I was the art director on these commercials. There were done by our team at McCann Erickson and shot by Ridley Scott. Shot in London, mostly on stage but the opening with the truck was shot on the street. We did these in the Winter and it was COLD - shot until after midnight as I recall. We did a whole "Catch the Wave" campaign for New Coke. There were other non-Max commercials in the mix, including "Horizontal Pour" and "Technical Difficulties." These were all done after Coke Classic had been reintroduced. The idea was the New Coke would be a "predator" brand and go head to head with Pepsi while Coke Classic would sail above the fray. It worked. The cola wars pretty much ended after this and Coke never looked back. I don't think Pepsi has made any serious inroads into Coke's market share since.
That's awesome, can you give us any insight to the whole "Bladerunnery" aspect of the ad? Were the others ones you mentioned also Bladerunner like? Was Ridley Scott, the Bladerunner crew, or any known sci-fi artists involved with the design of the set?
There was some disagreement about how the commercials should look. I felt like they should have the dystopian Blade Runner look - this was Ridley Scott, after all - but there were others, like the group Creative Director, who felt it should have more of a Spielberg E.T. vibe. The original English made for TV movie, directed by Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel also had a dystopian vibe. Anyway, when we had our initial meeting with Ridly I brought along a book called "Dead Tech," which was photographs of things that were once high tech and were now crumbling, like the Maginot Line in France, or various steel mills and so on. Ridley loved that and there was no more discussion. The Group Creative Director hated me for it bu I didn't care. Ridley is a good draughtsman - he can draw "in lenses" so that what he puts on the page will pretty much be what it will look like when shot. He was the mind behind the set design. None of the other folks - like Sid Mead, for example - who worked on Blade Runner were involved. If memory serves we shot at Pinewood Studios just outside London on the 007 stage, which is enormous.
@Jason Rasmussen You bet! You think it's creepy? Vack then it was all make-believe. Now we actually have creepy robot machines that listen and watch our every move, reporting it all back to headquarters. I'll take Max Headroom over that any day!
Summer of 87 there was a very cool radio rap song by max, it was a summertime commercial and I used to have it memorized, now all I remember was that he said paisley. I google it all the time but I don’t know if it was done as max or if it was the actor Matt doing it for coke since it was just a summertime jingle.
You obviously haven't done a google search and were not around when Max Headroom was a well known international talking head (parody, kind of)... First time I saw Carey I thought he'd straight copied the whole act for many of his most famous, outrageous characters, and of course voice and facial expressions (which he's very good at copying, to be fair)... They look very similar due to the shape of their lips.
OMG! How did I run up on this? I haven't seen Max in decades. Wow! And that first bit was actually the first time I ever saw him. Well, this one's going to facebook.
Gee, these two commercials make me feel old! I remember them airing in the mid 1980s and have not seen them since. I think there's a third in this series with the kids where they ride with him into a clubhouse and max says "af, f-friends!.....'
This was directed by Ridley Scott, between movies. The "mother" is Elisabeth Sladen of Doctor Who fame, but her voice has been dubbed by an American actress.
Yes, the formula is the same as it was before 1985. That year the company tried a new formula trying to compete with Pepsi, but few people liked it. Later that year they brought the original formula back, which outsold New Coke 10 to 1, and outsold Pepsi by introducing Cherry Coke and Caffeine-Free Coke. But now, 28 years later, while New Coke is still available(but very rare, some think it was brought back as Vanilla Coke), the original formula is STILL marketed as "Coke Classic".
Didn't the Jacksons sing a "catch the wave" song for Coke? RU-vid doesn't have it, but I remember a pop music commercial (maybe not the Jacksons, but an R&B pop sound)
As much as I hate water with bubbles (tap water tastes so much better to me), no that's not a doorway to alcohol, some just taste good (being a Sprite and Coke drinker for years, now also Red Bull). We all have different tastebuds I guess, some people will love a meal that others will hate, imho that's the same reason why carbonated drinks taste so bad to you.
