Sci-Why? FU! - Max Headroom

Max Headroom - a glitchy cyberpunk face that seemed like a novelty in the 1980s - somehow became a pop culture anchor through commercials, parodies, and wall-to-wall brand exposure. If you mostly remember New Coke or a weird talking head you saw on TV, you’re not alone and that’s part of the story.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Let me give you a partner. That's unbelievable. Hi. Both of you.

SPEAKER_06 0:14

This junk is a machine. This is not Edison Carter. It is a computer-generated geek. It is useless. Do you understand me?

SPEAKER_02 0:23

Edison is somebody else's system.

SPEAKER_06 0:27

We buried that kind of crap decades ago. Then I am talking ratings. I'm talking people thinking. Do what you think. Do what you have to, Mary.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Perfect.

SPEAKER_02 1:29

I like it. Let's do it. Let's shoot this turkey.

Why Max Headroom Still Matters

SPEAKER_02 1:32

Are we rolling? And welcome back to Dispatch HX. I'm Skip.

SPEAKER_04 1:37

I I I I I I am Jake.

SPEAKER_03 1:40

I was hoping one of us would do that.

SPEAKER_04 1:43

I'm stupid.

SPEAKER_03 1:45

Well, if it wasn't you, it'd be me. So today we're talking about a a fascinating and baffling pop culture phenomenon from the eighties that I think is still relatively recognizable, but almost no one has context for now. And also, even at the time, especially in America, almost no one had context for. And nobody seemed to understand why it was such a huge phenomenon. It's a really interesting story that has more legs through advertising and cameos and parodies. We're gonna talk today about Max Headrum.

SPEAKER_01 2:23

That's a pretty strange name, too. Never heard of him.

SPEAKER_03 2:26

First of all, you're of an age where I know that is a lie. You're a liar! You're a fucking liar. Not only that, but it is so oddly prescient today that it's worth talking about. Parallels to today's media landscape are undeniable and Nostradamus-like.

The UK Dystopia And Blipverts

SPEAKER_03 2:47

On April 4th, 1985, a dystopian satire premiered in the UK. Max Hedram Colon, 20 Minutes into the Future. It was a quippy, sarcastic take on media, corporate greed, Reaganism, and Thatcherism through the eyes of an investigative journalist named Edison Carter, played by the great Canadian actor Matt Fruer, and his quote, computer-generated altered ego. The first computer-generated TV presenter, Max Hedrim, was a baffling phenomenon that was quite literally ahead of its time.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

What a shame. Hmm, mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_03 3:22

I couldn't help it, that was stupid.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

What I want to know is why are the only funny lines on this show the ones behind me?

SPEAKER_03 3:28

The character was created by British video directors and artists George Stone, Annabelle Jenkel, and Rocky Morton. Totally sounds like a made-up name. Max was advertised as being computer generated, and some actually thought he was, but mostly because people don't know anything. But he was, of course, Matt Frewer wearing prosthetics, a wig, contact lenses, a plastic molded suit like he was in a Talking Heads video, and sitting in front of a blue screen. The creators imagined him as satire, a dark mirror reflection of the media culture that was shaped by Reagan and Thatcher, as commercialization in television became more invasive into the fabric of society. Now the movie is set in a near future where giant corporations control the media. The citizenry are addicted to television. And the story follows Edison Carter, who works for a underground sort of mysterious network 23. That's accurate. As he discovers that network executives have actually created a new form of cramming things down your throat through advertising known as blipverts, that can actually kill a person. It essentially overloads the brain, having seen these blipverts, which are entire advertising campaigns truncated into sped-up video and quick edits in a very, very small compact amount of time. While investigating the story, Carter is involved in an accident where he collides with a barrier that says max headroom 2.3 meters. And of course, it takes his head off. Desperate to maintain ratings with this guy, because he was extremely popular. The network hires a hacker to download Carter's mind and create a virtual avatar so that Carter could live on. All of this came from years of brainstorming between the creators. The original idea, which we'll get into, was that he would be sort of an interstitial between music videos or even TV shows on BBC's Channel 4, and that each segment of footage with Max Hedrum would be five minutes long. What they ended up doing was taking all of these little segments they created, these little shorts, and combining them into an hour-long made-for-TV movie. 20 Minutes into the Future, which is its subtitle, created an enormous franchise. And Max Hedrum very quickly became an 80s pop culture staple that represented everything that was innovative and creative and also awful and evil about that decade. He hosted he hosted interview shows, he was famously the spokesman for New Coke, but also introduced mainstream American

