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Max Headroom trivia

© Bruce G. Marcot
updated 30 April 2006

 
CONTENTS

SECTIONS ON THIS PAGE
Who is Max?
Prescient Predictions and One Deliberate "Miss"
The Irony of Graphics
Positioned for an Ironic Failure?
Blipverts
Subliminal Credits
A Special Update
The Story of the Subliminal Names
British to the Max
More Max Techno-Trivia:  Behind the Scenes
Tribute Trivia
Twisted References
Predictions to be Scared Of
My Thanks
Extra: The Real Max Headroom!

ADDITIONAL PAGES
Max's Prescient and Insane Rants
The "Lost" Max Headroom "Contest" Rules

  

  

Who is Max?  

For those of you who missed out on this briefly-aired TV series of the mid-1980's, you have missed much.

Yes, the character Max Headroom began life as actor Matt Frewer in a headpiece (it was never a computer-generated image) in Coca-Cola commercials (in the U.S.; Max was a v-jay before that in the U.K.) ... but Max's popularity was quickly adopted for this amazingly prescient sci fi gem.  The original pilot was produced in Great Britain but soon found an American audience.
 
 
 

  

Prescient Predictions and One Deliberate "Miss"

The series featured computers and a frightening, high-tech, TV-centric culture "20 minutes into the future," as each episode would begin.  Long before there was an Internet, a World Wide Web, e-mail, and cyberculture, this TV series displayed it all in amazingly accurate ways:

One deliberate "miss:"

In one episode, the court system was depicted as a computer that decides the outcome of legal cases.  The defense and prosecuting attorneys slide computer disks into the computer and it provides the decision.  Ridiculous?  Consider that the April 4, 2000, issue of PC Magazine (p. 87) had an article on Cybersettle.com, an automated Web site that settles insurance claims and lawsuits, notifying the litigants when they have come within 30 percent of the dollar amount for which they'd willingly settle the claim (they advertise "holder of US Patent # 6,330,551 for the Computerized Dispute Resolution System and Method").  Also consider that the November 2000 issue of Ziff Davis Smart Business for the New Economy (p. 84) noted that in Espirito Santo, Brazil, traffic accidents and minor offenses "receive immediate verdicts from an artificial intelligence program running on a portable computer."

In one episode, it also showed the judicial system as being integrally tied to television shows and ratings, in "videocourt" ... "All rise for the most highly rated judge" ... predicting the increase in judge and court TV shows so popular in modern times.  

Another episode showed video recordings of the deceased at their grave sites.  In July 2004, NewScientist.com ran an article "High-Tech Messages From the Grave"  which described essentially the same thing ... a real patent (US 2004/85337) for a hollow headstone with an LCD computer touch screen to show the deceased speaking through a video message.   

We are "twenty minutes into the future," folks.
 

Network 23 board member executive, 
watching a real-time graphic of viewership:  
"...Demographics are eroding."  
Cheviot (Network 23 Director): "How are they eroding, exactly?" 
"We're losing the five- to eleven-year-olds."  
Other executive: "Might I suggest that the story lines 
are becoming a bit too complex?"


  

The Irony of Graphics

It is ironic that some of the computer effects on the show were created on Commodore Amigas, and not IBMs or Apples which were incapable of producing such (then-)sophistocated graphics.  The irony is that the Amiga has since left the computer scene, which is now taken over by IBM and IBM-compatibles and Apple (Mac) computers.


Theora, reading a list of complaints against their show from their network censor:  "I have noted three 'damns,' four 'hells,' sixteen cases of sexual innuendo, a reference to self-abuse, two veiled remarks about network presidents, and a joke about the Son of God.  Doesn't say which god."
Carter: "I'm sure it's the current one. It's probably the guy who's running the censor computer."
 

   

 

Positioned for an Ironic Failure?

Max Headroom was a British Creation from Peter Wagg (who also produced the American series), sold to ABC for a short-lived run on Tuesdays following Moonlighting and then Friday's opposite CBS' Dallas, both of these being ultra-popular shows.  Max was not about to compete for such ratings.  This is an ultimate irony, because MH was often about television ratings ruling all aspects of society!  The demise of MH only proved the validity of its predictions.
 

Bryce:  "There are no experimental failures.
There's only more data."
 

