On Max Headroom: The Most Misunderstood Joke on TV 

Thank you for understanding. Excellent observation. Bullseye.

Matt Frewer is a criminally underrated actor.

You said 54 years and my heart dropped wondering if I'm so old I'd lost time. Then you put up the math reminding me it's 2039 and I felt old for an entirely different reason.

I am very surprised that Max Headroom hasn't become bigger in the Vaporwave aesthetic scene. he is the VERY CONCEPT of vaporwave

Max Headroom definitely feels like something ahead of its time. We need him more than ever now, in the age of cult personalities and social media; its like our modern world was designed for him to flourish.

It should also be said that at least one guy in America got the joke: the infamous Max Headroom Incident, in which a man dressed as Max Headroom (but with a full body) hijacked a tv station. Whang does a really good video on what happened, who probably did it, and why.

I was in my 20's when Max Headroom was on MTV and everyone I knew was aware that Max was a person playing a computer generated character and most of us appreciated the effort and the humor.

As a 50 year old,i feel like there's some things modern audiences miss about this well loved character. 80s and genX nihilism doesn't just come from the constant existential that of the cold War. It comes from a consumer culture where everything is depressingly devoid of meaning or value. Anything meaningful will be co-opted by commercial interests and recreated as something completely missing the point with the meaningless qualities emphasized. Max is a parody of all that. It's ok that he sold out. It works that consumer demand created stupid parodies that make no sense. Our society is so stupid that we should love new coke. None of it matters unless it's kind of funny. If phillip k. Dick had written buster friendly in the 80s,it would have been max headroom.

The Ray Bans were a practical solution. Matt found the contacts to be very painful, he didn't want to wear them anymore. So they gave him sunglasses.

Also, there is a 5th joke in Max's name that you left out. "Headroom" refers to the space a cameraman leaves over the head of the person in the frame. So that makes his name also a reference to the broadcasting format he is making fun of.

The hypothetical Max reboot actually sounds fantastic. I'm sure they'd half-ass it and get it wrong if they actually tried it, but what you described would be amazing.

I never saw Max as a villain. We have a thing in the UK called 'taking the piss', and Max was the ultimate piss taker. The closest real life persona to Max is probably Russell Brand

Seriously clever with the three second advert thing, next level genius...

Wait. As a child of the 80's I gotta say, nobody believed he was real cgi. Or very very few and only the oldest and dumbest. He was very clearly an actor.

"Life is pain, anyone who says differently is selling something" Timeless quote

I'm still not convinced that "New Coke" wasn't just a ploy to got people re-enthused about the "original" Coke.

Max Would be hugely popular today. Bitterness is much more accepted these days.

>Clicks the link to this video >See it's 40 mins long >Ain't no way in hell I'm sitting through 40 mins of this >2 minutes in >Ok. I can sit through 40 mins of this

6:10 - "Imagine a heartless Robin Williams". There is a small irony in this statement you may not be aware of. The Star Trek episode "A Matter of Time" was written specifically for Robin Williams as he had said several times that he wanted to be on the show and was working to make that happen. However, due to scheduling issues, he was never able to make the time to shoot the episode. The actor who they hired to replace him in his part was Matt Frewer.

Nobody at the time thought that it was genuine cgi. Just take a look at the limit that contemporary cgi had reached. Money for nothing by Dire Straits was filmed in the same year and it was absolutely state of the art for the time.

I love Max Headroom and used to record his shows on video-tape so I could watch them later. I loved his sarcasm and the music, and when he said to Sting "What do you do when you play in a country where they don't understand English, off the top of my head - America?" Just pure brilliance!