How The “CGI” Illusion Worked

SPEAKER_03 6:08

audiences to cyberpunk. He was pretty much everywhere, and then suddenly he was nowhere. This is a quote from Peter Wag, who's the producer. I was working for a record label, Chrysalis Records, by the way. I was basically ahead of what they called, in those days, creative services, which in television is the branch of whatever media to create commercials, either by making them for clients, or acquiring commercials to air during shows. Once MTV started, it totally revolutionized the dynamic of marketing and selling music. Music videos sort of becoming the most important part of our armory. Fortunately, that fell under my wing. I went to Andy Park, a pal of mine who ran a commercial radio station and became commissioning editor for music at channel 4, which was a new embryonic TV channel in the UK. Andy said, Hey, what do you think about trying to develop a new music video show for Channel 4? They were trying to compete with MTV. Of course, if you look at MTV, it was a bunch of video jocks, real people, linking and introducing music videos. And I thought to myself, well, alright, that's been done. So the starting point of the project was we didn't need a real person. Maybe it's animated, maybe it's a character we can create this sort of a hybrid mix that has a transatlantic accent, that has certain visual attributes. If you like, it's like Johnny Carson meets Terry Wogan in England. Terry Wogan was a look it up, you'll you'll get it.

SPEAKER_04 7:26

Okay, do your own research.

SPEAKER_03 7:28

I'm just asking questions. So the first person I listed was a guy named George Stone. So George Stone worked for an ad agency from George Stone. Quote, I was a writer and radio producer and commercial maker, and we had a number of clients that were record companies. I was interested in what we'd call the landscape of television, if you like. We had the show title first, Max Headroom. I mean, there was a list of about 40, one of them was called The Tube, I think. I did it one weekend and Max was the one that won. It's all about sound, it's all about vision, it's filling your head full of music and sound.

SPEAKER_04 8:01

And it's a great pun for what happens.

SPEAKER_03 8:03

That's true, very, very much so. His thinking, his logic behind the name Max Headrum, was because, quote, Max Headrum was all over the entranceway of every car park in the UK. So every parking garage. Garage. Yeah, well, Garage. Okay, that's fair. Therefore, instant branding and instant recognition. He goes on to say, it's a joke that's very specific to Britain, I think. There's a huge firm that specializes in car parks and height restriction notices. It's Max Headrum 6.5 feet, or whatever. In this case, 2.3 meters. From every single piece of signage, you had this title, which everyone knew. As a consequence, if Max Headrum National Car Park spent about three million pounds changing all of their signage to maximum height.

SPEAKER_04 8:46

That's nice.

SPEAKER_03 8:47

It's pretty funny. Annabelle Jenkel said that George came up with a great storyline with most, if not all, of the characters in place. Nobody really knew what Max would look like or how he would develop. We were talking about Bell's theorem, action at a distance, artificial intelligence, and everything else. So they went on this weird existential creative journey. They really thought they were doing something innovative here. They were going to create the first artificial avatar to host a television show, essentially. Which is ambitious, especially for the early 1980s. George Stone goes on to say, so what you have in the character is a consciousness, fully human, total amnesiac, whose first experience to the world is exposure to 30,000 simultaneous channels of television. That's where the character comes from. He's a fusion of every evangelist, every sports reporter, everything you see on TV, and from his perspective, he sees no difference or distinction between them. Which would of course be reused later as the plot of Age of Ultron to that movie's detriment. They didn't spend any time on that whatsoever. Two days after the TV movie's broadcast, Channel 4's The Max Headroom Show was officially launched. The main character was a VJ, essentially, a la MTV. Introducing music videos, ranting and raving between spots, quipping sarcastically, sardonically, snarkily, commenting on modern British and American politics, or just pop culture things.

Branding, Channel 4, And MTV Competition

SPEAKER_03 10:18

And it even inter you know even interviewed guests in front of a live studio audience, which I don't really understand the logistics of that, but it reminds me a little bit about uh just a little bit of Space Ghost Coast to Coast.

SPEAKER_04 10:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:36

And so as that part of it became more popular, they made that to focus in the second season, which became a hit in the UK. The second and third seasons were even broadcast in the US through Cinemax.

SPEAKER_04 10:50

Or as you kids might know it, Cinemax.

SPEAKER_03 10:53

Kids. You mean like elder millennials?

SPEAKER_04 10:55

I mean somebody over fifty.

SPEAKER_03 10:57

Exactly, right. So Channel 4 canceled the Max Headroom show after its third season with a Christmas special, which I watched earlier today, by the way, and it is bonkers. It's no Star Wars holiday special, but it's got like Robin Williams and Tina Turner in it. I mean And a bunch of British actors I've never heard of.

SPEAKER_04 11:16

If you look at the cast list for the people that were on his show, it's crazy. The names on there are just out of this world.

SPEAKER_03 11:24

And the crazy thing is, this Christmas special was written by George R.R. Martin. What the fuck?

