The whiz-kid who does the dump tells a bad-guy network executive, “I could make a memory dump of his synaptic circuits…the brain is only a binary computer. In the 1985 television show, a TV reporter named Edison Carter has a bad accident after discovering a dubious television company’s experiments and then gets his brain dumped into a computer program. Kind of scary, right? The character’s origin story is scary, too. He yelled a lot and twitched and the lined walls of his rotating digital box of a room seemed weirdly prison-like. Or at least it was meant to look that way. What I could discern: his glitchy and pitch-shifted vocal delivery, as well as his backdrop, was computer generated.

I am four years older than Max, but I wasn’t even really conscious of him as a kind of AI. He was also one 0f the earliest forms of fictionalized artificial intelligence (along with the “Flight of the Navigator” spaceship and C-3PO) that I came in contact with as a kid. Headroom was the star of a British sci-fi movie and TV show, talk show host and music video jockey, a David Letterman interviewee, and one of many Coke-hawking celebrities. M is, of course, for Max.For some reason, the 1984-born TV icon Max Headroom came up in conversation this week, and I immediately went down a very deep YouTube rabbit hole. Max Headroom takes us through the alphabet on Sesame Street. Sting says golf is “an old man’s game.”Īmong the array of Max Headroom New Coke videos, here’s one you’ve probably never seen with Run DMC, VCR glitches, and tracking adjustments. Max Headroom interviews a young Sting and hates his shoes. Included at the end is a clip of Ledernacken’s (we’ve never heard of them, either) music video “Ich Will Dich Essen” (I Want To Eat You). Max goes on and on about his love for golf. Just as applicable now as it was then: Are you a man wearing flip flops and baggy shorts? Max lets you know his thoughts. After the jump, we celebrate our nostalgia for a young Matt Frewer by dredging up some classic Max Headroom clips you won’t find on the DVD.

His smooth style and love of golf charmed us. With a pronounced jaw line and cool shades set against a backdrop of geometric lines, Max Headroom’s trademark stutter and biting criticism of big corporation, network television and censorship, intrigued us.

Have words like blipvert, fringer, and Zik-Zak entered your lexicon in the last few days? Got ’80s New Coke on the brain? Have no idea what we’re talking about? Shout! Factory’s recent release of Max Headroom: The Complete Series, a show that ABC aired from 1987 to 1988, has those of us who spent our childhoods in front of the TV excited.

Max headroom music videos