Max Headroom (character)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Max Headroom is the name of 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 and portrayed by Matt Frewer. Max Headroom was featured in a music video programme, a feature film, a dramatic television series and television commercials.
The Max Headroom character originated in 1985-86 as an announcer for a music video programme on the British television channel, Channel 4, called The Max Headroom Show. The intent was to portray a futuristic computer-generated character. Max Headroom appeared as a stylized head on TV against harsh primary color rotating-line backgrounds, and he became well known for his jerky techno-stuttering speech, wisecracks, and puns ("Like they say when you're buying suppositories, 'With friends like that, who needs enemas?'"). The Original Max Talking Headroom Show was made by Cinemax in 1987.
Analog
Notwithstanding the publicity for the character, the real image of Max was not computer generated. 3-D rendering and computing technology in the mid-1980s was not sufficiently advanced for a full-motion, voice-synched human head to be practical for a television series. Max's image was actually that of actor Matt Frewer in latex and foam rubber prosthetic makeup with a fiberglass suit, superimposed over a moving geometric background. Even the background was not actual computer graphics at first; it was hand-drawn cel animation like the "computer-generated" animations in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series. Later in the U.S. version they were actually generated by a Commodore Amiga computer. But when these things were combined with clever editing, the appearance of a computer-generated human head was convincing to many.
