He comes back in the episode “Grossberg’s Return” as a board member of Network 66 to introduce another insidious ad tool, neurostim, freebie gifts that hypnotize people into irrational acts of consumption by implanting memories directly into the brain. Grossberg (Charles Rocket) gets busted for the Blipverts scandal and dumped as chairman. Dead people can’t consume, so the network drops it. Network 23 is covertly testing blipverts, which dump 30 seconds worth of advertizing images directly into a TV viewer’s eyes in 3 seconds, but have been known to cause neural over-stimulation and sometimes death by spontaneous explosion. It’s surprising they manage to breed at all. Most people would agree that censors are a silly breed. The teen hacker is enlisted by Network 23 CEO Ned Grossberg to probe Carter’s mental patterns out to see if the unconscious reporter discovered media secrets. The network is after something in Carter’s brain. The pilot episode follows the darkest path of subliminal advertising. Max Headroom is the first viral computer virus and he was messing with what Ned Beatty in Network called the primal forces of nature: The international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet, the atomic and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things. Once inside the wires, Max is free to run amok, and other programs, untethered by systemic blocks. I could see him playing World of Warcraft with Stan and Kyle on South Park. He only ventures outside his laboratory in six episodes. A genius underachiever who got snatched away from his parents when he was ten and inserted into an elite computer school. His memory is downloaded by the requisite ’80s nerd in too-big glasses and is then accidentally uploaded onto the network’s computers. Carter’s AI alter-ego was created by Bryce Lynch, a Libra according to his personnel files, played by Chris Young. In the pilot, Carter smashes his head on a “maximum headroom” warning sign while escaping some camera-shy subjects. The characters are aware of their charm and of the menace they also seem to project. Frewer channels his inner Ted Baxter (played by comic master Ted Knight on The Mary Tyler Moore Show) in his characterizations of both the roving AI being and the reporter. Carter runs around with a mini-cam doing daring live broadcasts in a kind of real-time investigative show. Carter gets exclusive coverage for his What I Want To Know Showfrom a direct feed from his controller who hacks into the security systems of the reporter’s targets.Įdison Carter and Max Headroom are played by Canadian actor Matt Frewer. In the series, Max Headroom is a computer-generated recreation of the memories of Network 23 news reporter Edison Carter. Newsweekcalled Max Headroom “the world’s first computer-simulated megastar” in April 1987. It ran on ABC from March 1987 to May 1988. The score was composed by Cory Lerios. The Max Headroom TV series came to American shores as a mid-season replacement in the spring of 1987, and was renewed for the fall season. Lorimar acquired the rights to the Max Headroom character in 1987 and produced an American series based on the British TV movie with some of the same actors. The series worked with directors like Tommy Lee Wallace and screenwriters like Steve Roberts and William Morgan. When Channel Four asked for a Max Headroom origin story, the producers didn’t think it could be contained within the episodes, so the commission was changed to a feature-length TV movie that was written by Steve Roberts and directed by Morton and Jankel, and Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future was the result. That was superimposed over a moving hand-drawn geometric cel animation produced by Rod Lord, who also made “computer-generated” images for the TV series Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The backgrounds for American version were generated by a Commodore Amiga computer. Peter Litten and John Humphreys of England’s Coast to Coast Productions made a fiberglass suit out of latex and foam prosthetic makeup. Max broke in when he wanted, riffed, deflected dissent with disarming disarray and did the odd celebrity interview.īecause it was the mid-to-late ’80s, Max Headroom wasn’t really computer-generated. Britain’s Channel Four commissioned The Max Headroom Show music video commentary episodes in 1984. The character was created by George Stone, Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton in the mid-1980s to be “the world’s first computer-generated TV host.” The idea came from Peter Wagg of Chrysalis Records.Ĭhrysalis Visual Programming let Wagg, Morton and Jankel develop Max Headroomfor the then-newly-formed Lakeside Productions.
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