You missed one piece of Max Headroom that defined him for me. The song “Paranormia” by The Art of Noise, an incredibly popular group at the time, featured a vocal story of Max Headroom unable to sleep until another voice offers him comfort. Following his origin story, Max was a semi-sentient being uploaded, a “ghost in the machine.” He was a spirit half insane, bashing around computer networks, remembering sleep, but unable to access that comfort. Max was the insanity of our always-on society, on the brink of becoming something new as the internet started to metastasize. He was an insane AI, willing to do the bidding of his programmers, but feeling some shadow of his humanity when the programmers went away. And somewhere some other voice of mercy was leaking through into the machine to give him comfort. I also owned the Max Headroom Guide to Life, which was a total piece of shit.

It's genuinely eerie how the ongoing back-and-forth between "glitches" and ironic commentary EXACTLY matches the rhythm and overall aesthetic of youtube poops...

The problem with current relevance for Max is...the satirical dialogue of media control and influence is no longer a secret, it's not punk, it's so blatant and disturbing and inevitable that we meme about it constantly. We've hit dystopian already but can't admit it even though we all know. We meme about a mass pedo/sex trafficker being "suicided" because humor is how we cope with the inevitable reality that our world is run by horrible horrible people who view human lives as the smallest unit of measurement possible. Max was a cautionary tale that no one understand and it's far too late for his message now

dude, the natural comedic timing in your commentary is so good. I'm so conditioned to RU-vid vids being voiced by annoying, cringey and awkwardly tropey amateurs, so listening to someone who's not any of that is a breath of fresh fucking air!

Thanks for the exhaustive dork research on Max. Really enjoyed it.

Satire and lasting criticism is what make people more careful and cautious about the bad side of the media industry to push it to become better

So basically, the British made a joke and the Americans didn't get it. What's new?

Holy shit. The Spiderverse ad joke was hysterical. Absolutely flawless execution.

Max was waaaaay ahead of his time: Skype, blipverts, wi-fi, drones, cloning, body banks, GPS tracking, wikileaks, "resurrecting" dead actors via CGI, virtual reality, etc...

Max was a streamer decades before it was a thing. I'm glad I got to actually experience the whole of Max Headroom at the time. Matt Frewer's improv was a key part in being able to pull it off live, but the writing was brilliant. Great vid, at the time in UK we didn't really have those talk shows so I was never aware of the connection, though the satire was still obvious.

Not just one, but lots of misunderstood or not-quite-understood jokes. That's why rewatching -- and talking about it, like in this video -- is key. Also, I have to admit, I just really like the music video (and extended song version) of "Paranormia."

My mother was a producer on the Max Headroom show. -It was awesome to hang out on the set and watch them film. I was young but remember how important and cool everyone who worked on that show thought it was. I was able to meet Matt Frewer and he was extremely nice. Still wish I had my Valatera Max Headroom skateboard with the hot pink wheels. Thanks for the great video and perspectives.

So much of his appeal was the time itself. You had to have lived in the 80's to really get it. Young people today just don't understand just how powerful MTV was in the day. Max was all that in a blunt and often rude digitized talking head in a time when talking heads were almost always polite. Those were some wild and crazy times. Glad to have survived the ride!

This was an incredibly interesting breakdown of the Max Headroom character, keep up the great work like this!

A truly thought provoking critique. Well done! There are one or two more details worthy of exploration. Firstly, Max Headroom was originally broadcast on Britain's FOURTH television channel - Not just a small channel but the first new channel in 20 years and, at the time, only 3 years old. At that time, Britain had very limited exposure to American TV programming and even then, only complete series - Certainly not live shows, such as talk shows. David Letterman etc were more or less completely unknown in the UK at the time. British culture as portrayed on British TV was significantly distinct from American culture and the subject matter of US talk shows would have been of no interest to UK audiences - American TV at the time focused mainly on what happened within the USA and late night on the West Coast would have been very early morning in the UK. While the UK did have a few talk shows the formats were different and the hosts considerably more sincere. To that extent, Max Headroom was a British satirical critique of the insincerity of American Television in general, and quite possibly a warning of what British TV could turn into. I think there's some similarity between Max Headroom and Max Quordlepleen, the host at Milliways - The Restaurant at the End of The Universe in Douglas Adams' The Hitchhikers' Guide to The Galaxy and in fact, some of the graphics in "20 minutes into the future" are reminiscent of those in the original BBC Hitchhikers' Guide TV series. I'm not sure there was ever any intention of broadcasting Max Headroom in the USA so it's hardly surprising the American TV audience didn't get the joke. :-D

