![]() ![]() The television show looked like a nasty fever dream of tomorrow, but it was making sardonic comments about its present. The potential of viewers exploding could be dismissed as an unintended consequence of getting better returns for corporate stakeholders. Average citizens could be kidnapped and sold for organ transplants on the black market. Likewise, the Max Headroom series that eventually aired on ABC in the States dramatized oppressors against the oppressed. Stories of white people confronting Black people or rich people taking advantage of poor people wouldn't fly, so Serling substituted in people versus aliens and the living confronting the dead. Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling was very transparent about this, saying the show's morality tales were refashioned as fantastic allegories to get them past CBS brass. why not a computer-generated man? Like a lot of these things, it never made it to first base.Science fiction is often a palatable way of delivering difficult content to a public that might reject it otherwise. 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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