![]() ![]() He’s a frickin’ nerd!” followed by references to local sports commentator Chuck Swirsky, Headroom’s recent commercial for Coca-Cola and words that were difficult to follow. In those seconds, the masked man spoke apparent gibberish, starting with, “That does it. why not a computer-generated man? Like a lot of these things, it never made it to first base.But it wasn’t really Headroom, played by Matt Frewer, who recently found fame with the character that hosted from “20 minutes into the future.” It was someone wearing a Headroom mask, who proceeded to clown around on the hacked airwaves for about 90 seconds. But as Frewer recalls it, "There was an actor who was president. The anti-capitalist character had gone corporate and within a few years, he was the butt of the joke in Back To The Future II.Ī few years later there was an attempt to revive Headroom in the wake of Gary Hart’s failed presidential bid due to a sex scandal. There was also the disconnect of the show's content - Americans tuned in hoping for zany interviews and charismatic Max Headroom weirdness, but instead found themselves watching a science fiction show with heavy themes.īecoming a spokesperson for “New Coke” may have been the last straw. People were getting tired of the character. Unfortunately, making it to America also pushed Headroom closer to “jumping the shark" territory. Called Max Headroom, it premiered in mid-1987 and ran for two short seasons. The network produced a TV series based on the dystopian sci-fi concepts from the original British TV movie. The ABC television network decided to try to wring a little more out of Max Headroom. ![]() (What would that be like?) In this world, brave left-leaning journalist, Edison Carter, reports on the evil doings of his “Network 23.” There are no off switches for television, ratings decide elections, and every network sponsors their own candidate. In his dystopian fictional world television networks, not governments, ruled the world unchecked. This is how we got the Max Headroom origin story, which is far more cyberpunky than Max himself.Īt first, Max Headroom was a means to mock the ever-growing reach of television. Channel 4 liked the back story so much they decided they wanted to produce it as a standalone TV movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future, which would air just days before the music video show, called The Max Headroom Show, premiered. Morton had the idea to do five-minute segments on the music video show that would explain how Headroom came to be. That's because of a convoluted turn of events that led to Headroom having his own TV movie in addition to the music-video show. Max Headroom mania began in the UK almost before viewers had even seen him. ![]() It wasn't hard to sell this to viewers as computer animation, mainly because nobody had seen computer animation. Add some parallel colored lines moving around in the background, and Max Headroom had been achieved. Frewer said he based the personality on Ted Baxter, the character played by Ted Knight on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.įrewer, covered in heavy makeup and prosthetics to make him seem more artificial, would really act, with harsh side-lighting in front of a blank blue background. ![]() Not only did he look the part, he had a quick wit and insincere delivery that fit the character perfectly. ( Toy Story, the first computer-animated feature film, didn't come out until 1995.) They needed a real, flesh-and-blood Max, and found him in Matt Frewer, a Canadian-born London-based actor with a remarkably chiseled face. That was clear instantly - while Max's creators could write the character as artificial intelligence, they couldn't just invent animation techniques that were a decade off. At the time the concept for Max Headroom was taking shape, computer graphics were far too primitive to simulate a talking human face. ![]()
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