LONDON – Max Headroom – the cult British TV film from 1985 – is finally going to get a big screen makeover in the capable hands of Sam Mendes and starring House of Cards chameleon Kevin Spacey.
Fictional British character Max HeadroomcharacterFirst appearance(1985)Last appearance(2015)Created byGeorge StonePortrayed byVoiced byMatt FrewerInformationSpeciesGenderMaleOccupationMax Headroom is a fictional (AI) character, known for his and stuttering, electronically altered voice. He was introduced in early 1985.
The character was created by George Stone,. Max was portrayed by and was called 'the first computer-generated TV personality', although the computer-generated appearance was achieved with an actor in prosthetic make-up and harsh lighting, in front of a blue screen. Contents.Development Concept For his role of hosting a music video program, Max Headroom was conceived of by creator as 'the most boring thing that I could think of to do.a talking head: a middle-class white male in a suit, talking to them in a really boring way about music videos', also deciding that he should be computer-generated.Matt Frewer was chosen based on his 'unbelievably well-defined features' that Jankel noticed in a casting polaroid, and from his comedic improvisation skills that he demonstrated in a ten-minute audition. The actor took inspiration from 's, saying in a 1987 interview, 'I particularly wanted to get that phony of Baxter. Max always assumes a decade long friendship on the first meeting. At first sight he'll ask about that blackhead on your nose.' Producer Peter Wagg had already hired writers David Hansen and Paul Owen to construct Max Headroom's 'whole persona', which Morton described as the 'very sterile, arrogant, Western personification of the middle-class, male TV host'.
They created dialogue for Max's appearances in the TV movie and TV shows, which the actor added to through improvisation. The two also wrote the 1985 book in his voice, Max Headroom's Guide to Life.The background story provided for the Max Headroom character in was rooted in a near-future dominated by television and, devised by George Stone and eventual script writer Steve Roberts. The AI of Max Headroom was shown to have been created from the memories of crusading journalist. The character's name came from the last thing Carter saw during a vehicular accident that put him into a coma: a traffic warning sign marked 'MAX. HEADROOM: 2.3 M' (an overhead clearance of 2.3 metres) suspended across a entrance. The name originated well before the other aspects of the character from George Stone, who said 'Max headroom was over the entranceway of every carpark in the UK.
Instant branding, instant recognition.' Production The classic look for the character is a shiny dark suit often paired with sunglasses. Other than the publicity for the character, the real image of Max was not.
Computing technology in the mid-1980s was not sufficiently advanced yet for a full-motion, voice-synchronized human head to be practical for a television series. Max's image was actually that of actor in latex and foam prosthetic make-up with a suit created by and John Humphreys. Preparing the look for filming involved a four-and-a-half-hour session in make-up, which Frewer described as 'gruelling' and 'not fun', likening it to 'being on the inside of a giant tennis ball.' Only his head and shoulders were depicted, usually superimposed over a moving geometric background. This background was a piece of CGI footage that had been generated for one of Morton and Jankel's ad agency's commercials, later, in the United States version, generated by a computer. His chaotic speech patterns are based upon his voice pitching up or down seemingly at random, or occasionally becoming stuck in a stuttering loop. These modulations also appear in live performances.The rights to the Max Headroom character were held by as of November 2007.
TV history TV movie Max Headroom originally appeared in the British-made, which was broadcast on April 4, 1985. The Max Headroom Show series The TV movie consisted of material originally planned to be broken into five-minute backstory segments for the British program, which premiered two days later. Max Headroom served as, and its first episodes unusually featured no introductory title sequence or end credits. The show was an immediate hit in the UK, doubling Channel 4's viewing figures for its time slot within a month.A 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.A 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.Cinemax produced a fourth season of the talk show on its own, The Original Talking Max Headroom Show, which ran for six episodes in 1987. These episodes were never shown in the UK.The series pilot won the (BAFTA) award for graphics in 1986. Max Headroom series The final spin-off from the original film was the dramatic television series, which was broadcast in the United States, running for two short seasons (mid-1987 and late 1987), with two more episodes shown later in 1988.released Max Headroom: The Complete Series on DVD in the United States and Canada on August 10, 2010.
