Today, we're all little Maxes, opining away, fragmenting the feared and revered Boob Tube of the '80s into that far less monolithic series of tubes we call the Internet. He flitted from screen to screen, saying his piece to anyone who'd listen. He represented both the machine and the ghost that haunted it. See, on the show, Max was uncontrollable. Thankfully, Max gave birth to more than a new generation of screen-hoarding Svengalis: He also gave us the key to busting their monopoly. With the hair and the hyperwhiteness, Fox News' Beck is clearly the child of Max he simply substitutes crocodile tears for neck-jerks when he tells us to "t-t-t-take our country back!" There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of heads-in-boxes today, each with just as many catchphrases - and just as few facts. The irony, of course, is that two decades on, Max wouldn't stand out in a crowd (and not just because he has no legs). For Jankel, he was a Frankenstein monster of media excess, a figure of "pure, amped-up, swaggering arrogance." " Max was a fact-free zone, supremely confident and totally subjective.
Where Edison bemoaned the creeping commercialization of the airwaves, Max embraced it (albeit ironically), going to commercial with "And the Max Headroom award for worst commercial goes to. (Both were played by Canadian actor Matt Frewer.) Max was the true journalist's evil twin: Where Edison sought the facts at any cost, Max was content with flash-fried opinion.
#Who is max headroom tv
(It was canceled after one season.) In the series, Max is the accidentally downloaded consciousness of a crusading TV newsman named Edison Carter. The concept was picked up in the US by ABC, and the pair (along with writer-futurist George Stone) poured all their tele-disgust into Max and his mythos - enough to fill 14 episodes of the short-lived prime-time drama. Hired to invent a new kind of free-floating veejay personality for Britain's Channel 4, British video artists Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton created him in reaction to the "false intimacy" of US television personalities in the Reagan era. Max wasn't the first talking head, of course. Max was the forehead of today's mass punditocracy, presaging Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann, and the rest of today's flesh-and-blood bloviators. "I'm an image whose time has come," he told us back then, and he wasn't kidding. Turns out he sold us more than sugar water. Two decades later, right around the time that future is supposed to be happening, Max Headroom is getting a DVD release, and maybe Max will get his due. In 1987, he starred in a landmark cyberpunk series on ABC, a media-spoofing sci-fi adventure set in a dystopia that exists "twenty minutes into the future." His creators designed him as high satire and dark prophecy. Though he spent most of the late '80s hawking New Coke ("C-c-c-catch the wave!"), Max was more than a Spuds MacKenzie-style spokesgimmick. Well, allow me to refresh your Memorex: Max was a computer-enhanced "talking head" with a freakishly sculpted scalp, chronic stutter, and a knack for one-liners. We think of him today as an empty-headed relic of the 1980s-if we think of him at all.