 

   

Blipverts

The opening show of the series depicted use of "blipvert" ads on TV that flash images so quickly that watchers are compelled to stare at the screen.  The images act as subliminal messages (which is nearly an inside joke because the show itself used subliminal messages -- see below).

In the episode, a small proportion of TV viewers watching blipverts had a fatal physiological reaction -- they had an epileptic-like fit (and some would explode!).

Sci-fi you say?

Consider an article on "TV: Are You Addicted?" in the February 2002 issue of Scientific American (by Robert Kubey and Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi), which describes the adverse physiological effects of blipvert-like television images:

In 1986 Byron Reeves of Stanford University, Esther Thorson of the University of Missouri and their colleagues began to study whether the simple formal features of television -- cuts, edits, zooms, pans, sudden noises -- activate the orienting response, thereby keeping attention on the screen.  By watching how brain waves were affected by formal features, the researchers concluded that these stylistic tricks can indeed trigger involuntary responses and "derive their attentional value through the evolutionary significance of detecting movement... It is the form, not the content, of television that is unique."

...Annie Lang's research team at Indiana University has shown that heart rate decreases for four to six seconds after an orienting stimulus.  In ads, action sequences and music videos, formal features frequently come at a rate of one per second, thus activating the orienting response continuously.

...But increasing the rate of cuts and edits eventually overloads the brain.

And physiological effects could be terrible:
In 1997, in the most extreme medium-effects case on record, 700 Japanese children were rushed to the hospital, many suffering from "optically stimulated epileptic seizures" caused by viewing bright flashing lights in a Pokemon video game broadcast on Japanese TV.
Other Max episodes showed how society fell into chaos when power was cut and the TV screens went blank.  Viewers (who included everyone in society, since, in Max, having an "off" switch on your TV set was illegal!) would suffer extreme withdrawal symptoms.  Again, the Scientific American article mirrors this bit of fiction as fact:
Within moments of sitting or lying down and pushing the "power" button, viewers report feeling more relaxed.  Because the relaxation occurs quickly, people are conditioned to associate viewing with rest and lack of tension.  The association is positively reinforced because viewers remain relaxed throughout viewing, and it is negatively reinforced via the stress and dysphoric rumination that occurs once the screen goes blank again.
Again, Max got it right by predicting the rise in blipvert-type advertising and the negative effects it and TV in general has on watchers.


Murray:  "Those that can, do.  
Those that can't, censor it."

               - - - - - - - 

Cheviot: "Override Censor? Good God, Murray,
I'm the Chairman, not the Creator!"
 

 

   

Subliminal Credits

In a few of the early episodes, during the opening credits, there appears subliminal text on the screen for only one or two frames.  These occur right after Max is saying “...two minds, but with one single memory,” and the subliminal text is superimposed over the quick image of an Asian man’s face and torso (the man has a ring on his right hand, and is holding a spark plug, then a “zik-zak” sign with a bowl of cereal with food in it; the man is wearing a dark suit with a gray tie with diagonal stripes on the tie; this was from the first American episode on "BlipVerts").

The subliminal text is that of people’s names, which I presume are maybe otherwise uncredited producers, or maybe the special effects people or the writers, but this is only a guess.

These subliminally shown names change, too, in different episodes.

In one episode there is only a single name, “Peter Sternlight.”  In another episode – “Blipverts,” which is the first full episode (shown in the U.S.) – the names shown are “Fred Raimondi” and “Cliff Ralke.”  In a few later episodes, only “Fred Raimondi” is shown without “Cliff Ralke”, or “Fred Raimondi” is shown with “Bill Stewart.”  The episode with “Fred Raimondi” and “Bill Stewart” is the one about “blanks are beautiful” and tele-elections.  Yet another episode also lists "Billy Fox."

None of these names appear in any of the regular opening or the closing credits.  Who are these people?  [See below!]

 


 


A special update to the topic of subliminal credits and the technology shown on Max Headroom: 

An insider (who wishes anonymity) associated with the production of Max Headroom has provided me with the following wonderful tidbits of MH trivia.
 

The Story of the Subliminal Names

As recounted to me, the television industry has its own quirky rules for providing (or not providing) credit for ideas and productions.  As Max Headroom came up to "full steam," it was apparent to all involved that this thing was special.  To this day, many of the creative talent involved still get together, based solely on their involvement on the show; this is quite unusual for a television production.  Max Headroom the show continues to be treated within the television industry with a respect far in excess of the show's audience ratings (box office and industry respect are two very different things).

