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…
Max Headroom 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 while wearing foam make-up appliances 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 commercials than for the British-made Max Talking Headroom Show (where the character originated) and telefilm 20 Minutes into the Future, or the American weekly series that adapted 20 Minutes as its pilot and lasted a mere 11 episodes.
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 that a light bulb finally went on in my head and I “got” Max. (I never had much use for the cyberpunk sub-genre, 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 was obviously way, way ahead of its time in attempting to bring these ideas to the general public.)
What I liked about the show was the visual style — the world of Max 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, but not nearly as baroque (naturally, since the Max 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.
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.
Yeah, Max Headroom… 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 movie. I might have to go rummaging when I get home from work tonight…
