
The character Max Headroom got his name because, in the original story, Edison Carter crashed into a traffic gate labelled "Max headroom 2 metres" and was knocked unconscious, and when his brain was digitized that was his last image. One example is the use of traffic signs for character names. Some was more overt, such as Max's wisecracking lines, while other was less obvious. Everyone should have one.")Īlthough it was not a comedy series, low-key humor was a noteworthy part of the entire effect. Various episodes delved into issues like literacy and the lack thereof in a TV-dominated culture (Blank Reg: "It's a book.
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The series portrayed the Blanks, a counter-culture group of people who lived without any official numbers or documentation for the sake of privacy. Like other science fiction, the series introduced the general public to new ideas in the form of cyberpunk themes and social issues. It was the first cyberpunk series to run in the United States on one of the main broadcast networks in prime time.
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The original one-hour movie was partially recast and re-filmed as a pilot for a new series on the U.S.
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In 1987 the story was turned into a full fledged television series. The resulting program takes on a life of its own as the eccentric and unpredictable "Max Headroom" who can move through computer and television networks at will.

In the process, he is injured and his mind is digitized into a computer program. In the pilot episode, Edison is hunted down by his own employer, Network 23. It introduced television reporter Edison Carter and his efforts to expose corruption and greed.

Titled 20 minutes into the future, the movie was a dystopic look at a run-down near-future dominated by television and large corporations. To create a background story for their announcer, Channel 4 created a one-hour TV movie describing the story of the creation of the computer-generated person. He also hosted an interview show on the Cinemax cable TV channel, and appeared in the video for "Paranoimia" by The Art of Noise. He was the spokesman for Coca-Cola's disastrous New Coke campaign, using his trademark staccato to deliver the slogan "Catch the wave! Coke!". Max became something of a celebrity outside of the television series.

With the backgrounds and video editing, the average viewer was convinced that Max was computer generated. Max was actually an actor in latex and foam rubber prosthetic makeup. Max himself was not computer generated, the technology did not exist in the mid-1980s to make it possible (or at least practical). Max Headroom appeared as simply a stylized head on TV against harsh primary color rotating line backgrounds, he was most well known for his jerky techno-stuttering speech, wit, and a knack for word-play puns (such as "With friends like that, who needs enemas?"). The intent was to portray a computer-generated cutting-edge character. The Max Headroom character started in 1985 as an announcer for a music video program on British television Channel 4 called "The Max Talking Headroom Show". Max Headroom was the name of a fictional celebrity character in the late 1980s and a science fiction television series featuring him.