SPEAKER_04 11:30

This is back when he was working.

SPEAKER_03 11:31

Yeah, when he was cranking things out for Murder She Wrote.

SPEAKER_04 11:34

He wrote something we covered previously.

SPEAKER_03 11:38

Yeah, probably Murder She Wrote, because I did that in one episode about it.

SPEAKER_04 11:42

I feel like it was something else. Put a pin in that maybe.

SPEAKER_03 11:45

So they went from this sarcastic commentary on commercialization and commodification of culture, and commodified it and commercialized it. And then, of course, that uh suddenly America whips its head around.

SPEAKER_04 11:59

What?

SPEAKER_03 12:00

Do I hear dollar signs?

SPEAKER_04 12:02

Bro, let's steal that British thing and make it ours, alright?

SPEAKER_03 12:05

Yeah, that always works out really well. Like the unaired pilot for the American Faulty Towers with John Larriquette.

SPEAKER_04 12:11

Yeah, yeah, let's do Max Headroom. Max Headroom's gonna be good, but it's gonna be big. Let's make it.

SPEAKER_03 12:15

So then ABC acquired the rights and put their own little twist on it. They wanted to go for a primetime dramatic series that actually addressed Max Headroom 20 minutes into the future and sort of move away from the MTV thing, which I think is a good idea. However, the MTV thing was the thing that really made it popular. The show was broadcast for only two seasons, 87 and 88. Peter Wag attempted to sell a movie called Max Headroom for President. If that's your pitch, I'm listening. But it never came to anything. The show only produced 14 episodes in its two-season run. For the 80s, that is crazy. That is a very British run. The show also, along with Matt Fruer, starred Amanda Pays, who was one of the leads in the The movie. Well, yes, in the movie, but also in the CBS DC comics The Flash. Chris Young, Jeffrey Tambor. Wait, Chris Young, was he Not the former Royals pitcher, Chris Young, but Great Outdoors, that's what I was thinking of.

SPEAKER_04 13:09

He's the oldest son in Great Outdoors.

SPEAKER_03 13:11

Okay, there you go. And then also George Co. If people don't remember who George Co. is, ironically, the voice of Space

ABC’s American Rebuild And Quick Fade

SPEAKER_03 13:19

Ghost in Space Ghost Coast to Coast. And a bunch of other adult swim stuff, who died, sadly, about 15 years ago. Or maybe 10 years ago. Yeah, about 10 years ago. Now, despite it only running for two seasons, and not just running for only two seasons, but for being a relatively unpopular show that got cancelled pretty early. It created this weird anchor in worldwide pop culture in the 80s. Max Hedram appeared on the cover of Newsweek. He was parodied in Mad Magazine. He was in a Donesbury comic. He was in Coke commercials, pushing new Coke. I seem to remember him in maybe he did Dorito commercials too. I can't really remember. Maybe I'm just conflating the Coke and Dorito commercials, as we'll talk about. He also appeared in several other things, including Back to the Future 2. Well, kind of. He was a parody, but it was the same concept.

SPEAKER_04 14:06

Yeah, it's a direct take on Max Headroom. And kind of like, what if Max Headroom just became ubiquitous? And that's the way that things are in the future?

SPEAKER_03 14:15

Or ring any bells, anybody? It is also funny, too, that in that they were hawking Pepsi instead of Coke, uh, which could be one of the reasons that he didn't appear as Max Headroom, but who knows?

SPEAKER_04 14:25

It's interesting that Coke took this character that was new, inventive, and different. A British character from an American actor uh that had this small movie. Well, yes. And then made him spokesperson, and he's this weird supposed to be CGI generated uh you know, computer animated talking head to sell their product. It's very like I guess it was at the time that it was the big late 80s, early 90s Coke versus Pepsi war. Um, the great Cola Wars.

SPEAKER_03 14:57

We're all veterans.

SPEAKER_04 14:58

I have that shirt I lived through the Cold of Wars.

SPEAKER_03 15:01

I got a purple heart. I was wounded in the I got a triple bypass myself.

SPEAKER_04 15:07

That's an very inventive ad campaign with something that's new and untested. Props in a weird way. If any large cola conglomerate needs props in any way.

SPEAKER_03 15:18

Actually, having looked into the Cold of Wars a bit recently for completely unrelated reasons, but also completely related reasons, Coke had lost its majority market share, or at least a huge chunk of its majority market share to Pepsi at the time. Pepsi was taking a lot of big swings. They had signed Michael Jackson as

Coke, New Coke, And The Cola Wars

SPEAKER_03 15:35

their spokesperson. Pepsi was gaining on Coke in ways that Coke had not been challenged in a long time. I mean, Coke survived being a supporter of the Nazi Party.

SPEAKER_04 15:45

I mean, we we've got a lot of companies that survived the Nazi Party.