There was considerable concern that people on the show were not receiving the onscreen credit they deserved.  ABC and Lorimor were steadfast refusing additional credits.  It was television and they didn't have the time nor the screen space for the additional credits.  At least one major player in the production was denied the formal credit deserved and was promised.

None of this made any of the creative talent very happy.  They were discussing this one night and came up with the idea of putting the names of the people, who deserved to be credited by virtue of their work, graffittied into the show somewhere.

It worked like this.  Overall credits spanning the series (camera assistants and the like) were graffittied into the main title.   Episode-specific credits were graffittied into the episode itself.  For obvious reasons, no records were kept of the credits, nor where they were specifically inserted into the shows.

So who are the names I discovered in the opening credits?  

Peter Sternlight (also spelled Peter Sternlicht) and Fred Raimondi are Max editors 1 and 2.  In some of the later episodes, Fred Raimondi is given explicit credit as the visual effects editor, as listed in the closing credits.  There were ultimately only 3 Max editors and these people were the only ones "annointed" to cut the Max inserts, the famous stuttering, freezing and voice pitching.  Lorimar didn't care so they used graffiti (subliminal insertion of the names).  According to the Internet Movie Database of IMDB (http://www.imdb.com), Peter Sternlight (Sternlicht) has since been involved in digital visual effects for such movies as Armageddon (1998), Independence Day (1996), and The Shadow (1994), for the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987), and many other projects.  Fred Raimondi served as the visual effects supervisor for Grasp (2002).  

Cliff Ralke may have done the paintbox graffiti, or may have been the young person who did the Amiga Graphics, which, for the record, were limited to the securicam and phonecam graphic overlays.  (Most of the effects in the show were created with Quantel Paintbox and Harry Computers; Quantel was also British.)  IMDB also lists Cliff Ralke as cinematographer for Terminal Exposure (1987), the TV series Fantasy Island (1978), and other projects since his work on Max.

Another subliminally-shown name was Bill Stewart, who was a video compositor.  In fact, in the episode about "blanks," the character Bryce is shown activating a remote "fly-cam" and the following text appears briefly on his computer monitor:

B. Lynch
B. Stewart
Graduation Project:
"The Botanical View
of the Sex Life of
the African Tsetse"
Note the inclusion of "B. Stewart" (Bill Stewart) here!  In later episodes of MH, Bill Stewart is explicitly listed in the closing credits as Visual Effects Editor.  (IMDB lists credits for a number of "Bill Stewarts.")

In the episode on ViewDoze, one brief shot of a computer screen showed the results of an ongoing, on-line election:

       Instant Opinion Poll

        H. Carter
        S. Peller
        B. Laramie
        J. Rivers

Note that "H. Carter" and "S. Peller" referred to Harriet Carter and Simon Peller, characters in the episode.   But "B. Lamamie" very likely referred to Bernie Laramie, the post-production supervisor for MH.  And did "J. Rivers" refer to "Joan Rivers?"  IMDB lists subsequent credits for Bernie Laramie as including producing or co-producing the TV shows Threat Matrix (2003), CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000), Dark Skies (1996), and others.

Appearing in some of the opening credits subliminal grafitti was the name Billy Fox.  Billy Fox was the playback editor, working then on the Lorimar Lot (now Sony) editing all the pieces used in the computer monitors.  

In the episode about "zipping," there is a brief view of a computer monitor showing real-time ratings of various TV stations including Network 23, Network 66, a few others, and one called "J. Smith TV" ... J. Smith may have been a ficticious name, or perhaps yet another "grafitti" credit inserted into an episode.

Also, in the closing credits of some (not all) of the episodes, a credit reads "Special thanks from Max Headroom to David Hanson and Paul Owen."  These were likely the special makeup people responsible for the Max Headroom segments.  (IMDB lists a number of Billy Foxes, David Hansons and Paul Owens.)

There also are some subliminal audio credits, generally done in the walla background (background crowd noise and such) of the show.  The walla group would talk about the projects on the show as background walla to various scenes in public places.  Sometimes, if you listen carefully, you can identifiy last names and such, although they obviously had to keep it down.  None of this audio grafitti lasts very long.

