Talk:Max Headroom

Untitled
I think that George Stone should be credited here also. Keithbowden 01:00, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

See for instance http://homepage.ntlworld.com/john.seymour1/ukbookguide/Series/MaxHeadroom.html Keithbowden 01:11, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Art Of Noise With Max Headroom - Paranoimia (12in mix) excerpt.ogg
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BetacommandBot (talk) 07:56, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:MaxheadroomMpegMan.jpg
Image:MaxheadroomMpegMan.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images lacking such an explanation can be deleted one week after being tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot (talk) 17:34, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Not that I care that much, but what is trying to be said in this sentence? "The Max Headroom Show had 2 Seasons 85-86 and 1987 shows not series by cinamax was a major success."

This is the first sentence in the 3rd section, "20 Minutes into the Future"

Scotty A (talk) 21:47, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Name origin
Does anybody know of a source confirming "Max Headroom" as being derived from "max headroom", a message on signs (now or past) in the UK denoting maximum allowable height of a vehicle under a bridge? Mapsax (talk) 00:19, 8 March 2008 (UTC)


 * That is the reason given for his name in the television movie. Are you asking if this is the origin for the name in reality? &mdash; Val42 (talk) 20:50, 8 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Actually, I already thought that it was. I guess that's more reason to include a mention in the article.  :)  (I don't remember watching the TV movie although I might have.) Mapsax (talk) 02:49, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

underestimating technical capabilities?

 * 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.

This is rather misleading. It may well be true that it was not cost-effective to use computer animation for a low budget TV show, when a costumed actor would obviously be cheaper. However, the quote seems to give the impression that in 1985, 3-D CGI was not up to the task of doing this level of modelling, or that the cost would have been totally prohibitive. In reality, by 1985 capabilities had far exceeded what was shown on MH, and it would have been perfectly plausible to viewers to think that Max was CGI.

2-D CGI, and 3-D wire-frame CGI, of course harks back to the 1970's. But as early as 1976, Futureworld had a 3-D, shaded CGI human face. It was pretty crude, though, and obviously artificial. The first realistic-looking, 3-D, shaded CGI human figure (a nude woman, at that) had appeared in Michael Crichton's Looker back in 1981 -- admittedly, the imagery was not animated, although it could be viewed from multiple angles. Then just a year later, Tron had 15 minutes of fully CGI 3-D animated scenes. Most of these were geometric or mechanical shapes, but a few CGI human faces occur as well. In 1984 The Last Starfighter had 27 minutes of realistic 3D CGI imagery, albeit all of it of machines rather than faces, however it is vastly more complex than anything in Max Headroom. In the same year, 2010 had the entire complex and spectacular end sequence computer generated, including numerous faces. In 1985, the year Max first appeared, the music video for Money for Nothing was an entirely computer generated 3D cartoon -- boxier and flatter than Max, but with far more character movement and animation. In the same year, Young Sherlock Holmes had the first example of a photo-realistic 3D CGI character interacting with human actors.

In short, by 1985 the state of the art was actually far more sophisticated than the simple, repetitive motion and totally smooth surfaces found in Max Headroom, and given that 90% of Max consisted of moving between the same small handful of poses, there is probably only a minute or so of unique foreground footage to create -- i.e., it wouldn't even have been monstrously expensive. It's just that it was more expensive than putting a guy in a mask!! -- 202.63.39.58 (talk) 11:48, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

>>> I share the sense of excitement about CGI technology and an interest in its history with the above editor. Yet, I think the above gets it wrong, even if only by a few years. Even if we're only talking about 3-4 years between Max Headroom and Tin Toy, the difference and advancements in that time are significant.

The current sentence - "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." seems to me to be a fair representation of motion picture GCI in 1985. Especially if one is comparing the state of technology with the *practicability* of creating those images. The Max Headroom character features smoothed but softly modelled and realistically lit skin, and there are a number of subtleties in Frewer's performance that are difficult enough 25 years later, let alone in 1985. Quite simply, the infrastructure wasn't there: many of the animation and lighting/shading tools that are taken for granted now were still in development. It's one thing to create a modelled image; quite another to animate it; and quite another again to texture and light it in a way that looks anything like real material. Oh and you want it to look like something other than metal, plastic or glowing light? Oh and how many minutes do you need? How often?

There's a reason why the first characters in early Pixar shorts are non-human. And Pixar was on the edge of this technology, not to mention outcasts within ILM - maybe the geek-friendliest place in the industry. They were using rare and expensive, custom-built, enterprise level computing power. It could take hours and or days to render a single frame. (See The Pixar Story)

I don't believe that any of the advancements cited set any precedent for *animating* even the most rudimentarily recognizable human face with realistic lighting of more-or-less organic looking materials. If there were we'd be discussing those. The caveats made by the previous editor acknowledge the real weaknesses of the argumentThe CGI figures in Tron are either wireframe or highly geometric - a soup can essentially. (I was around, and we thought it was impressive at the time.) For Young Sherlock Holmes we're talking about mapping images of stained glass and metal onto what is essentially a fractured two-dimensional figure. It's not until 1988, that Pixar, in Tin Toy, gives us a reasonable, if still ghastly and geometric, human baby-figure. The examples cited from Young Sherlock Holmes and Tron don't even approach this now crude looking attempt at human flesh on a human figure. To quote The Social Network, "If they'd invented Facebook, they'd have invented Facebook".