SPEAKER_03 15:49

Well, that is very true. Most of them just changed their name. Coke was a recognizable brand. And then when there were laws put in place during World War II where American companies couldn't market or sell their products in places like Germany or Italy, that's where Fanta was created. Fanta was a ghost company to replace the big presence that Coke had. I mean, Coke was a big sponsor of the 1936 Olympics, for Christ's sake. And to reclamate their image, they would donate free Coke to American GIs during the war. So everybody had an ice cold Coke.

SPEAKER_04 16:22

It's gonna make you feel better. Got all that cocaine.

SPEAKER_03 16:25

Well, it does. And that well, man, we should do a whole thing on Coke because that is crazy. They still use cocaine to this day. Part of their formula is they separate the narcotic parts of the coca plant, and they still use the flavoring from the actual plant itself in their formula. Where does that cocaine go? The pure cocaine that they extract out go?

SPEAKER_04 16:46

You know that meme of the entire class points at Bart. Say it, say the thing, Bart.

SPEAKER_03 16:52

Just say the line. Oh. Well, actually, it turns out that the way that they legitimized this absurdity, and to this day still do, is that the cocaine that they extract, they claim, they donate to companies that create numbing agents for dentists. Your gums get all numb and tingly. That's derived from cocaine extracted from the coca plant, discarded by Coca-Cola. How are they not prosecuted for trafficking narcotics? Call it pharmaceutical. And that's all you need. Think about the Reagan era and all that shit and how they just let it happen. It's fucking cocaine. And that's the reason you get so much pure cocaine on the streets in the 80s. That and of course the horrible bullshit that Reagan did in Central and South America.

SPEAKER_04 17:36

One of the greatest presidents.

SPEAKER_03 17:38

Yeah, including selling it to launder money to give weapons to Iran to fight Iraq, who he also gave weapons to. What? Yeah, but what a weird decade.

SPEAKER_04 17:48

I'm pretty sure when I was looking at Trump's new wall of fame for presidents, it didn't have that on the little Reagan bio. I don't think it was there.

SPEAKER_03 17:57

Weird. I wonder if it has any mention about how he stole his campaign slogan Make America Great Again from Ronald Reagan. What there's a lot of Reagan blindness, I'm pretty sure.

SPEAKER_04 18:06

Well in that whatever. Or the exact opposite. I mean, if you if you took the darkest view, it's all on purpose as a greater plot. Reagan was this product of the media, bolstered to be from that 50s generation. I'm a cowboy, I'm a soldier, but it's all acting, but it's the idealized version of the American male, and let's make him president. Well, in the 2000s, what's the version of the American male that our twisted society, especially the right, see as the perfect ideal? Someone who's rich, someone who's vain, someone who has all power, someone who's an an influencer and all constantly on TV. Let's just repackage him with the exact same policies. Let's do it all over again.

SPEAKER_03 18:53

But from a legacy family that was involved in the CIA. Yeah. I mean it directly. A lot of the pieces fit. Don't forget, Prescott Bush, also huge Nazi sympathizer and collaborator. That's fun. The main patriarch in the Bush political dynasty. Good stuff. It all comes back to Nazi somehow. We're living in the Fourth Reich, man.

Reagan Era Politics And Media Packaging

SPEAKER_03 19:10

And so this became, of course, interestingly enough, and unbeknownst to the people that actually execute these things, he became a template, a prototype for AI influencers and online influencers today. The influencer culture evolved separately, obviously, but AI influencers, which are sadly a thing, create these AI-generated avatars that become quote influencers to pedal whatever products that they want. This is a direct result of the Max Hedro model. Today, AI influencers have long-term deals with luxury labels, pharmaceuticals, political groups. They're advantageous because they don't have public meltdowns. They can post 24 hours a day. They don't make embarrassing statements outside of what was already scripted and programmed for them. They don't require any extra money or representation. And you don't have to worry about negotiating pay with them or a union. It's basically just a fake avatar created by real people to peddle products and manufacture consent all around the world 24 hours a day. And whether directly inspired by or Max Hedrum as a concept turned out to be prescient and prophetic, that's a little hard to say, but either way, they're not unrelated. Yes. And I'm pretty sure that the creators of the show would say the same thing. Matt Fruer thought the character itself was disruptive and a statement about commercialism, about consumerism, about the increasingly pervasive news and media cycle. And if only they had known how bad it would get. Man, I don't think people really understand how important this commentary would

AI Influencers And Manufactured Consent

SPEAKER_03 21:04

be in terms of predicting the quagmire that we are currently in.

SPEAKER_04 21:08

Or the utopia that some people believe that it is. I think if they saw the future, I don't know if it would change any of their behaviors.

