Matt Frewer, an American actor living in Britain decided to audition for the role by recommendation from a friend.

At the same time, the hunt for Max Headroom, at least his actor, began. Unfortunately, the team fell out with George Stone due to creative conflict, but a replacement writer Steve Roberts took his place to write a final script for the film. The team pitched it Channel 4, who liked the idea so much that they gave the opportunity for an hour-long film to set up the narrative before the real 13-part show aired.īy 1984, the idea had enough funding to get started. All this progress was made, but at this point, no-one whew what Max Headroom would even look like. This narrative was called “20 Minutes into the Future”, explaining how Max Headroom came to be. George Stone decided that he should be computer-generated, and from this point, an entire narrative began to unfold. When discussing the concept of an animated figure, Morton came up with “the most boring thing that could think of to do, which would go against the grain for the MTV generation… was a talking a head: a middle-class white male in a suit, talking to them in a really boring way about music videos.” And the seed for Max Headroom was truly planted. When it came to animation, Wagg reached out to Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, who were cutting-edge animators at the time. But it also had another meaning maximum headroom is filling your head full of sound and vision. It was piece of signage that everyone knew, easily recognisable and could act as a form of free marketing. In 1980s Britain, the height restriction signs that we know as “Max. Wagg contacted writer George Stone to join his team, and the first thing that was agreed on was the name Max Headroom.

Wagg looked at MTV for reference, which had originated the concept in 1981, and decided that the video jockey didn’t need to be a real person, he could be animated. In the early 1980s, producer Peter Wagg was contacted by British TV network, Channel 4, who were in need of small programming slots for a upcoming music video show Think of the original MTV, the small guidance scenes in between the music videos, presented by a television personality. Max Headroom began as a computer-generated artificial intelligence video jockey. Granted, I have known of Max Headroom for a couple years now, and until a few days ago, I just dismissed him as weird 1980s character. The thing is, I never really knew about Max Headroom until a few days ago.

Max headroom screensaver