Being around back when Max Headroom was first released, I can attest that I believed that he was actually computer generated (well at least at first viewing). This may sound silly by today's standards but you have to remember we basically had no experience viewing anything CGI other than a few short clips in Star Wars films and a Dire Straits video, so we had nothing to make comparisons. Also, TV resolution back then was horrible, certainly much less than 640 X 480 dpi, so you really couldn't make out details that would give away practical effects.

The danger in analyzing satire is in forgetting that the funhouse mirror is just as aptly turned on ourselves as it is on, say, Talk Show hosts.

I was a teenager when Max Headroom first came into the public consciousness. Like most great comedy, people who loved it understood exactly (or at the very least approximately) what was going on. It was more than obvious at that time that Max Headroom was not computer generated - this was a time when Asteroids (the video game) and Tron (the original movie) were the pinnacle of computer graphics. Everyone understood that futuristic content was all visual effects. The concept of analyzing and explaining Max Headroom misses the joke so wildly that you become part of the joke. The Canadian TV series Max Headroom was created way after the original British music video show. Whether or not the backstory was part of the original show is irrelevant. This was pure cult TV aimed at young people which made fun of everything "adult".

OMFG I'm generally so uncomfortable with talk shows and could never explain why. You've hit the nail on the head: polypolitical. They are selling personality. this is brilliant stuff.

The British tv pilot is probably the best thing to watch as an introduction for someone who's never seen Max Headroom.

Honestly, I want Max Headroom to come back! And with his status as a villain and all, I really do think he has the potential to top villains like Handsome Jack or Bill Cipher. And of course with the infamous Max Headroom Incident, that whole mess of a TV hijacking would just cement his villain status even more.

I watched this stoned and tapped the “skip ad” button you put there at the moment you resumed the explanation of max headroom’s origin, so I genuinely thought I was getting ads on YT premium 😂😂

My takeaway from this: Steven Colbert stole Max Headroom's shtick.

Matt Frewer's wife was a good friend of mine in the 90s. I met Matt a few times. He's a very nice man, very quiet and introspective, extremely intelligent and very dryly funny.

Max is the villain we need in these troubling times.

I like how someone who probably doesn't actually remember any of this thinks that no one who watched it actually got and 30+ years later he has to explain it to them

I loved Max. He never got enough air time. In the song Paranomia, he can’t sleep, he wants a star on his door, or better yet a door, ha swinging doors. He ridicules himself as much he does anyone else. The only thing we have like him these days is South Park. Nothing is sacred.

The blipvert thing is frighteningly on point

As someone who liked Max Headroom in real time while he was still around, this video really made me examine *why* I liked him. He was rude and blunt, unlike polite society, he was the antithesis of "good ol friends" rural culture, he was sort of like a prototype of Johnny Bravo....something you INTENSELY disliked, but when you bother tuning into him, he's funny....then you promptly forget about him again. You had to. It was almost expectation to never, ever dwell much on anything he said. He reminds me of the modern gas stations, which were always silent, but now BLARE with advertising noise. He is an embodiment of advertising, and you mention that in relation to talk show hosts...but I imagine it one step further...he IS advertising. Rude, unapologetic, misogynistic, amoral, blatant, polished to an eerie spit-shine, and also very much, as I agree with the video, NOT your friend. I was young, but somehow this was definitely in my soul...even though I didn't have the words or world experience yet when I watched him. Thank you for your dork research!

This is a criminally good breakdown. Thank you.