SPEAKER_03 21:16

Maybe not. I don't know. Maybe it would have given them different ideas. I'm not really sure. But I think they saw the writing on the wall. We could be dealing with the chicken and egg scenario where it's like, did they directly inspire this? I'm not really sure. Like we said, you were more likely to have seen Max Hedrum in a commercial than you ever would have likely seen 20 minutes into the future. Which by the way is a brilliant title. It sets this sliding timeline where it's just saying, well, this is inevitable. This is gonna happen any minute. And they were right. Mm-hmm. It just happened a few years down the line. I mean, good on them. Did they accidentally create a Pandora's box type thing where they didn't know what they had unleashed? I don't know, can't really tell you, but it definitely had a huge impact on culture and then just kind of slowly went away. Yeah. It's only a handful of episodes and one movie, and it's only an hour long. And yet had this blasting power over all of British and American and probably worldwide pop culture.

SPEAKER_04 22:09

Yeah. It was a flashpoint that came, burned brightly, burned all over, and then faded away. At least until a unique thing happened at the tail end.

SPEAKER_03 22:18

Yes, it did.

SPEAKER_04 22:19

Before we get to that, I wanted to cover three things.

Ridley Scott Ads And Matt Frewer’s Career

SPEAKER_03 22:22

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 22:22

Just random, random thoughts. One, those coke commercials directed by Ridley Scott.

SPEAKER_03 22:28

Another more famous person. Oh yes, that's right. And it still didn't help new Coke.

SPEAKER_04 22:34

Well, no. But uh I think it probably helped his career and at least gave it a style that I think helped promote the ubiquity and prevalence of Max Edrim. Two, the creators and directors, Animal Jenkel and Rocky Morton, you also might know them from their video game blockbuster, Super Mario Bros.

SPEAKER_03 22:55

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_04 22:57

Yeah, a true classic. They've done other things, but that's pretty much it.

SPEAKER_03 23:01

What with all the success of Super Mario Brothers? Come on.

SPEAKER_04 23:04

Yeah, indeed. Three, I don't know if we give Matt Frewer enough credit for being a sci-fi icon.

SPEAKER_03 23:11

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 23:12

Oh, that guy. Just so many things.

SPEAKER_03 23:17

That man works. And you know what? He's pretty much great at everything. He's always a little cartoonish, but he never ruins anything that he's in. From Max Headroom to Star Trek The Next Generation, to Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead.

SPEAKER_04 23:31

Quick run through. 83, one of his first films, Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

SPEAKER_03 23:36

Oh, that's right!

SPEAKER_04 23:37

Then he's in Supergirl.

SPEAKER_03 23:38

Yes!

SPEAKER_04 23:39

Our famous Lost Episode.

SPEAKER_03 23:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 23:41

Then he's uh in Max Headroom, the year after that. Spies Like Us, Ishtar, Saint Elsewhere, which we've covered.

SPEAKER_03 23:50

Yeah, cool.

SPEAKER_04 23:51

And then Honey Eye Shrunk the Kids.

SPEAKER_03 23:52

Yep. He's the neighbor.

SPEAKER_04 23:54

The next generation of Star Trek. Then you got Batman the Animated Series. I think he's been in six different iterations of Stephen King adaptations. Was he in the biggest one being Trash Can Man, the stand? Yeah. Uh he was in Lawnmower Man 2. He's in Lawnmower Man 2. A few years after that. He was the Pink Panther in the three-year 60 episode animated Pink Panther run. Interesting. Okay. Then Hercules, a big role in that. Of course. In multiple versions of all of the Herculeses that Disney did. Then Taken, which we talked about in our sci-fi series. Dawn of the Dead, as you talked about. Well, of course, Zach loved him, so then he cast him in Watchmen.

SPEAKER_03 24:41

That's right. He was the older, or no, he was uh Moloch.

SPEAKER_04 24:43

He was Moloch, yep. And then he became a staple in the last ten years of sci-fi products of Eureka, Falling Skies, Witches of East, and Ninth Museum, Pixels, Olympus, Twelve Monkeys, Orphan Black, and Altered Carbon.

SPEAKER_03 25:00

Oh yeah. Altered Carbon was what I was thinking of recently, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 25:04

Unique, always engaging, always entertaining, constantly working, just one of those sci-fi staples that I just think Matt deserves his props. You know, not only for sure Max Headroom, his whole uh pantheon being part of the genre.

SPEAKER_03 25:19

If I remember right, I could be a little off on this, but if the next generation producers had approached Robin Williams for two roles, one of which was the character that Matt Frewer ends up playing, and then the other was of Kivis Fajo and The Most Toys. That would have been interesting. It would have been really interesting. Because if you watch both of those episodes, they're kind of doing a Robin Williams, sort of an over-the-top, this is Jim Carrey before Jim Carrey type thing. I could totally see Robin Williams playing both. I think Matt Fruer was great. His resume is way longer than what we mentioned. He's got tons of questions.