The production team assumed that "20 minutes into the future" there would be a better technology (remember VHS was still fighting for prominence over Betamax as a videotape standard, and many had 3/4" machines) for frame pulsing and therefore these subliminally-credited people were a form of creating a cyber archeology project for the future.

These and others on the production team contributed so much to the making of Max Headroom.  As mentioned above, they have since gone on to many other successful endeavors, and you can find their credits on other projects.  For example, Fred Raimondi was a compositor on the recent blockbuster movie Titanic, and Billy Fox has since spent many years as Producer of TV's Law and Order.
 
 

  

British to the Max

The subliminal name graffiti was never used on the British version of Max Headroom.  There was a TV variety show with Max on Channel 4 in Britain, but that only had Max as a host.  The British version of Max Headroom is still available in a few video stores and on-line, and is the only videocassette version of MH released.  The American Max lives on as very occasionally-aired reruns on the SciFi channel.  The British version is never aired with the American version (the Lorimar version) because Lorimar apparently does not have the rights to it.
 

Max:  "Ah, love!  The walks over soft grass. 
The smiles over candlelit dinners.
The arguments over just about everything else." 

 

   

More Max Techno-Trivia:  Behind the Scenes

There were numerous innovations behind the scenes, in the making and filming of MH.  Here are some examples:

Max was the first show shot at 30 fps (frames per second) in film rather than 24 fps.  This was done to streamline the video monitor production, which was the largest of any show to date, comprising a standing unit of 6 playback machines and a playback editor (Brian Roberts who is credited somewhere).  By shooting at 30 fps, the production team was able to more quickly turn around the tapes for playback into the monitors without copying them to 24 fps and playing them through special video machines into special tv sets.

Today, most shows use this technique.  The production team did all of this without using any more film than if they had shot the show at 24 fps.  They accomplished this by changing all of the rollers in the cameras and the telecine machines to create film frames 3 perforations high rather than 4 perforations high, the common film format for over 85 years before Max came along.  The post-production supervisor created this system from information received through Panavision from Sweden where they had been experimenting with film formats.  The production team accomplished all of this within hours of starting to shoot the show.

Today, most Warner Bros shows are shot in this format for economic reasons (it's technically not the best way of doing it but it saves money).

Max was the first show to use the Synclavier, an audio keyboard midi device, the first of its kind.  It was the first show to fully integrate video and film for storytelling.  The production team figured out how to freely cut between the film, Max's POV, Edison's camera, and back to film.  At the time everyone thought the production team was crazy.  They used the first prototype of the avid editing system but the experiment failed.  The avid was introduced 2 years later and is now the industry de facto editing system.
 
 

   

Tribute Trivia

Much of the dialogue on the show in the boardroom of the (maybe not-so) ficticious "Network 23 (XXIII)" reflected actual conversations with network executives.

The original stage name of the head of Network 66 (the rival station to Network 23) played by actor Charlie Rocket was "Brandon," because at the time Brandon Tartikoff was head of NBC and Brandon Stoddard was head of ABC.  ABC executives absolutely turned down the argument that "Brandon" was a common name and could be used.  Nice try.  (The final stage name used in the American series was "Ned Grossberg," the character who started off as second in command at Network 23 and switched to become head of rival Network 66.)


Grossberg: "The show has surprise, shock, pace ... and huge cash stakes. I've accomplished the impossible... I've replace mindless action with fascination."

 

Network 66 was so named as a "tribute" to The Omen.

The Japanese corporation on the 
show is named "ZikZak" ...

 

... which is an homage to the French cigarette rolling papers named "Zig-Zag" which were popular in the 1970s and 80s for rolling more than just tobacco.

 


The head of the ZikZak corporation was named ... Ped Xing.  Remember that the next time you cross the street.

 

Max also made a somewhat back-handed tribute to Asian, particularly Japanese, business.  Max displayed them as imminently successful, competitive, and ruthless as major market forces, and that our economy and marketplace would need to bend to integrate them.  (This was also a theme in the film Blade Runner, of the same era as MH.)  This was a few years before Japan exploded onto the technology scene.  At the time, most TV depicted Middle Easterners, not Asians or Japanese, as the bad guys in such situations. 