Television hijack. The hacker made references to Max Headroom's endorsement of, the TV series, WGN anchor; and 'all the greatest world newspaper nerds', a reference to WGN's call letters, which stand for '. A corrugated panel swiveled back and forth mimicking Max Headroom's geometric background effect.
The video ended with a pair of exposed buttocks being spanked with a flyswatter before normal programming resumed. The culprits were never caught or identified. In other media Max became a celebrity in every medium outside his own television series, making cameo and sampled appearances in other TV series, books, music, and advertisement campaigns. He was the for (after the return of ), delivering the slogan 'Catch the wave!' (in his staccato, stuttering playback as 'C-c-catch the wave!' After the two TV series and the advertising campaign had ended, Peter Wagg attempted to sell a movie concept called Max Headroom for President. In 1986, released a Max Headroom video game, created by developers Binary Design, originally for the and ported to the,.
His last TV appearance to date was a series of advertisements for Channel 4 in 2007 to raise awareness for the, and were directed by Rocky Morton. In popular culture Max Headroom has inspired many imitations and spoofs:. In the 1980s, created the character for his political comic strip. The character combined the concepts of Max Headroom and then US President. also featured a Max Headroom inspired Reagan, and computer-generated versions of and the as waiters at the fictitious Cafe '80s.
In Season 2 Episode 10 'Science Project' Steve Urkel builds an Atomic Bomb that has a Max Headroom like computer interface that looks like him. It gives the countdown before detonation, but fortunatly it was all in Laura's Dream. In the novel, protagonist Wade Watts uses the name Bryce Lynch as his alias.
He also has a Max Headroom AI in his ship. 's 2013 ' video features himself portrayed as Max Headroom. In 2015, Max Headroom appeared in the film in a cameo as the ominous alien liaison just before the final showdown between the Arcaders and the leader of the invading aliens, who have been posing as 1980s video game characters and celebrities.
Matt Frewer reprised his role, but unlike Max Headroom's other appearances, in the film Max was generated via CGI from a facial capture of the performance, which led to the visual effects team needing to manually reduce the accuracy to mimick the immobility of the facial prosthetics.References. Archived from on 2016-03-22. Retrieved 2014-10-03. Wogan, Terry (host) (14 August 1985).
BBC1. ^ Bishop, Bryan (2015-04-02). Retrieved 2020-01-30. ^ 'Mad About M-M-Max'.
April 20, 1987. ^ Brian Ward (2010). Live On Network 23: The Story Of Max Headroom (Max Headroom: The Complete Series bonus feature) (DVD). Shout Factory. Retrieved 2020-03-28. Bishop, Bryan (2015-04-02). Retrieved 2020-04-01.
^ Bishop, Bryan (2015-04-02). Retrieved 2020-03-29., retrieved March 3, 2010. Foust, John (October 1987). Amazing Computer Magazine. Vol. 2 no. 10. ^ Mark Sweney (November 29, 2007).
Retrieved November 29, 2013. Retrieved November 29, 2013. Retrieved March 28, 2020. Ross, Andrew (1990). In Mellencamp, Patricia (ed.). Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism.
Indiana University Press. P. 138.
Schwoch, James; White, Mimi; Reilly, Susan (1992). P. 113. Forester, Tom; Morrison, Perry (1994). Sseveral other instances of uplink video piracy have occurred. WTTW (Channel 11 in Chicago) was also overridden by a 90 second transmission, this time by a man in a Max Headroom mask smacking his exposed buttocks with a fly swatter.
Knittel, Chris (November 25, 2013). Motherboard. Gallagher, Sean (November 22, 2017).
Ars Technica. Loder, Kurt (September 14, 1986). South Florida Sun Sentinel. Retrieved March 29, 2020. For one, there was a book market for what had become Max mania: Steve Roberts whammed out a picture-book novelization of his film script, and Owen and Hansen came up with Max Headroom's Guide to Life (the most suitably pompous title they could concoct), and both sold well. Retrieved March 29, 2020. Mclaughlin, Robert (March 19, 2008).
Retrieved March 28, 2020. Trudeau, G. (October 1995).
Flashbacks: Twenty-Five Years of Doonesbury. Andrews and McMeel. P. 217. Boyar, Jay (November 22, 1989). Orlando Sentinel.
Retrieved March 29, 2020. Retrieved 2017-04-08.