SPEAKER_04 26:01

I was just picking things that that highlighted that you guys might have seen, heard, know about.

SPEAKER_03 26:05

Yeah. And he's very rarely been a lead in anything, Max Hedrum excluded, but he's in everything. And I guarantee you, you have seen it. Six Degrees for Matt Fruer would be a fun game to play.

SPEAKER_04 26:16

He'd be an easy cog in that that game.

SPEAKER_03 26:19

Very much so. He's just one of those ubiquitous working actors, and not in a bad way. He's a consummate character actor, and he's really good as a genre character actor. He definitely deserves more credit than he gets.

Psy Factor Detour And Deep Cuts

SPEAKER_03 26:35

Oh, it's like late 90s.

SPEAKER_04 26:37

It is 1996.

SPEAKER_03 26:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 26:41

The creator was Peter Aykroyd. Yes, of the Aykroyds. Yes. Dan Aykroyd is the host, but yet it's I think they did reenactments. Is that what this is supposed to be?

SPEAKER_03 26:52

If I remember right, it was Dan Aykroyd hosting the show where they would do like an unsolved mysteries type show, where they would do reenactments of supposed paranormal events focusing on psychic ability, ESP, and things like that. So it wouldn't surprise me if it's the same character.

SPEAKER_04 27:10

Like he plays the same character in 49 episodes.

SPEAKER_03 27:12

Oh wait.

SPEAKER_04 27:13

I don't know what the show is. It looks like kind of X-Files E.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

These stories are inspired by the actual case files of the Office of Scientific Investigation and Research.

SPEAKER_03 27:28

That thing it's totally real.

SPEAKER_04 27:30

Are they investigating these incidents?

SPEAKER_03 27:32

I think so.

SPEAKER_04 27:32

I think A science team that works for the OSIR investigates the reports of supernatural phenomenon.

SPEAKER_03 27:39

It was Canadian.

SPEAKER_04 27:40

Of course.

SPEAKER_03 27:41

And filmed obviously in Toronto. 88 episodes over four seasons. That's right. It was a weird mashup of something like the X-Files.

SPEAKER_04 27:49

Loosely inspired by a real life organization and true events. So they're taking like supposedly true events and then doing a staging, but with a Mulder and Scully investigating those events.

SPEAKER_03 28:01

Yeah, sort of like the Warrens.

SPEAKER_04 28:03

Right.

SPEAKER_03 28:03

In a sense. Not the real Warrens, but the the the fictional Warrens that we see in movies. The first season was shot like a documentary, but then they expanded that. Michael Moriarty shows up of Q the Winged Serpent fame.

SPEAKER_04 28:18

Yes, everyone knows him from Q the Winged Serpent.

SPEAKER_03 28:21

It's the only movie I can think of him in off the top of my head. Which says a lot about me, I think.

SPEAKER_04 28:25

Well, it says a lot about Michael Moriarty as well.

SPEAKER_03 28:27

He suffered from mental illness. That was a big problem of his. It's one of the reasons he quit acting.

SPEAKER_04 28:31

No, that's that's too bad.

SPEAKER_03 28:33

Actually a pretty good actor. Uh Sci Factor also included drop-ins from Linda Blair. There you go. And Nicole De Bauer.

SPEAKER_04 28:39

I just found a movie that Michael Moriarty wrote and starred in called Hitler Meets Christ. Oh, good. Two men meet in a train station. One believes he's Hitler, the other Christ. Their unusual pairing brings together two of the most controversial figures in human history. And yes, Michael Moriarty is playing Hitler.

SPEAKER_03 28:58

Is it like a cop buddy movie? Do they have good ventures together?

SPEAKER_04 29:02

I feel like it's before sunset, but with Hitler and Jesus.

SPEAKER_03 29:08

I'd pay money to see that. Some of the other notable guest stars in Sci-Factor, aside from Linda Blair and Matt Frewer, Nicole De Bauer from both Cube and Star Trek Deep Space Nine in its final season. Harlan Ellison, the sci-fi writer, that everyone thinks is a crank. Allison Pill.

SPEAKER_04 29:28

Get pilled.

SPEAKER_03 29:29

Well, she sure did. Margot Kidder. No, she didn't. Margot Kidder did. Yeah, maybe I'll cut that up.

SPEAKER_04 29:38

It was a pretty good joke, honestly, but I don't know if it should make it in the final cut.

SPEAKER_03 29:44

Yeah, we'll see how it plays later. Corey Haim, the great great green, who just died recently, I believe. And Ryan Gosling.