I actually worked on the original Max in LA at the Post Group. We did some crude CG for the show, and yes, everything was super hard and time consuming in those days. Peter Waag was often hanging around and seemed to me kind of a dick in meetings. I got to meet the actor Matt a time or two. Nice guy, we felt sorry for him going through hours of makeup. He also had his own ophthalmologist around because the contacts were dangerous to keep in for long . Great analysis and research by the way! From my pov the show was actually pretty fun and often shocking in its forcasting for entertainment. Oh, and yeah the Japanese were indeed buying up Everything during those times and it freaked people out a bit driving up prices (but everyone wanted them as a client since they had endless money). Bring Max back! good idea.

holy shit the blipverts spiderverse joke oh my god. Amazing.

A criminally low number of views on this one. Excellent video, enjoyed every second.

Bravo sir! Great essay and video about the subject. Excellent points about the late night talk show thing.

Brilliant video! Thank you for putting this together.

Max was like the first meme in history. He disappeared and was misunderstood, because he was just 40 years ahead of the curve

"Because of course we did" should be the epitaph on humanities tombstone. In other news: I think Matt Frewer is an underrated character actor.

That was intense viewing. Thanks for making my Sunday morning so much better.

"Floored" and "confused"? Not even close. As a 17 year old in 1985, it was the coolest thing we'd ever seen. He was funny and fascinating to all of us and the talk of the high school the next day . He was all over the place and we couldn't get enough until he saturated our daily lives and was out of there by 1988.

A senior level manager at Coca-Cola revealed to me that the "New Coke Disaster" was actually a bait and switch to disguise that Coca'-Cola Classic went from using cane sugar to high fructose corn syrup. If you think about it, it's actually genius.

As someone who lived through all of that, and ate it all up, I am glad someone else sees the need for Max to come back.

I liked Max because he was representative of the counter culture spirit of punk if you thought of him as the concentration of all the things we didn't like about the world. He was the closest thing to critical of pop culture you could find outside of the lyrics of the music I listened to

I have vague memories of Max Headroom from when I was a small child and this video explains him, and the 1980s, perfectly. Thanks for doing all the exhaustive nerd research!

"Americans would always worship Celebrity, even if it was made of this, acted like this and looked like this..." Just.... Yikes....

Back in the 80s, when I still had a physical body and there were only 4 television channels in the UK (I know, one of those facts seems unbelievable, right?) I loved Max Headroom. I was 15, exactly the right target audience to appreciate the satire. The books (especially "Max Headroom's Guide to Life") were much more on the nose about how vicious the satire really was.

I have no clue anything I'm seeing. So lost yet, I simple love you voice and energy of narration. And the far away clisnof yelling are perfect.

I was too young to remember Max, but I do remember Matt Frewer being in a little bit of everything back in the day. After watching this documentary, I get the feeling Jim Carrey may have modeled all of his characters on Matt. They even have identical voices.

I certainly wasn’t expecting to watch a 40min video today but as a child of the 80s I couldn’t resist. That was an incredibly enjoyable deep dive into the character plus so much more.

I never saw Max as a villain, more of a trickster. Max is chaos. If your thinking green, he will say red. Max would be the perfect face for a hacker group who was going against an evil corporation.

This is a splendid piece of analysis. Thank you

Amazing vid, i didn't know just how much content they made with this character, i've been looking at various videos on the titular man himself and i've started drawing connections to a character in Toby Fox's work, Deltarune, Spamton feels like the perfect encapsulation of a lot of the things you said at the end, a "business man" driven insane, yet with all the pleasantries of a salesman, great stuff

As an Australian who grew up in the 80's but without having seen many of the late night talk shows but knowing of them. We loved Max. He was a cynical, satirical, allegory of everything we thought embodied mainstream commercial television and America. This excellent online video essay by Cameron Byerly reminds me of what we loved about Max. All style, no substance but in reality a clever commentary on the world of celebrity before it was a thing. Max was before his time and yes whoever owns the rights to him now they need to dust him off. Let him live again. But would they allow this to happen? Is it a crime that it hasn't happened? Does the world need a "Max Headroom' now more than ever? It's a crazy mixed up world. Max could be the cure.