Suellentrop, Chris (July 24, 2015). Retrieved March 28, 2020. Wilson, Tim. Creative COW. Retrieved March 28, 2020.External links.
Bishop, Bryan (2015).
In the list below, Virk explains how each of these five character simulations foretold the future in some way.Virtual Character #5:For most of us, Max Headroom, the stuttering talking head which rose to fame in the 1980s, was the first idea of a virtual character that could look human and actually speak, though with an electronically sampled voice.Max first appeared in 1985 British made for TV movie, “ Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future.” Max became a celebrity in his own right, appearing in more than one movie, TV show and making guest appearances in various places. There was even an American TV series that aired from 1987-1988 called “Max Headroom” on ABC. On the British side, there was ‘The Max Headroom Show’, which ran for 3 seasons. Although his heyday was in the 1980s, Max also recently appeared in the movie Pixels in 2015.Even those who remember the character probably don’t remember the back story. TV reporter Edison Carter (played by Matt Frewer) hit his head on a sign that said, “Max. Headroom 2.3m”. Later, his personality was uploaded to a computer, and Max was the virtual character that resulted from this “uploading of consciousness”.Max had a very distinct personality – in fact creator Rickie Morton said that Max was the “very sterile, arrogant, Western personification of the middle-class, male TV host”.
The world of the Max Headroom shows was a dystopian future run by TV networks – while they hadn’t imagined Google or Facebook in those days, this virtual character was one of the first that got us thinking about the whole idea of “virtual characters”.How Max Headroom Foretold the Future:Besides being a forerunner of all of today’s virtual characters, we are now seeing virtual characters start to creep into the newsroom. In fact, China’s Xinhua news agency recently introduced a male and female virtual news anchor, and I’m told (though I don’t speak Chinese) that they do a great job of reproducing a human news anchor, who may no longer be necessary. Max Headroom may have been prescient after all.
Virtual Character #4: The Doctor Hologram in: VoyagerWhile the first Star Trek (known as TOS, the Original Series) had Spock, a Vulcan and Star Trek: The Next Generation had Data, everyone’s favorite android who became a Star Fleet Officer, Star Trek: Voyager was one of the first TV series to have a virtual character as a regular member of the cast.In the show, the spaceship Voyager went through a wormhole and was flung 70,000 light years away from Earth, to boot it didn’t have a doctor on the crew. That could be inconvenient since humans have an annoying habit of getting sick or malfunctioning in other ways.Luckily, the ship had the newly created Emergency Medical Hologram, played by Bob Picardo, who always asked when he first became active, “What is the nature of your medical emergency?”, and seemed to be better than a lot of real doctors in diagnosing and curing members of the crew.At first, the character was confined to the Medical Laboratory, where the holograph projectors were located which had his program. The doctor had a distinct personality and there were many stories about him.
As the series evolved, they got him an armband which served as a mobile projector, so that the doctor wander around the ship. In a particularly interesting take on virtual vs. Virtual character, in the episode “ Heroes and Demons,” the Doctor (a hologram) went into a Holodeck re-creation of Beowulf, and interacted with the hologram characters there, who seemed less “real” and more “programmed” than he was – because they existed only inside the simulation, while the doctor existed outside of it, in Voyager.How it foretold the future. Virtual Character #3: Virtual Influencers: Kizuna Ai and Lil MiquelaThis spot goes to two (real life?) virtual characters that never existed on TV or in the movies. They are among the biggest YouTube stars – in fact, the days of YouTube celebrities being human may be a thing of the past.The trend stated In Japan, with Kizuna Ai, an anime-inspired character who looks cartoonish, is a major star in Japan. In 2018, the character has not one but two YouTube channels and has over 2 million subscribers. She was known as the first “virtual YouTuber” and later, Mattel launched virtual Barbie as a real character.
Today YouTube estimates over half a billion views that have been attributed to virtual influencers on the platform.More recently, Silicon Valley got into the game as the creators of Lil Miquela, a more realistic looking CG characters he recent wave of virtual characters. These characters are now well-known enough and because of their AI, even though there are voice actors and regular actors they may be modeled on, are considered separate from those actors.
Unlike say both Max Headroom and the doctor in Star Trek where the actor was a major part of creating the character, here 3d modeling and visualization techniques are used to create the characters and the latest artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques are used to make them seem real.How they foretold the future:This future is just being invented. Virtual characters are already doing a great amount of advertising.
