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.
Max headroom movie series#
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.” The Plot Thickens 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.
Max headroom movie movie#
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.
Being Max Headroom Was Physically Painful 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. Computer Animation Didn't Actually Exist In 1985Īt the time the concept for Max Headroom was taking shape, computer graphics were far too primitive to simulate a talking human face. So that was a plan - just need to send it to the computer animation department and let them work their magic, right? Well no, not in 1985. Max would be an obnoxious and condescending white American male in a suit. Morton decided his yet-to-be-visualized host should be the opposite of that, as unappealing as the VJs at MTV were appealing. Rocky Morton, a co-creator, was drawn to the idea of a host who was completely inappropriate to the material - music videos at the time were very creative, DIY clips with storytelling that spoke to young people like nothing else on TV. The show's producers hit upon animation, which evolved into the idea of a computer-generated talking head. Something like the VJs that MTV used, but different. A new channel in the UK called Channel 4 was launching a music-video program, which would need some kind of constant element or structure to make it feel like a show and not just an assortment of unrelated clips.
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