- #MAX HEADROOM 20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE MOVIE#
- #MAX HEADROOM 20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE SERIES#
- #MAX HEADROOM 20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE TV#
#MAX HEADROOM 20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE SERIES#
Finally, in 1987, Max’s peek “twenty minutes into the future” premiered as an hour-long sci-fi drama series on ABC in the US. From there, he became a British VJ and talk show host and a commercial barker for the ill-fated New Coke.
#MAX HEADROOM 20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE MOVIE#
His creators decided that a one-hour made-for-TV movie could be used to introduce said animated VJ to the world. The character of Max originally started out as an idea to create an animated VJ (video jockey) for an MTV-type music video program in the UK.
But another 80s phenom that had an incalculable influence on the spread of the genre was Max Headroom.Īs this mini-doc makes clear, Max Headroom took a very strange and circuitous route into canonical cyberpunk history. At the creation of the Headroom character in 20 Minutes into the Future, his programmer calmly says, ‘This is the future, people translated as data.When we talk about the early spread of cyberpunk science fiction into popular culture and the emerging techno-culture of the late 80s and early 90s, we always talk about Neuromancer and Ridley Scott’s cinematic masterpiece, Blade Runner, as principal memetic vectors. He represents the end of Lévi-Strauss’s ‘individual human beings’ and the start of a sinister ‘society reduced to its simplest expression’. Listen to the audio performance of Land’s essay ‘Meltdown’ (1995) and watch Headroom with the sound off. Headroom feels like an early tactical manifestation of accelerationism, something dreamt up in Nick Land’s short-lived Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick University in the late 1990s. Despite hailing from the early years of Channel 4, amidst a proliferation of art on British television, Headroom was not the direct product of an art commission, although it echoes many artists’ broadcast interventions, such as General Idea’s Test Tube (1979) and Shut the Fuck Up (1985). He looks simultaneously human and synthetic: both are plausible, neither is fully convincing. In this photograph of Frewer being made-up in his latex costume, we encounter the uncanny valley.
#MAX HEADROOM 20 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE TV#
In the late 1980s, the character was spun off into two TV series, including The Max Headroom Show, a music-video showcase. The style borrows from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), but the premise uncannily resembles Robocop (1987), as a half-dead human is brought back to life by technology with disastrous results.
The character – a journalist turned into a computer-generated head following a traumatic accident – was launched in the TV film Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future (1984). That of the Nambikwara was so truly simple that all I could find in it were individual human beings.’Ĭreated in 1984 by Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton and George Stone, Max Headroom was a pre-internet, post-human tv presenter, portrayed not by computers (the technology wasn’t up to it) but by actor Matt Frewer inside a complex latex mask. ‘I had been looking for a society reduced to its simplest expression. Like most of Godard’s script, the line comes from elsewhere, in this case Claude Lévi- Strauss’s memoir Tristes Tropiques (The Sad Tropics, 1955). Courtesy: John Humphreys, In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1969 film, Le Gai Savoir (Joy of Learning), the characters talk in an empty TV studio, searching for images ‘of a society reduced to its simplest expression’. Actor Matt Frewer being made up in the latex mask designed by sculptor John Humphreys for Max Headroom, c.1984.
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