

is a company that developed Commodore Amiga hardware and software, including a digital video sampler.

The NewTek "Demo Reel One" featured a Max Headroom grab. He stated that Channel 4 is now suddenly "20 years into the future", making a subtle reference to 20 Minutes into the Future. As he is looked after by a caretaker, he moans about being with the other "relics", and then talks about digital TV.
Max headroom incident 30th anniversary tv#
On November 22, 1987, an unidentified hijacker used Max as a basis for a hijack in the Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion.Īn older-looking Max was used in a campaign to inform UK households of the impending digital TV switchover. He recites the alphabet with selected commentary on some of the letters. In 1987, Frewer appeared as Max Headroom in a segment for Sesame Street. He also hosted an interview show on the Cinemax cable channel, called The Original Max Talking Headroom Show. In the UK, Max appeared in television commercials for Radio Rentals. He was the spokesman for New Coke (after the return of Coca-Cola Classic), delivering the slogan "Catch the wave!" (in his trademark staccato, stuttering playback as "C-c-catch the wave!"). Max became a celebrity outside the television series.
Max headroom incident 30th anniversary series#
Shout! Factory released Max Headroom: The Complete Series on DVD in the United States and Canada on August 10, 2010. The final spin-off from the original film was the dramatic television series, Max Headroom, which was broadcast in the United States, running for two short seasons (Spring 1987 and Fall 1987), with two more episodes shown later in 1988. These episodes were never shown in the UK. The spin-off show was an immediate cult hit, doubling Channel 4's viewing figures for its slot.Ī second season, which broadened the original concept to include celebrity interviews and a studio audience, was produced in late 1985, and a third and final season ran in 1986 (The second and third seasons were shown first on the US cable channel Cinemax, and on Channel Four an average of six months later).Ī Christmas special was produced at the end of the second season and seen by UK audiences just before the regular run of the season, and just after the US season concluded.Ĭinemax produced a fourth season of the talk show on its own, The Original Talking Max Headroom Show, which ran for six episodes in 1987. At first sight he'll ask about that blackhead on your nose."Īfter its success, the character was spun off into a veejay in the British music video program, The Max Headroom Show, whose first episodes unusually featured no introductory title sequence or end credits. Max always assumes a decade long friendship on the first meeting. In a 1986 interview, Frewer said: "I particularly wanted to get that phony bonhomie of Baxter .


The actor decided to model Max's personality after what he saw as the smarmy, self-important goofiness of The Mary Tyler Moore Show 's Ted Baxter. Matt Frewer was chosen for his ability to improvise, and - according to producer Peter Wagg - his "ideally exportable" mid-Atlantic accent. The character's personality was partly intended as a satire of insincere and egotistical television personalities - what Rocky Morton described as the "very sterile, arrogant, Western personification of the middle-class, male TV host" - but also was "media-wise and gleefully disrespectful" which appealed to young viewers. These modulations, achieved with a harmonizer, also appeared when the character was performed live. Another distinguishing trademark of Max was his chaotic speech patterns - his voice would pitch up or down seemingly at random, or occasionally get stuck in a loop. Only his head and shoulders were depicted, usually against a "computer-generated" backdrop of a slowly rotating wire-frame cube interior, which was also initially generated by analogue means - in this case traditional cel animation, though later actual computer graphics were employed for the backdrop. The classic look for the character was a shiny dark suit, which was actually a fibreglass mould, often paired with Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses.