SPEAKER_04 29:51

Oh man. Alright. I am going to see if I can find the Ryan Gosling episode, and I'm going to watch it.

SPEAKER_03 29:58

Please do. We'll put that in as a bonus. Your review of the Ryan Gosling episode of Psy Factor.

SPEAKER_04 30:04

Alright. Mr. Gosling, where are you hiding? Oh, he played Adam in this one episode. Oh, it's the first episode. That's easy enough. Oh wow. Okay. Starting out strong. If you go to the the now open files of the KGB, it's in there.

SPEAKER_03 30:22

It was part of the Epstein files release.

SPEAKER_04 30:24

It's still waiting to see the light of day. Oh, at least the f at least the first episode's on YouTube.

SPEAKER_03 30:30

Hey, there you go.

SPEAKER_04 30:31

Click on that. Gonna go to that later. Poison my brain with garbage. Sure will. That's what we do here. We do that so you don't have to. Ooh. Great. Probably just gonna take me to this goddamn fictional scientific think tank. Lies. It ain't real, man.

SPEAKER_03 30:47

It was something that Dan Aykroyd was trying to do, which essentially led to the writing of Ghostbusters.

SPEAKER_04 30:53

Someday maybe we'll do an episode on the wild life of Dan Aykroyd outside of the movies.

SPEAKER_03 31:00

Yeah, between Aliens and Crystal Skulls. Yeah. And vodka.

SPEAKER_04 31:05

Uh oh my.

SPEAKER_03 31:06

And his weird brother.

SPEAKER_04 31:07

His weird family. I mean, that's yeah.

SPEAKER_03 31:10

One of my favorite Dan Aykroyd recent moments. Elon Musk, I remember a couple years ago, posted that he was the first autistic host of SNL ever, and then Dan Aykroyd was tweeted out, and she's like, um, hi, right here. Uh, pretty sure I did it for a really long time. Back to Max Headrum.

The Chicago Max Headroom TV Hijack

SPEAKER_03 31:26

Now we'd like to get to a really interesting idea. Something that I think both is indicative of how deep and far the Max Headrum thing went as far as being iconic in pop culture, but also how it was probably too early based on what happened. If Max Headrum would come out now, these events I think would be a much bigger deal in a different format and would be all over the internet and probably more nefarious. So, on November 22nd, 1987, two TV stations based in Chicago were hijacked, which is is very hard to do no matter what the Joker tries to tell you. They were hijacked two hours apart from one another by unidentified suspects, briefly sending pirate TV broadcast of an unidentified person wearing a max headroom rubber mask and costume to thousands of homes in the Chicago metropolitan area.

SPEAKER_06 32:21

I'll get you a hot drink, Mason.

SPEAKER_05 33:57

As long as I can tell a massive electric shot, you died instantly.

SPEAKER_03 34:00

The generator! Are you always so careful? He did the whole thing with the distorted audio, even though he filmed it all in front of a swiveling corrugated metal panel. He criticizes Max Headroom's Coca-Cola endorsements. He criticizes the TV series Clutch Cargo, featured in Pulp Fiction of all things, and used to be shown on Sci-Fi Channel, by the way, in the early days. Didn't touch that one. Then criticizing WGN anchor Chuck Sworski. WGN is a national channel, but to be able to do that would need local access. TV programming was disrupted for a total period of 115 seconds before before control was taken back. Not only is this very difficult, it requires a lot of knowledge about how TV stations work, about how broadcasts work, how to circumvent failsafes that were and still

Freakers, Theories, And Copycat Influence

SPEAKER_03 34:52

are set in place to prevent this type of thing from happening. The perpetrators of this hacking event have never been identified. But in 2010, a Reddit user, BPOAG, volunteered some information in an AMA where he proposed a theory from 1987. He's from the suburbs of Chicago and was an avid what they call a freaker with a pH.

SPEAKER_04 35:16

Freakers and tweakers.

SPEAKER_03 35:17

Freakers and tweakers. That's one of my favorite Jet Abtou vehicles. That freaking is the quote the art and science of manipulating telephone networks and the systems which lived on them. Which is funny, that's kind of what they do in Sneakers, starring Dan Aykroyd. Basically, it's what we would call a hacker. Now this guy was interviewed by Atlas Obscura, who did withhold his name, but he claimed to be involved in a group of quote freakers in Lagrange, which is a suburb of Chicago. The leaders of the group were two brothers in their early 30s called J and K, obviously to keep them anonymous. And in 1987, the week before the infamous hack, these brothers warned this guy, who was 13, that they were planning to do something, quote, big over the weekend. Then they told him to tune into Channel 11 on the evening of November 22nd. The actual hack, according to them, was simple for them to pull off. It didn't require any advance or technical equipment beyond what an avid freaker would already have. He wrote, quote, All that had to be done apparently was to provide a signal to the dish that was of greater power than the legitimate one. That does still take some technical know-how. It may have been easy for them, but not for the layperson. According to this source, the older brother Jay had, quote, moderate to severe autism, but was a very capable freaker. The ramblings that went on during this hack included threats, of course, to WGN anchored Chuck Sworski, and then hummed the clutch cargo theme. And that's how he figured out that these two guys were the hackers. Because not only did they tell him to tune in at that exact bat time, that exact bat channel, but that it was stuff that they had talked about before. When asked about the motivations, he said, quote, it it only lasted as long as it needed to get the point across. The point being that the airwaves were woefully unprotected and easily exploitable. It's the equivalent of having your picture taken on the summit of Mount Everest before coming back down. Which is not a way to put that.

