{"id":1216,"date":"2007-12-12T10:39:36","date_gmt":"2007-12-12T10:39:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1216"},"modified":"2007-12-12T10:39:36","modified_gmt":"2007-12-12T10:39:36","slug":"tv_title_sequences_max_headroo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2007\/12\/12\/tv_title_sequences_max_headroo\/","title":{"rendered":"TV Title Sequences: Max Headroom"},"content":{"rendered":"

You probably all saw this coming after yesterday’s entry, right? Sometimes I am so predictable… Oh, well. You gotta be what you are, right? Just watch the clip:<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

Mmmmmm, so very, very ’80s…<\/p>\n

<\/i><\/p>\n

Max Headroom<\/i> was the third television program to feature the bizarre-looking, wise-cracking, supposedly computer-generated character, who was not actually CG at all, but was rather played by the actor Matt Frewer<\/a> while wearing foam make-up appliances<\/a> all over his head and a rigid fiberglass suit. I would imagine, however, that most Americans remember Max more for his “Catch the Wave” New Coke<\/a> commercials than for the British-made Max Talking Headroom Show<\/i> (where the character originated) and telefilm 20 Minutes into the Future<\/i>, or the American weekly series that adapted 20 Minutes<\/i> as its pilot and lasted a mere 11 episodes.<\/p>\n

The quick failure of the series is no surprise, given the time in which it debuted. Back in 1987, when only hardcore sci-fi fans had heard the term “cyberpunk” and few people even owned a computer, the premise of a ravaged future society entirely dominated by mass media and information technology was pretty heady stuff, and the nature of the show’s title character –an artificial intelligence imperfectly modeled on a brain-scan of the show’s true protagonist, TV journalist Edison Carter — was damn-near incomprehensible to the average viewer. I’ll admit I never fully understood exactly what Max was supposed to be while the series was still on the air. It was only much, much later, after I started reading some of the wild, long-haired crazytalk about The Singularity<\/a> that a light bulb finally went on in my head and I “got” Max. (I never had much use for the cyberpunk sub-genre<\/a>, which apparently explored a lot of this sort of thing — I much preferred space opera and pulp-style adventure stories — so I may have been a late bloomer in understanding the idea of “people translated as data,” at least among the science fiction community. In my own defense, however, I’ll just point out that it’s still a pretty far-out concept for the vast majority of those hypothetical average viewers I mentioned earlier, and Max<\/i> was obviously way, way ahead of its time in attempting to bring these ideas to the general public.)<\/p>\n

What I liked about the show was the visual style — the world of Max<\/i> is a bizarre retro-futuristic wasteland where people drive antique Studebakers and operate computers via mechanical typewriter keyboards; it’s somewhat similar to the world of Blade Runner<\/i>, but not nearly as baroque (naturally, since the Max<\/i> producers probably had about 1\/100th of Ridley Scott’s budget) — as well as the considerable charm of Matt Frewer as Edison Carter. Edison was very unlike other TV heroes of the day, an average-looking guy who got by on intelligence, a smart mouth, and a stubborn streak, rather than brawn or firepower.<\/p>\n

And the show was funny, not just in the sense that Edison and his doppelganger Max were always spouting one-liners, but in very subtle and sometimes very dark ways. For example, one TV network executive was an Asian named Ped Xing — an obvious enough joke when it’s written out, but when it’s just spoken in the dialog, it takes a moment to settle into your head and make itself known.<\/p>\n

Yeah, Max Headroom<\/i>… you know, now that I think about it, I’ve got a few episodes on a very old VHS tape somewhere down in the Bennion Archive, as well as a bootleg of the 20 Minutes into the Future<\/i> movie. I might have to go rummaging when I get home from work tonight…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You probably all saw this coming after yesterday’s entry, right? Sometimes I am so predictable… Oh, well. You gotta be what you are, right? Just watch the clip: Mmmmmm, so very, very ’80s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tv-title-sequences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1216\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}