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Back on TV: Max Headroom
infofreako writes: "
Everyone's favorite 80's construct, Max Headroom, has returned
thanks to the people at TechTV.
According to their website,
they will be rebroadcasting all 14
episodes starting this Friday! This series was doing ethics
themes based on designer babies, corporate controlled media, brain
scanning and more before some of us were capable of hitting record
on the old VCR. "
R-R-R-Rock!
Bet that doesn't include the original Channel 4 series and the original TV movie with a much slimier Bryce. As always, US TV took a good idea and sanitised it for the masses.
(showing age). The 15 minute entertainment show - Max + videos (zoolookology anyone?) was much sharper than anything that came later.
"Oh to be in gay Paris, where only the river is Seine"
.02
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Max Headroom back on TV, Alf doing commercials, a new flavor of Coke hitting the market, Hulk Hogan as WWF champ... the 80's are back! Ronald Reagan should be President any day now.
Max Headroom was shown on Canada's Bravo network soon after it came out. Already have all the episodes recorded in LP for my time-shifting pleasure.
The best episode by far was #13: Lessons, about cracking down pirated video programming. Children were not allowed to learn because the educational television wasn't paid for, and schools were not free to the public.
SPOILERS AHOY....
The whole thing turns out to be a cover operation for an old fashioned printing press operation, to print real books for kids to read.
It's very 80's of Max to focus so much on how much television will change our society. Sign of the times.. The world could use a lot more freelance journalists like Edison Carter...
I saw the story, and had to check with my Tivo. It had already seen the show in the listings and was ready to record as per standing orders.
/. not covered this, the Tivo would have recorded it. That's the difference between a VCR and a Tivo.
Even had
BTW, since chrisd didn't spoil it, I will - Edison doesn't die....
www.eFax.com are spammers
This is something...Max Headroom episodes were great. I loved the "20 minutes into the future" atmosphere. Network 23 (the innovator of "Blipverts" - commercials shown at high speed to prevent channel switching) and its sponsor the Zik Zak Corporation (motto: "We make everything you need, and you need everything we make") were bad guys I could really sink my teeth into. And of course every episode features a good dose of Max Headroom himself. Anyone remember Max Headroom's show on Showtime? He hosted a talk show and interviewed celebrities, and predated Space Ghost by about 10 years. The only negative I see is it's on the really obscure channel "Tech TV", which is probably only availible to those with satellite TV.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Obviously anyone who has read this 'conspracy theory to end all conspiracy theories' will realize why Edison Carter works for 'Network 23'. :)
deus does not exist but if he does
What's tech TV? Is it a real TV station? I've never heard of it...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They invented this new color. The Max Headroom guys would look at it astounded while the camera was always on the other side of their computer monitor so you couldn't see it. How could you invent a new colour on an RGB monitor??? Funny stuff, that show is great.
;-) Can't wait until mine arrives...
Then one day I found out that they really have found a new color! Hrm, I can't seem to find the link though, anyone have it? You can even buy T-shirts in the new colour
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
TechTV is owned by Vulcan Inc., the Bellevue, Washington-based investment organization of Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen.
Hmmm... is TechTV objective? Do they also have Apple and Open Source programming? I really don't know. Otherwise this scares me.
Carl
Vote Libertarian
Max Headroom was NOT computer generated. Those funky, trippy lines behind him might have been, but even that would have pushed technology to the limits. :P
Oh, and by the way, Star Trek (the orig, with Kirk) didn't have a computer generated starship either.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
April Fools happens at the beginning of April, not the end.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Amanda Pays, she was pretty hot.
Hey I barely (barley is yummy) remember Max Headroom, not that I'm young(33) but didn't he start by some guy going face first into a toll booth arm thing...what do you call those things? It said "Max Headroom" on it. Shouldn't he be called Moordaeh Xam? Sounds like an Indian superhero... :-P
Watch out Delhi here comes Moordaeh Xam! Bollywood should make a movie about that.
Actually, it was just plain old makeup against a bluescreen for the backdrop.
dont forget squant from a few years back. It was a pretty cool hoax, there were pictures of various squant (the new color) colored things that you couldnt see without a new RGB-Squant monitor.