As these characters, who are for now just inside YouTube videos, are ever introduced inside video game-like simulations and allowed to run free, we may have the first real independent “virtual characters”. We may be some years off from this, but you can see the trend emerging. Virtual Character #2: Joi from Blade Runner 2049Of course, we couldn’t conclude this article without a reference to Philip K Dick, whose original story, “ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” was the inspiration for the 1982 movie Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford. There were many great artificial characters in that movie – but they were all embodied so don’t count as virtual characters for this list– including Sean Young as Rachel who had implanted memories and thought she was human, and Darryl Hannah’s Pris, the pleasure model of android, not to mention Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty.In the long-awaited sequel, Blade Runner 2049 (which wasn’t based on a Dick novel but his last wife, Tessa B. Dick, said he’d appreciate it, though she found it slow), Ryan Gosling plays K, who is an android detective.
So where are the virtual characters in this?It turns out that Joi, the hologram “girlfriend” of K, who was a virtual character, kind of stole the show for many people. She was, of course, one of many copies – anyone could buy a version of Joi to be their girlfriend, and K was enamored with her, and had a portable device to take her with him. Who can forget the advertisement for Joi, showing the virtual character at much larger than life-size?
Her portability becomes important to the plot.How This Foretold the Future:The movie only came out recently, but the genre of the virtual girlfriend is an interesting one. In Japan, there was a gentleman who married a virtual character.
In the 2014 movie, Her, Joachim Phoenix played a lonely tech guy who got a new operating system and fell in love with her. In a striking resemblance to a scene from Blade Runner 2049, the main character tries to have sex with the virtual character by using a surrogate.
Virtual love and sex are new areas, but new technology helping with loneliness is not. Virtual Character #1: Agent Smith from the MatrixAnd, we come to the #1 virtual character. Since this article is in honor of the 20 th anniversary of the release of the Matrix, who else could it be but the famous Agent Smith from “The Matrix” trilogy?Played by Hugo Weaving, Agent Smith was a virtual character created by the super-intelligent machines that had created the Matrix, who was set out to find and destroy Neo (the main character, played by Keanu Reeves). Who can forget Agent Smiths’ slow delivery of Neo’s virtual character’s name, “Mr. Anderson” and not to mention the awesome special effects.What made this character really special was that he could be in more than one place. In fact, in one of the sequels, he uploads his consciousness to one of the humans outside the matrix. A virtual character becoming real, and he finds he doesn’t like it.
In another incredible example of why he’s the top virtual character on this list, Smith makes copies of himself and then proceeds to have the copied inhabit every single virtual character in the Matrix, everywhere. In fact, Empire magazine voted him the 84 th most popular movie character of all time.Even the creators of the Matrix, the super-intelligent machines had to be careful with this one – who seemed intent not just on killing Neo, but once he was released from the control of the machines, on destroying both the humans and the Matrix itself.
While his ultimate fate isn’t fully explained, it’s theorized that the machines actually kill Agent Smith, by deleting all copies of him when his purpose has been served, by re-booting the Matrix. In fact, fan theories have cropped up which suggest that Agent Smith was the “Many” to Neo being the “One”, making him just as much of a messiah as Neo.How He Foretold the Future:I don’t know if Agent Smith foretold the future or not, though the simulation hypothesis is taken much more seriously now than it was in the past. In his 2003 breakout paper, “Are You Living in A Simulation”, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom made the argument that if any civilization were ever to create a Matrix-like reality (which he called ancestor simulations) then it’s very likely that we are already in a simulation. This argument was because there would potentially be many more (millions, trillions?) of simulated characters inside ancestor simulations than real biological beings.
Metal warriors snes. Other scientists, like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking, not to mention technologists like Elon Musk, have agreed that it’s very possible that we live inside a simulation and are simulated beings. What this means is that Agent Smiths may be more plentiful than Neos – in fact, we you and I might be more like Agent Smith than we know.And there you have it – some of the best virtual characters over the last 30 years, and what they portend for the future. As computer science, computer graphics, and AI evolve, they grow to touch every part of our lives. To quote a famous saying about science fiction, the future ain’t what it used to be. In our future, these famous virtual characters may end up having more influence on our world than the ubiquitous robots/androids that get most of the attention in stories and movies.