It would take four and a half hours to get all the makeup and prosthetics onto Matt Frewer who said it was not fun and “grueling”. Max Headroom would only be shot from the shoulders up so all the attention would be mainly on his head. To create more of the look of Max Headroom prosthetics would be used and Latex and foam makeup would be used to create the robotic look of his face. In future releases, they would use actual computer-generated images that were created by the Commodore Amiga but up until then, everything you saw was straight up analog. The image of Max Headroom would be superimposed over these cell drawn backgrounds and that helped to give everything a true computer-generated look. These hand-drawn animation cells were created by Rod Lord who would also create “computer-generated” images for Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. Most of the backgrounds were actually hand drawn. This was totally an analog creation and would have to be controlled manually.Īs much as they might have wanted to create a computer-generated image for all this the technology just wasn’t there in the mid-1980s. He would wear Ray-Ban sunglasses and would actually be put in front of a “computer-generated” background which was the inside of a slowly rotating wire cube. The look of Max Headroom involved a dark shiny suit which was actually made out of a fiberglass mold. Max Headroom is the computer reincarnation of Edison Carter and his name comes from the last thing that Carter saw before getting hit in the parking lot: A sign that said “Max Headroom: 2.3 meters”.Ī lot of people always believed that Max Headroom was a computer-generated image but there’s nothing animated or CGI based at all, so they did their job well. Eventually, he learns too much and has to flee his work which leads him getting injured by a motorcycle which puts him in a coma. The artificial intelligence used in Max Headroom is said to have come from a crusading journalist named Edison Carter.Ĭarter is a hard-hitting reporter for Network 23 and tends to uncover things at the network that his superiors wish he hadn’t. The story with Max Headroom is that he comes from a dystopian future which is dominated by television and large corporations. I think they also had the idea that this could have a lot of spin-off opportunity into feature movies or comic books so they wanted to have a mythology to Max Headroom in the same way the Transformers did when being introduced. They covered all their bases and wanted their “computer creation” to have a proper backstory for their TV show. They brought in actor Matt Frewer as he had a lot of improv ability, wit and was able to imply that sense of self-importance and general douchebaggery. The concept was put together and the idea was to base Max partly on Ted Baxter from the Mary Tyler Moore Show. They were also sick of the sterile, one dimensional, insincere and arrogant douchebags they were seeing on every channel. ![]() He would be created by a few people including George Stone, Annabel Jankel, and Rocky Morton. ![]() In the ‘80s you had a big explosion of insincere and egotistical TV personalities and this created an idea that would develop into Max Headroom and his personality. They’re all trying to be the next Ryan Seacrest and they’re all pretty insufferable. We live in an age now with pretty mindless and morornic entertainment channel “personalities” that are all really a dime a dozen if you ask me. His parents were not a Commodore 64 and a Speak N Spell. Wait, I’m not talking about him being conceived I’m meaning the development of the actual concept. So if you have wondered who Max Headroom is, you’re about to find out. So he was part cartoon, part video game but had a lot of story and development that went behind him. There was also the very bizarre “Max Headroom incident” which I’ll get to later. ![]() You might think of him as just a one-off use for things like this but there’s quite a lot of backstory, a movie and TV shows that developed the character. Max Headroom made a real splash in the ‘80s trying to capitalize on the advancements in technology and become a true TV personality. But the story of Max Headroom is an interesting one as it’s part performance art, part ingenuity and maybe a bit of absurdity. You might only have awareness of Max Headroom from Back to the Future II when he’s on the TV in the Cafe ‘80s or you might remember him from the New Coke commercials. He would be used in TV shows and commercials. He was considered the first computer-generated TV host but the effect was created by makeup and prosthetics. Max Headroom was a fictional artificial intelligence character who was played by Matt Frewer. ![]() The 80s was a period of many technological advances and a TV character would be created that would embrace the modern technology.
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