There was even a plugin for your browser to allow it to approximate the appearance of Squant.
Your
In protest of the show being canceled, someone in Chicago hijacked the airwaves of 2 TV stations. It's pretty amusing, unfortunately the only site that had video clips of it is down. Here's some information though:
Google Cache with more information
Slightly less, but more direct information
To summarize, it involved a Max Headroom mask, a bare ass and a fly swatter, while Dr. Who was supposed to be playing.
I just want the DVD box set already, dammit. And while they're at it, could they please get UHF released, too?
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I mean, if the entire Titanic can realistically be rendered, why not be able to render a person in real time with realistic voice synth and physics?
Are you serious? If you are, you obviously have absolutely no grasp of how 3D modeling works.
Rendering something like the Titanic is easy. (Not easy in the sense that anyone with a copy of 3D Studio MAX can do it, but easy in the sense that it's just a ship.)
When you create something in 3D like the Titanic, it's based on specifications that do not change. Lighting is constant, shapes stay the same, and moving parts are minimum.
Compare that to attempting to duplicate a person, detailed, in 3D. People are tremendously harder to do than objects, because people automatically scrutinize other people. That's why when you look at a movie like Final Fantasy, you can say "Wow, they sure are realistic, but there's just *something* not right."
With a person, you have to deal with mouth movement (a very difficult thing to model in 3D), eye movement, muscle expansion and contraction based on movement, bending limbs and joints, breating, and a whole host of other factors. Then when you get into voice synthesis (which is still not perfect, but AT&T is making leaps and bounds.), and physics modelling on things such as cloth and water... It's all very hard.
So between rendering something like a ship moving through the water, or creating a realistic person in 3D, the ship is a lot easier to do. It may be painstaking in detail to create, but it's still just basic shapes.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
...but pop-up ads and spam make me want to explode.
:( I would tape every episode of these!
I wish I got Tech TV out here
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
AFAICT it is not. Anyone know if it will be?
As I vaguely recall, yep, that's where he debuted. Maybe Pepsi was time-travelling at the time and brought Max back from the future. :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
VCR??? What the hell is that? I was recording those babies on my parents BetaMAX.
The previous virtual mascot for the channel, Tilde, was female (appealing enough to the first niche gamer-type market ZDTV was shooting for), but she was not good enough. They used on-the-fly 3D graphics based on VR-suit-like encoding, so the movements of the character were not fluid or terribly near accurate.
If Matt Frewer could record new vocals, I don't think anyone would object to a purely-digital Max Headroom. Digital!? But, what about..um..the original..was..good..um..ah.. Oh yeah..they just didn't have the technology to do it in 1985, you know.. psst.. they used a latex mask--it wasn't digital!. Also, surely Mr. Frewer is not doing terribly much since Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Lawnmower Man 2, so he can probably use the money (that is, if a short revival of the original series doesn't load his pockets with royalties).
Oh, and don't watch Lawnmower Man 2...for the love of all that's Holy! Don't watch it!
For once, they've got something on TechTV that I actually want to watch. Max Headroom of all things! That was relegated to certain death on the A&E network where it was playing.
But this time around, I've got TiVo. I'll save and savor every episode. This completely rocks. (Can you believe I kind of idolized Bryce Lynch when I worked at an ISP? Scary thought.)
This'll go absolutely perfect for the videos to play in my arcade gameroom. Max rocks. He's the perfect consumer whore!
Zik Zak corporation is Microsoft's role model :-)
Anyone know is email address?
Oh, wait.. Maybe he's still answering the webmaster address.. That appears to be (google) the email address he's been using on the site (according to a quick search).