 

Entering a church with a television on the alter:  
Carter: "What happened to the old religions?"
Murray: "I don't know.  Television killed it.  We have better miracles."

 

   

Twisted References

One episode conjured a fictional, wealthy security company named Sybaris.  Sybaris was actually an ancient city of Magna Graecia of southern Italy, on what is now the Gulf of Taranto, founded 720 BCE.  Sybaris was a wealthy Greek city whose citizens reportedly lived hedonistic and epicurean lifestyles -- thus, the word "sybaritic" means "furnishing gratification of the senses."  

The same episode referred to Sybaris Security Systems as "SS" ... an obvious play on the SS of Nazi Germany.  

The same episode also briefly displayed a TV "rerun" of a show called "Lumpy's Proletariat." The lumpenproletriat (German for "rabble-rouser") was used by Marxists to describe proletariats -- the manual labor working class -- who could not find legal work, and who were prostitutes, beggars, or the homeless.  MH used this term to vilify and ironicize the illegal working class.  

In the episode Grossberg's Return, Network 66 is showing a soap opera program called "Porky's Landing," a back-handed reference to the actual TV show of the time "Knots Landing" (1979-1993), competing with Network 23's "Lifestyles of the Poor and Pitiful," an obvious reference to the actual TV show "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" (1984).  MH was filled with such twisted references.  

 

Murray: "You can't fake a tape, pictures don't lie. 
At least not until you've assembled them creatively."

 

   

Predictions to be Scared Of

So what did Max Headroom predict that we should be scared of coming true?  

Censorship?  In MH, "Censor" is "an automatic network system.  You see, we have stuff pouring in so fast, no one can check it, so the system checks as we transmit, certain words, certain references, certain subjects are automatically cut off as we go on air. ... It 'protects' the viewer."  Does this not conjure automatic censor systems in place today, such as the "V chip" used in TVs, or web page blocking software?  

Actually, most of the scenario of MH is nightmarish and all too increasingly familiar, with its faceless bemasked Metrocops, and for its omnipresent blaring TV screens everywhere (have you sat in an airport recently?), and the law that makes it illegal for a TV to have an off switch (have you tried to turn off those blaring TVs at an airport?), and "blipvert" TV ads that induce epileptic fits, and its integration of "network courts" and political elections with TV ratings.  

Most scary is when "blanks" (people who stay out of the computer databases) are indicted for crimes they did not commit, simply based on computer-calculated probabilities that they may have committed some crime when evidence is not available.  In MH it's called the CCMP, the Career Capability Malfeasance Program.  "It matches blanks with unassigned profiles.  It compares the crime template to the personality template.  And if it matches, you're assumed guilty."  How soon will this become the basis for current-day "profiling?"  Or is it here now? 


Grossberg: "I want you to form a team of the most brilliant minds in network television."
Bryce: "Isn't that a contradiction in terms?"


  

My Thanks

Again, I am deeply indebted to my special, anonymous contact from the Max Headroom production team, for the above "Special Update" facts and stories.  My contact wishes to remain unheralded, lurking in Cyberspace much like Max himself.  He knows how much his work is admired and appreciated, as is that of all the other specialists mentioned above and who appear in the subliminal graffiti credits on the show.  Thanks to all of you for bringing us Max.

Thanks also to Plexus reader Robert Baruch for helping track down some of the unheralded subliminal names in the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).  As Robert pointed out, because those names were shown only as subliminal flashes during some of the Max Headroom opening credits, IMDB does not credit them as having worked on Max.  But now we know what wonderful contributions they made to a vision of our world today.

And thanks to Max (Matt Frewer) and all his prescient and insane rants.

 

Announcer:  "The big news on Network 23 tonight is that the next eleven minutes will not be interrupted by commercials.

 

  

Extra:  The Real Max Headroom!

There is a "real" "Max Headroom" and he "lives" in the London Heathrow Airport, where I've seen him several times now.  

It's actually the words on a sign posted on a driveway gate, just like in the first MH episode.  It reads ... "Max Headroom 3 meters" (or some such height measure).  My wife tried to photograph it the last time we were there, as we took the airport shuttle bus among the Heathrow terminals, but the photo didn't turn out.  But Max is alive and well and living in London...  (and such signs are fairly common in the U.K., actually ... so Max is everywhere there!)

 
 


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