The sentence in question, however, says nothing about the *intent* of the creators. The worrisome implication might actually be that the creators wished they could have had CGI - but had to settle for foam latex and chromakey. Would an all digital Max Headroom be as charming at the foam-latexed performance by a real human? Should the Muppets to be CGI? We don't know. We fell in love with the other ones. The statement as it stands is accurate. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.156.223.121 (talk) 07:44, 23 February 2011 (UTC)

Spaceballs?
The "... a case of man bites droid" news announcer in the movie Spaceballs The Movie was a Max Headeroomesque character.

It's referenced on the WP article for the movie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceballs --Thistledowne (talk) 06:55, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Not gonna mention the Eminem video ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.115.208.61 (talk) 13:53, 21 May 2017 (UTC)

History of the character
It's hard to learn the early history of the character from the article. Here's how I think it goes.

Note that sources disagree on some facts. One page says the TV movie is from 1984, another that it aired in 1985. One site says the music video show came before the TV movie, while another claims the TV movie was first. --StevenDoerfler (talk) 04:14, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Sunglasses?
It seems to me as though most "memories" of Max Headroom (beyond my own and people I've talked to, also parodies and references in the media such as the recent article in Wired Magazine) have Max wearing opaque sunshades.

I've recently acquired a copy of both the movie and television show however, which shows him without eyewear of any kind.

When do the shades happen, and how do these stick in cultural memory if they do not dominate his appearances? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jesset77 (talk • contribs) 01:00, 5 August 2010 (UTC)
 * He had sunglasses in the ads for New Coke. This was a huge campaign and may well have been seen by more people than saw the MTV videos. -- 202.63.39.58 (talk) 07:27, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Food article?
Calling this a food article seems weird. The only relationship to food I can see is the fact that he was in some Coca Cola commercials. Is that how that project works? By comparison, Michael Jordan is not considered food-related, in spite of the fact that he has a restaurant. I'm thinking "Michael Jordan : MJ restaurant :: Max Headroom : Coca Cola." Dpurrington (talk) 13:55, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

Homage in advertising
1998 to around 2002 T-Online germany employed a character called "Robert T. Online" in their advertising that was an obvious homage/plagiat/spoof of max, both in apearance and manerism. aparently created in 3Ds max and likely animated using motion capturing. (not adding to article. my edits are constantly reversed) 84.190.206.72 (talk) 21:22, 21 May 2019 (UTC)

Facts and quotes that currently need sources
Let's get rid of this "more citations needed"! These ones require a bit of digging, and can't just be covered by existing citations in the article (eg the Verge oral history): * Shout! Factory released Max Headroom: The Complete Series on DVD in the United States and Canada on August 10, 2010. BrightVamp (talk) 12:17, 25 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Morton described Max as the "very sterile, arrogant, Western personification of the middle-class, male TV host", but also as "media-wise and gleefully disrespectful", which appealed to young viewers.
 * Matt Frewer was chosen for his ability to improvise, and—according to producer Peter Wagg—his "ideally exportable" mid-Atlantic accent. — Preceding unsigned comment added by BrightVamp (talk • contribs) 12:51, 25 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Max's image was actually that of actor Matt Frewer in latex and foam prosthetic make-up with a fiberglass suit created by Peter Litten and John Humphreys of Coast to Coast Productions in the UK.
 * Even the background was not created using computer graphics at first; it was a piece of hand-drawn cel animation produced by Rod Lord, who created similar computer-generated images for the TV series Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
 * These modulations, achieved with a harmonizer, also appear in live performances.
 * The Max Headroom Show, which premiered two days later. (and lots of other tv show premier dates - radiot times?)
 * He was the spokesman for New Coke (after the return of Coca-Cola Classic), delivering the slogan "Catch the wave!" (in his staccato, stuttering playback as "C-c-catch the wave!")
 * In 1986, Quicksilva released a Max Headroom video game, which was sold in the UK for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64.

The backgrounds were really CGI
From the Verge oral history: "We’d just made this commercial for a chocolate milk or flavored milk. And in this commercial, we had these moving, very primitive-looking CGI linear backgrounds. What I basically did was stole that from the commercial, and just put it behind Max."

The confusion about Rod Lord's contribution seems to be that he did the computer graphics on screens in the british tv movie, eg. that Bryce was working on, although in contrast to Hitchhiker's even that appears to have been at least computer assisted (vector graphics programmed in frame by frame)

https://books.google.com/books?id=hA-GDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT106&dq=%22rod+lord+%22+%22max+headroom%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjC5KjHiL_oAhVYmHIEHbFvDmQQ6AEwAHoECAYQAg#v=onepage&q=%22rod%20lord%20%22%20%22max%20headroom%22&f=false — Preceding unsigned comment added by BrightVamp (talk • contribs) 06:38, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Requirements for In pop culture section
Following WP:POPCULTURE, for "In Popular Culture" entries to remain they must be BrightVamp (talk) 22:55, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Reliably sourced, which also means no user-generated content sites (WP:UGC) such as IMDB
 * The source cited should explicitly make the Max Headroom connection and support whatever is stated in the entry