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Fresh Gear - gadgets galore... if you read /. you would probably like this show
Audiofile - where tech meets music... everything from mp3s to music creation gear to the tech behind making acoutic guitars
Extended Play - the only weekly program I know of that covers video/PC gaming (tho I'd imagine the channel G4 is offering quite a bit... wish I had that channel :)
The Tech Of... - they pick a topic (rollercoasters, race cars, etc) and well, talk about the tech of it :P
Yes, The Screen Savers plays a million times a day... but once you have a TiVo it doesn't matter what's on "right now" anyway! Buy a TiVo and then you can enjoy the "better programs" that apparently don't air whenever you happen to be channel surfing. :)
If all you were watching for was the animation sequences or the action scenes, then I guess this comment is dead-on. Of course, if all you were watching for was the animation sequences or the actions scenes, then you seriously missed the point! Max Headroom was about computer animation the way that Star Wars is about space flight; that is, just as a hook. The key to Max, the whole essence of the show, was its cynical-yet-so-true jaded view of Big Media and the world we were rapidly approaching, wherein the sheep of the world abdicate their power to the TV... Hmmm. A lot like this world, actually.
Max Headroom might have been "twenty minutes into the future" but it was also twenty years ahead of its time.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Just so long Coca Cola leaves my Coke alone this time. Max scares me and brings back some terrible memories of driving from store to store in the backwoods of Arkansas to find unsold 'real" Coke.
Classic Coke is acceptable, but it's still not the real coke of the past when it was still made with sugar rather than frutcose and sucrose syrups.
This series was doing ethics themes based on designer babies, corporate controlled media, brain scanning and more before some of us were capable of hitting record on the old VCR.
Ahem. Speak for yourself. I was the only person in my family who could Program the VCR. I was 4 years old. My dad still hasn't figured it out.
Triv
A BetaMax of a Beta Max.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
>wow, techtv is the best, i wish i got it where i live
:-(]. 3,760 MHz Horizontal, MPEG2/DVB, Symbol rate: 26000 FEC:7/8.
Where do you live?
In the western hemisphere, try Satcom C4, transponder 12, or the various DSS providers.
In asia, try AsiaSat3S [listed as encrypted
Elsewhere, I don't know -- sorry. Since TechTV seems to be (generally) a FTA channel, you might get lucky if you check your local DVB listings...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
If somebody told me teen would be locked up after refusing to watch TV commercials in school, I'd think they were kidding.
I can't provide a link to this one, but a certain religious radio station gave away three radios as a promotion in a very low-income area - radios that were locked into the station's frequency, with no way to change it.
An ATM tried to show me a commercial for something today.
Does it seem to anybody else that we're in a handbasket going you know where?
...when Max Headroom receited the alphabet on Sesame Street? I was, sadly, too young to catch the original on TV the first time around, but the stuttery, spoken alphabet "song" will forever be burned into my subconcious.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I believe that was a negativland creation.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
It could be WORSE.
You could be seeing a talking coca-cola vending machine.
Don't forget your change!
Y'know, I look at advertisements for new model cars, and I look at the state of the economy, and I look at Slashdot stories like this and I just have to wonder... Maybe Back to the Future II was really shot on location in 2015 afterall.
"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live" -- MLK, Jr.
Nope, it died a deserving death: alone, unwanted and when it died no one noticed, not even a obit. (except probably the wall steet journal)
Max was my favorite show for a while there, back when it was on. I don't remember how old I was... couldn't have been more than 7 or 8.
Anyone one year for Halloween, my sister WAS Max! My father and aunt helped her turn a big cardboard box into a wearable TV set, with holes in the sides (arms), bottom (legs), and front (so it looked like she was a head inside the TV looking out). We even got wood-colored wallpaper so it looked more like a TV (remember it was the 80s, and lots of TVs were still built like furniture, with wood siding).
Definitely a cool costume.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
Trivia: The guy who exploded watching blipverts was played by Mike Cule, who played the Vogon Guard in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series...
Yes. I am sad, thank you very much...
"Information wants to be paid"
Even ST:TNG used a model for the Enterprise. The model was mounted, upside down, in a green room. A motion controlled camera was then used to move around the ship to create movement. Then stary backgrounds were matted onto the green field. That is why 95% of Enterprise shots are of the bottom of the ship.
In some of the fly-bys, notably the opening credits, you can see people moving inside the Briefing Room. This was done with a green window where the briefing room window was, then stock footage of people walking around was shrunk and matted into the scene.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
There is no "better than connecting it to Video-In..."
Laserdiscs are, believe it or not, analog. (The video is, anyway, there were a few incarnations of digital audio.) Worse than that, they're composite video, so you need to decide whether the comb filter in your capture device is better than the one in your LD player. (Decide this by testing with a good monitor. Dot crawl sucks.)
