Originally published at: Max Headroom being interviewed live by the BBC in 1985
…
11 Likes
It was a particular bit of fun watching some folks slowly recognize the Max Headroom background I’d use in the early days of pandemic zoom meetings.
23 Likes
The actor who played Max (Matt Frewer) regularly pops up in genre telly and movies I watch, and every time, I’m like “That’s Max Headroom!” and I squee a bit.
I was always quite surprised his career didn’t sky-rocket after playing Max though. Sure, he’s had steady work, but back then, he had as much star power as anyone I was aware of.
22 Likes
the first time this credulous fool became aware that Max Headroom wasn’t CGI was on stumbling over this article which shows the fiberglass ‘makeup’ - actually a full upper-body mask - they used under all the subsequent video effects available at the time.
(the c2000 primus music video being the heir apparent…?)
12 Likes
You weren’t the only one. I blame it on 640x480 analog raster scanned pictures… 
Ugh… hours rendering, saving to a tiny frame buffer, spitting out 10 to 20 seconds at a time then working the h*ll out of the video tape editing machine. Kids these days don’t know how good they’ve got it… 
12 Likes
The Max Headroom movie and US series also used lots of pseudo-CGI in the form of hand-drawn animation pretending to be vector computer displays. The '80s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy TV series used the same animators for its graphics:
edit: playlist removed
11 Likes
I love Wynona’s Big Brown Beaver… wait, notlikethat!
5 Likes
That’s not actually a genuine clip from the Hitchhiker’s series.
But this is.
6 Likes
13 Likes
I get an almost vertiginous feeling comparing all the carefully crafted fake CGI in entertainment of the '80s and '90s to modern, real-time graphic processing. (And the movies that had both - Tron!) The speed at which things went from “we can do this for real with CGI” to “we can do this so much better with CGI” is somewhat dizzying.
10 Likes
We had such amazingly odd TV in the 80’s. I miss the objective weirdness that was SOP then.
3 Likes
8 Likes
Same. I love seeing him appear in shows I’m watching. I watched, what was it, Psy-Factor or something like that just because he was on it.
I also went to a funeral once where he was a pall bearer. That was a bit surreal.
6 Likes
The original Max Headroom movie (20 minutes into the future) was such a fantastically bizarre bit of television. I love it to this day. The woman lead parked her car inside her loft apartment! There were punks running an underground pirate TV station. One person’s big crime was putting an off switch on a television. The male lead ended up in a corpse processing center when he wasn’t dead. Just so much odd stuff packed into it, it’s fascinating.
13 Likes
In the case of Holly from Red Dwarf, it was assumed that future computer performance would be so advanced that it could be portrayed by using no CGI at all.
14 Likes
That’s not actually a genuine clip from the Hitchhiker’s series.
But this is.
Sorry about that, I just linked to a playlist that was supposed to be a number of HHGTG animation segments, it looks like this one was included by mistake.
3 Likes
I’m sure absolutely everyone here knew it but…
I was looking up something Star Trek the other day and discovered that Terri Farrell was in the US version of Red Dwarf.
I couldn’t really watch it. But it exists which is certainly a thing!
6 Likes
I can hardly believe the USian TV bods tried that. Never heard of it before. Tell me it never got beyond the 2nd pilot. Too much of the humour was quintessentially British.
Also
Not only is everything in it a practical effect, it’s all being done in real time.
Or, Max was a recording and Wogan just delivered his rehearsed lines in the bits in between.
Nah - Wogan was a pro, but I doubt he learnt all those lines. No real signs of him looking at signs of a teleprompter, but I suppose he could have been.
(ETA @beschizza typo in headline. Interviewed missing an ‘r’)
5 Likes
Frewer starred in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation as a time-travelling conman but I think they really missed a golden opportunity for a crossover episode.
18 Likes
I’m hoping someone here will know more about this monstrosity!
1 Like