SPEAKER_04 37:16

Yeah, that's odd.

SPEAKER_03 37:18

But this is before widespread adoption or really implementation of the internet in general. So the fact that they used Max Hedrum as an avatar for this, I think says a lot about where people thought that culture was going even before the infrastructures of the internet and hacking and trolling and posters was even a concept. This was oddly, just like Max Hedrum, prophetic. The true identity, like I said, their motivations, nobody to this day, I can pin it or link it really to anybody except for this one guy who claims it on Reddit. Probably they were just having having a laugh, you know, as they say.

SPEAKER_04 37:56

Is that what they say?

SPEAKER_03 37:57

Uh that's what I say. It's not. Thankfully, the internet didn't exist then. Because if all of this stuff had become influential now with the internet as it is today, I think this would have been a way bigger widespread problem. But it also did influence groups like Anonymous. If you watch several anonymous posts, they use the aesthetics of Max Hedron in a lot of their videos, including in a 2010 video aimed at the Church of Scientology, where they straight up just used the Max Hedron background. So whether or not Max Hedrum directly inspired not only the commodified commercialized thing that they were trying to satirize, or the organic response to that part of our society, influenced both in one way or another. For that reason becomes a an important, odd, baffling, and extremely rare flashpoint in pop culture worldwide. Maybe it was too soon. Maybe it wouldn't matter today if it hadn't happened then. I don't know. But it does remain relevant whether you know it or not. Even though it's pretty innocent. In fact, its motivations were relatively benign, if not good social commentary. But either way, a lot of the world we live in now is unbeknownst to most because of Max Hedro.

Reboot That Didn’t Happen And Farewell

SPEAKER_03 39:17

Not something I ever thought I'd say out. And uh and a final note about that, in 2022, AMC announced a reboot of Matt Frewer as Max Hedro. Yes, with Halt and Catch Fire co-creator Christopher Cantwell developing the project and would serve as showrunner with Elijah Wood and Daniel Noah's SpectraVision set to produce. This never happened. For one reason or another, and I don't know exactly the demise of this project, or if it's still just in development, hell, not sure. But I think it's a good idea, and I do think they should bring back Matt Frewer. I think it's more prescient today than it ever has been, but this project didn't go forward. That's where we are today. We're living in the world of Max Hedrum, and we just don't know it.

SPEAKER_04 40:06

Fascinating.

SPEAKER_03 40:07

Yep. So that's just Max Headrum right there.

SPEAKER_04 40:09

And this is just Dispatch Ajax here. Well, we hope you have enjoyed this journey down the checkered past with which our world is built upon. We're glad that we could bring some insight into that. If you think other people might find it interesting and insightful, please like, share, subscribe, send it to your friends, family, whatever AI influencer that you like the best. Perhaps they might like it. If you wouldn't mind rating us five new Cokes on the podcast app of your choice, ideally Apple Podcasts, it's the best way for us to heard and thus seen. We would super appreciate that. Again, thank you for listening. We're happy to have you. Please come back for our interesting journey into Geek and Sci-Fi and fantasy pop culture stuffs or whatever we feel like talking about that day. But until this podcast gets hacked and Matt Frewer shows up to describe his version of reality, Skip, what should they do?

SPEAKER_03 41:11

Oh, I wonder if he's on Cameo. Oh shit, that would be awesome. Well, first first of all, they should do exactly what Jake said and make sure that they tell their friends' family. Not their friends or their family, but their friend's family. That's our target audience. Your friend's family. Make sure it goes through as many iterations as possible. It was just funny. I'm sorry. It was just funny. I'll cut that out. Don't worry. Make sure you've paid your tabs, make sure you've cleaned up half of yourself with some sort of reasonable degree. Make sure you've tipped your weight staff, your bar staff, your cages, your DJs. Anybody that tries to earn a living wage in today's society. Don't forget to support your local comic shops and retailers. And from Dispatch Ajax, we would like to say no matter where you go, there you are.