I have a pretty sizeable collection of Laserdiscs, and keep meaning to start converting these to DVDR. I have this bizarre hangup that I need to move the AC3 audio, and I haven't found any way to capture AC3 with a S/PDIF card. (Pointers appreciated!)
The reality is that I should ignore that, since anything I might have with AC3/DTS is recent enough that it's likely to be rereleased anyway.
Back to your question, spend as much money as you can bear on the capture device, (I have a Director's Cut, but would get a DA-MAX if I were doing this for money.) think about a proc-amp (might not be necessary) and go for it.
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
the title music was one of the cute things aswell, by british band The Art of noise, another part of the show that was about 15 years ahead of the times..
Cheesy story ...
When I was a very young geek lad, I had a TRS-80 color computer. After watching Max Headroom, I decided that I wanted my own max headroom. So, I layed awake in bed one night, excited about the prospect that there could be a slight chance that I could build a max headroom with my TRS-80.
The next morning, I tried. It was my first programming experience. It went something like:
10 say "hello, I am max headroom"
I couldn't figure out what "syntax error" meant, and my dreams of my own Max Headroom faded into the past.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
No, the show itself was 1) very expensive to produce, and 2) really stretched the authors to the point of burn out.
The Prisoner was the same way. There were only 17 episodes of the Prisoner because they simply ran out of other things to do that wouldn't be repeating what they'd already done to some degree or another.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I just got the channel a few months ago, it isn't what I thought it would be, I dont like it.
/. types will be fans of a network that is so Microsoft centric, with an occasional aside for Apple (though last night the guy said something to the effect of "well, they set me up with an Apple again and I've already shown you how to use the ipod, so will skip the 'tips' sequence and move on to something else...") and, even rarer, a mention of GNU/Linux. TechTV simply isn't relevant to what most of us do, nor are they particularly close to the leading edge of software.
... all of 4 or 5 hours / week (OK, so I don't watch much TV. Since they cancelled Max Headroom there really hasn't been much on worth watching).
:-)
I don't imagine too many
That having been said, they do have an excellent show on in the evenings entitled "Big Thinkers," which last night featured an industrialist working on developing nano-technology, and a night or two ago had Lawrence Laessig on discussing the debacle that is current copyright law. That, and the airing of max headroom, will mean I'll end up watching techtv more than any other channel
In short, it looks like they may have realized how out of touch they are with the tech savvy crowd, and are doing something constructive about it, "Screen Savers" notwithstanding.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
More trivia. The guy that ran the pirate radio station in the bus/camper/whatever was also the prison guard in one of the Star Trek movies, and ALSO was in B5 as a bad soul hunter. Great actor, whose name escapes me now...
.... wait for it...
Ishtar! , which scored 3.6/10 on imdb. Major suckage.
- j
AFAIK, the first trek series to use computer models was voyager. They looked a little bit cheesy at first, but of course got much better towards the end of the show.
The only way you can tell the difference nowadays is by taking a good look at the motion of the objects. The motion of cgi models is freer, a little more calculated and perfect than plastic-and-glue models.
Rich
MAX. HEAD ROOM 2.3M
That's how, in the American series at least, Max got his name: it was the last thing Edison saw before being walloped into unconsciousness and having his brain scanned. When his braindump came online, it was the first thing it tried saying, and it stuck as a name.
The cyber-battle leading up to that was also loads of fun to watch, but I won't spoil how it happens; it's well worth a chuckle.
What a trivia geek I am too, but in this case I don't see that as a bad thing.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
No corn syrup. Cane sugar.
Dear oh dear, some people are hard to please.
What shapes would this young fellow like to meet/frag on screen instead of people? Trolls? Amphibious landing craft?
And how dare people dis innovations coming from my home town (no, I'm not on the payroll).
Personally, I think producing a 3D head model from two ordinary pictures is a neat trick. Meeting 'avatars' of friends on line is surreal but definitely entertaining. It'll catch on sooner or later, unlike a lot of crud from the last 2 years...
I'd really like to have the link, and I'd expect that many others would like that link too.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.