Max in the 1980s: how Headroom looked in his heyday.
Channel 4 is to bring back 1980s creation Max Headroom to front a series of TV ads to raise awareness of the digital switchover. The campaign, which breaks this Saturday, features Matt Frewer, the actor who played the original Max Headroom. Ads will feature Headroom criticising Channel 4, which created the stuttering digital host in the 1980s, for ignoring his vision of a digital future....The six Max Headroom ads range in length from five seconds to more than a minute.
Okay, it's a two-year-old news story. So sue me.
...The six Max Headroom ads range in length from five seconds to more than a minute. From the "1%" blog article titled Channel 4 Finds Max Headroom in a Nursing Home:
If you were a geek, or a budding geek, back in the 80s, then you knew about Max Headroom. He not only hawked C-c-c-coke in commercials, but in 1987, for one short year, he had his own dystopian television show that felt like a cyberpunk rendition of Brazil. Channel 4 in the UK has brought Maximum Headroom back, sort of. He’s a rambling geriatric, being wheeled around in an old television set by a large, British caregiver. Max continuously babbles in stuttered samples as he is bathed, taken on slow-moving tours, and wheeled to the beach to stare at the sea.
The premise: Max Headroom was ready for all things digital 20 years ago, and now Channel 4 is going the same route. The ad is a bit jarring and abrasive, but then again, wasn’t Max Headroom always that way?
Here's the ads, courtesy of YouTube:
"Not a day goes bbbybyby without someone using the word 'digital'...""First, Jim Carrey steals my schtischtick....""Digital switchover is coming!""Guess what, kiddies...the future is here!""I was bbbbig once...back in the eightieeighties, I was bbbbigger than big! Have I ever told you about the eighties...the eighties...the eighties?""No, not the face!"