I genuinely enjoyed this video. Max headroom was from a time that people born in the 90s and later will never really be able to grasp. And you broke him down perfectly as well as the night show hosts. I was one of those people who thought that Max headroom was a computer program I was genuinely convinced that goes to show you how good people are at their damn jobs

Great review beautifully put together. Savage stuff!

excellent editing!

I think Matt Frewer was extremely underrated in this character. All of the over the top facial expressions, laughs, and ridiculous sounds were done in live action by him. I think he even surpassed the facial and emotional flexibility of Jim Carey. I would have liked to seen more of this actor's work.

Original "Max Headroom" fan here, and someone who believes he understood the joke. I loved your historic, organized, researched, and connected analysis. Great work in giving me a lot to think about; as I view the last few decades, and where we find ourselves today.

I watched the original series so it's scary to think that, in 2039, a program I watched as a teenager will be 54 years old.

Reboot announced today, starring Matt Frewer. I hope the new producers/writers understand it.

As a kid during this period, I can tell you that max headroom was representative of cool. The MTV generation LOVED him. He was the opposite of a bad guy to us

I think it’s perfect that max never had a defining moment and that he just disappeared...he had an influence...he was like a subtle subconscious suggestion...a fleeting sense of a thought...a prophecy of sorts...

I was there - we understood Max and was begging for computers to progress lol. He was totally in the times as we were coming along. Presently I am still impressed how advanced he was for the time. Yet in the day we expected it, computers were soooo slow to become commonplace.

Given the context of your video I understand where you're coming from & as someone who watched every episode when it broadcast originally Well Done!!

"20 minutes into the future" as a setup to a dystopian world is somewaht subtle and terrifyingly genious. Gives me a feeling of a society on the edge of total collapse, a feeling i feel sometimes, as a brazilian in these days. I'm baffled by how well though, sarcastic, genious and well done everything about this video is, and i'm really glad i randomly found this content. Thank you so much. Also, good luck on the last kirby badge 🤣🤣🤣

That was just brilliant! Thank you for making this. And finally someone else who also wants to see Max back on the screens, acknowledges his relevancy and realizes his potential. I've been talking about this for years, but mostly to myself, I admit.

I remember Max Headroom as a kid and not understanding him at all. Kids are oblivious to satire and get very bored very quickly, especially when it's a "computer generation" in the '80s. I'd really love to see him now that I'm jaded by life.

Oh my God I’m so lucky I found you! This is my first video and I’m subscribing! I love your style!

Outstanding video. I grew up with Max Headroom and I've never been able to articulate the lost opportunity I feel happened there or why exactly he felt much more deep than just a shallow joke. This was great to watch.

Matt Freyer also did a great job as a guest star on an episode of Star Trek:TNG as an opportunistic hack inventor who time traveled from the past who tried to trick the Enterprise crew into believing he was a historian from the future in order to identify and steal important technologies from the 24th century in order to bring them back to his own time.

He's gonna be a real phenomenon in 2039 guys watch out😭😭

The 3 second Spiderman ad clip was masterfully played. I had to rewind to make sure it wasn't an actual ad

Some of us do not have to remember... Max is like an old friend we have not seen since school... Some of us even miss the guy. Thank you for the mini-documentary.

I must be outside of the joke on this channel but saying 1985 was 54 years ago broke my brain lol

ps. Max wasnt a joke. He was the voice we needed then and again today.

Great piece, brought back some memories and added a lot of pieces to the puzzle

I was watching this thinking "how haven't I heard about this guy before?", thinking the channel had 500k subscribers. You have under one thousand. This channel is criminally underrated, based on the quality of this video.

It took me way too long to figure out that this video was set in 2039

this was such a well done video. you deserve way more subs.

Best coverage on this story I've ever seen 👏