If that wasn’t enough, Max’s celebrity status made him an ideal spokesperson to help Coca-Cola promote, appropriately, New Coke-with Ridley Scott directing the commercials (yes, that Ridley Scott). ABC then adapted the original movie into the series Max Headroom, aka Max’s Blipverts. Max eventually made his way to HBO’s “side project” Cinemax with The Original Talking Max Headroom Show, adopting a celebrity interview format piloted in the U.K., featuring the likes of William Shatner, among others. The Max Headroom Show, with the title character as a veejay, debuted mere days later-and was a hit. The project began as a cyberpunk TV backstory movie, Max Headroom: Twenty Minutes Into the Future, in which a television reporter suffers an accident after discovering some nefarious activities by his employer, and is replaced by a wise-cracking, glitchy “CGI” version of himself. “I mean, it’s all sound, it’s all vision, it’s filling your head full of music and sound.” Stone didn’t have a good answer for why that name worked, but Wagg loved it since it dealt with the content, he told The Verge. Teaming up with writer George Stone, they landed on a name: Max Headroom. Producer Peter Wagg, who worked for Chrysalis Records, explained in The Verge‘s “ The Definitive Oral History of 1980s Digital Icon Max Headroom ” that the idea started out as an animated, fabricated host of a music video show. The character was then brought to America when ABC created a new drama series for the character that expanded on the story introduced in the TV movie.The show has its roots in the early ’80s, at the intersection of music and the newly created Channel 4 in the U.K. Max Headroom quickly became a pop culture icon in the UK, and famously appeared in ads for New Coke. The character then went on to host The Max Headroom Show where he served as a video jockey playing music videos. Max Headroom is a fictional artificial intelligence that is advertised to be 'the first computer-generated TV presenter.' The character first appeared in the 1985 British “cyperpunk” TV movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future. Additionally, Matt Frewer is set to reprise his role as the title character, with Halt and Catch Fire co-creator Christopher Cantwell on board to write the series and serve as showrunner. AMC Networks is teaming up with Elijah Wood’s production company SpectreVision to develop a drama series reboot of Max Headroom, the snarky 'first artificial intelligence' the world ever saw. Deadline is reporting that a 1980s icon is about to make his return to TV.

Max headroom video