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1980's Max Headroom
Max Headroom is the name of a fictional British artificial intelligence, known for his surreal wit and stuttering, distorted, electronically sampled voice. The character was created by George Stone, Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton and portrayed by Matt Frewer. Max Headroom was featured in a music video programme, a feature film, a dramatic television series and television commercials.

At the beginning of 1986, Coke's marketing team found a strategy by returning to their original motives for changing the drink: the youth market so beholden to Pepsi. Max Headroom, the purportedly computer-generated British media personality played by Matt Frewer, was chosen to replace Cosby as the spokesman (of sorts) for Coke's new "Catch the Wave" campaign. A very stylish figure in his jacket and sunglasses, he was already known to much of the U.S. youth audience through appearances on MTV, where he had first appeared in the Art of Noise's "Paranoimia" video, and Cinemax. The campaign was launched with a memorable television commercial, produced by McCann-Erickson New York, with Max saying in his trademark stutter, "C-c-c-catch the wave!" and referring to his fellow "Cokeologists". In a riposte to Pepsi's televisual teasings, one showed Headroom asking a Pepsi can he was "interviewing" how it felt about more drinkers preferring the new Coke to it and then cut to the condensation forming on the can. "S-s-s-s-sweating?" he asked.

It was a huge success, and surveys likewise showed that more than three-quarters of the target market were aware of the ads within two days. Coke's corporate hotline received more calls about Max than any previous spokesperson, some even asking if he had a girlfriend. The ads and campaign continued throughout the year and were chosen as best of 1986 by Video Storyboard of New York.

 In the UK, Max starred in television commercials for Radio Rentals. He also hosted an interview show on the Cinemax USA cable TV channel, called The Original Max Talking Headroom Show and performed vocals and appeared in the music video for the pop music single "Paranoimia" by Art of Noise.

Art of Noise featured an overdubbed Max on the song "Paranoimia". Max was also featured on a single titled "Merry Christmas Santa Claus (You're a Lovely Guy)" released by Chrysalis Records.

In 1986, Quicksilva released a Max Headroom game, which was sold in the UK for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. The game's plot was to protect Edison Carter from bad guys with guns, whilst rescuing Max Headroom.

Production notes

Notwithstanding the publicity for the character, the real image of Max was not computer generated. Computing technology in the mid-1980s was not sufficiently advanced for a full-motion, voice-synced human head to be practical for a television series. Max's image was actually that of actor Matt Frewer in latex and foam prosthetic makeup with a fiberglass suit created by Peter Litten and John Humphreys of Coast to Coast Productions in the UK. This was then superimposed over a moving geometric background. Even the background was not actual computer graphics at first; it was hand-drawn cel animation like the "computer-generated" animations in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series. Later in the U.S. version they were actually generated by a Commodore Amiga computer. But when these things were combined with clever editing, the appearance of a computer-generated human head was convincing to many.

On the 1985 episode of I Love the '80s, John Humphreys noted that the head was so convincing that the series pilot won the BAFTA award for graphics.

Max Headroom and 20 Minutes into the Future

The Max Headroom Show was developed into the television movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future which in turn became the pilot for a series which ran from 1985 to 1987. The first episode was presented in an extended edition to American audiences in 1986 on Cinemax. Though officially two seasons, only fourteen episodes were created, and only thirteen aired.

The background story provided for the Max Headroom character presents a dystopic look at a run-down near-future dominated by television and large corporations. Max Headroom was shown to have been created from the memories of Edison Carter. The character's name came from the last thing Carter saw during a vehicular accident that put him into a coma: A bar with a sign warning of low clearance, marked "Max. Headroom" along with the height of the bar.