and (mostly) serious Cyberpunk for two half-seasons before being cancelled and largely forgotten. Many believe the network intentionally killed it, scheduling it opposite the hugely popular Miami Vice (where, ironically, Matt Frewer played a villain in a two-parter shortly after his show was cancelled). The world presented by the show was strange and unwieldy, full of corporate greed, corrupt politics (elections to all political offices were done via TV: each network hired a candidate, and the highest rated network at the close of polling got their man installed), and a legal system that could not possibly have worked (it was illegal to turn a television off, books were banned in order to disenfranchise those who couldn't afford pay-per-view educational TV, bloodsports were mainstream, and trials for all but the rich and powerful were carried out in game show format). Also, everything had silly SciFi names: "Blipverts", "Baby Gro-bags", "Cred-sticks", "Neurostim", etc. The character was resurrected in 2008 as part of Channel 4 's marketing for the digital switchover, in a number of (full-length) adverts. In 2010, it was announced that the US series will be getting a DVD release in August of that year, with an amusing lenticular cover.
- Max Headroom is a fictional British artificial intelligence, known for his surreal wit and stuttering, distorted, electronically sampled voice. The character was created by George Stone, Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton. Max Headroom was featured in a music video programme, a feature film, a dramatic television series and television commercials. Notwithstanding the publicity for the character, the real image of Max was not computer generated. Computing technology in the mid-1980s was not sufficiently advanced for a full-motion, voice-synced human head to be practical for a television series. Max's image was actually that of actor Matt Frewer in latex and foam prosthetic makeup with a fiberglass suit. This was then superimposed over a moving geometric background, which was originally hand-drawn cel animation, though computer generated in the American television series. The background story provided for the Max Headroom character presents a dystopic look at a run-down near-future dominated by television and large corporations. Max Headroom was created from the memories of a reporter, Edison Carter, who was injured in an accident that put him into a coma. The character's name came from the last thing Carter saw before the accident: a bar with a sign warning of low clearance, marked "Max. Headroom: 2.3 meters". Max Headroom was originally created for a non-fiction entertainment show, a British music video show called The Max Headroom Show. This was developed into a television movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future that presented the character's backstory. This in turn became the pilot for an American series, whose first episode was presented in an extended edition to American audiences in 1986 on Cinemax. The series ran on ABC from 31 March 1987 to 5 May 1988—officially for two seasons, though only fourteen episodes were made. The American series expanded on the cyberpunk themes of the British TV movie but otherwise had no connection to the British music video show. Adapted from two Wikipedia articles on the character and the television series, both named Max Headroom.
- The video waiters at the Cafe 80's in 2015 had behavior patterns similar to those of Max Headroom. Marty McFly, who was visiting from 1985, would not have recognized the pop cultural reference, which was first seen in the United States in the music video for the song "Paranoimia" by Art of Noise, shown on MTV in April 1986.
- Max Headroom is a character, portrayed by Matt Frewer and designed to resemble a computer-generated figure, who originated in a 1985 British music video show. Headroom became ubiquitous in pop culture for a time, appearing in Coca-Cola commercials and in his own 1987 television series, also called Max Headroom.
- Max Headroom is a television series that was so horrible that it was yanked from the airwaves after only two seasons, never to be heard of again (until now). Each episode went on and on, seemingly endlessly, for 57 minutes. Advertisers avoided the show like the plague. Only the U. S. Army had the balls (or the stupidity) to sponsor the show, although more timid advertisers allowed their products to be shown in the series itself as so-called product placements. George Stoned, Rocky Moron, and Annabel Jackass are to blame for the original idea for the series.
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