Actor Matt Frewer's actions are translated onscreen into those of his avatar, talk show host Max Headroom. Max was the first virtual celebrity.
Max Headroom is the name of a fictional artificial intelligence, known for his surreal wit and a stuttering, distorted, electronically sampled delivery. The character was created by Peter Wagg, Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton and performed by Matt Frewer.
The Max Headroom character originated in 1985 as an announcer for a music video programme on the British television channel, Channel 4, called The Max Talking Headroom Show. The intent was to portray a futuristic computer-generated character. Max Headroom appeared as a stylized head on TV against harsh primary color rotating-line backgrounds, and he became well known for his jerky techno-stuttering speech, wisecracks, and malapropisms ("Like they say when you're buying suppositories, 'With friends like that, who needs enemas?'").
The Karl Lorimar Max Headroom Sweepstakes
Production notes
Notwithstanding the publicity for the character, the real image of Max was not computer generated. 3-D rendering and computing technology in the mid-1980s was not sufficiently advanced for a full-motion, voice-synched human head to be practical for a television series. Max's image was actually that of actor Matt Frewer in latex and foam rubber prosthetic makeup with a fibreglass suit, superimposed over a moving geometric background. (Even the background was not actual computer graphics at first; it was hand-drawn cel animation like the "computer-generated" animations in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series. Later in the U.S. version they were actually generated by a Commodore Amiga computer.) But when these things were combined with clever editing, the appearance of a computer-generated human head was convincing to many.
