![]() Litten and Humphreys took cues from the computer tech of the time, and achieved this by smoothing things out, creating prosthetics that completely covered Frewer, making him look plastic-what we might call “low-polygon” today. The illusions had to be real, lifelike, and above all, remarkable to the point of fooling eyes and brains into believing Max was not Matt, but all digital. How do you make somebody look and feel digital? “We had to realize the future as best as we could,” Humphreys says, “and we pulled our hair out from time to time.” That meant trial and error, experimenting with media, and applying or reapplying makeup and foam prosthetics to Frewer, who sometimes stretched his face in such exaggerated ways during performances that the foam lifted off or seams began to show. It was as vague as, ‘He’s a computer-generated character.’ It had to look like Matt, it had to be as convincing as possible.” At that time in the ’80s, nobody knew how a computerized humanoid would appear, but Humphreys and Litten worked together, combining their talents and artistic know-how to pull off a special effects magic trick, albeit without any digital tools. But well before Max’s fame, during the project’s formative years, an even bigger issue loomed: How do you make somebody look and feel digital? “When we were first approached,” says Litten, “no one had any idea how we were going to achieve what they wanted. With each appearance and each performance, transforming actor Matt Frewer into Max Headroom was time-consuming. Ultimately, Max may not have been able to save New Coke (the company eventually discontinued it), and his final TV show completed its run in the late ’80s-but he continues to reverberate throughout visual culture today.Īlong with Wagg and Stone, Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton are credited as co-creators of the character collectively, they brought the idea to life with the help of special make-up and prosthetic designers Peter Litten and John Humphreys, who designed Max’s look and feel. If that wasn’t enough, Max’s celebrity status made him an ideal spokesperson to help Coca-Cola promote, appropriately, New Coke-with Ridley Scott directing the commercials (yes, that Ridley Scott). ABC then adapted the original movie into the series Max Headroom, aka Max’s Blipverts. Max eventually made his way to HBO’s “side project” Cinemax with The Original Talking Max Headroom Show, adopting a celebrity interview format piloted in the U.K., featuring the likes of William Shatner, among others. ![]() The Max Headroom Show, with the title character as a veejay, debuted mere days later-and was a hit. The project began as a cyberpunk TV backstory movie, Max Headroom: Twenty Minutes Into the Future, in which a television reporter suffers an accident after discovering some nefarious activities by his employer, and is replaced by a wise-cracking, glitchy “CGI” version of himself. “I mean, it’s all sound, it’s all vision, it’s filling your head full of music and sound.” ![]() Stone didn’t have a good answer for why that name worked, but Wagg loved it since it dealt with the content, he told The Verge. Teaming up with writer George Stone, they landed on a name: Max Headroom. Producer Peter Wagg, who worked for Chrysalis Records, explained in The Verge‘s “ The Definitive Oral History of 1980s Digital Icon Max Headroom ” that the idea started out as an animated, fabricated host of a music video show. The show has its roots in the early ’80s, at the intersection of music and the newly created Channel 4 in the U.K.
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