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Have a M-M-Merry Max Headroom Christmas
12.21.2017
10:11 am
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Well, apparently computers celebrate Christmas too.
 
Max Headroom’s Giant Christmas Turkey aired on Boxing Day in 1986. Not to be confused with the follow-up sci-fi adventure series adapted for Cinemax, this holiday special was from the original British programme. The cheeky, glitching computer-host first came to life after a fatal traffic accident in the 1985 cyberpunk TV-movie, Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future. Now living inside a television set in a world dominated by the networks, Max personifies the sleek and vain talk-show host of our eventual dystopia. With the success of the film came The Max Headroom Show, an MTV-style variety show hosted by the smart-talking Siri of the 80’s.
 

 
Max Headroom’s Giant Christmas Turkey was pretty bad. Not even cameos by Robin Williams or Tina Turner could’ve saved it. For some reason, producers thought it would be a good idea to have Max perform several jolly ballads throughout the episode. In “Children,” our renegade cyberhost serenades two young boys in the back of a horse-drawn carriage. Strangely enough, the lyrics very nonchalantly mention killing children, something that Max “would never do.” Another tune “Gimme Shades” is a bizarre Western-style tribute to sunglasses. It really has nothing to do with the holidays, except that maybe shades are on Max’s Christmas list. Tina Turner gets him golf clubs.
 
Headroom takes all the gigabytes home with “Merry Christmas Santa Claus (You’re a Lovely Guy),” the climactic finale to the holiday special. Playing a grand piano from his television set, Max describes Santa as an under-appreciated and selfless soul, one who could use a song to show him we care. The passionate jingle builds momentum as we transition to a snowy winter exterior, where Max is joined by the Southwark Cathedral Choir for one hell of a conclusion. The takeaway? Santa Claus, you are one helluva guy!
 

 
“Merry Christmas Santa Claus” was released on a 7-inch record shortly after the premiere of the Giant Christmas Turkey. The single is paired with “Gimme Shades” on side B, making the two a festive addition to this year’s h-h-holiday playlist.

Listen for yourself after the jump…

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Posted by Bennett Kogon
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12.21.2017
10:11 am
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Talking Heads: Max Headroom interviews Sting and David Byrne
10.28.2014
04:38 pm
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Max Headroom, now there was a weird-ass experiment. In hindsight the digital character is the very definition of a “curio.” It takes only a few seconds of watching Max to remember just how irritating he was, a stuttering, condescending, smarmy non-entity (literally) who is devoid of content (making him a natural pitchman for Coca Cola, which he was for several national advertising campaigns). Watching authentic artists like Sting and David Byrne interact with Max is a little painful. 

Before the narrative sci-fi show Max Headroom descended on U.S. shores in 1987, British audiences had been “enjoying” The Max Headroom Show, which featured interviews and music videos, throughout 1985 and 1986. In the first clip, Sting is promoting The Dream of the Blue Turtles as well as The Bride, his first movie after Dune, so it must be 1985. True to Max’s essential vapidity, they discuss shoes for most of the interview. The strategy of intersplicing unmotivated stock footage resembles nothing so much as a short film by Lelaina Pierce as recut by Michael Grates, to invoke the Winona Ryder and Ben Stiller characters from Reality Bites.
 

 
Of course Sting is inherently annoying—check out his shades—but it’s really not his fault in this case; David Byrne’s naturally distanced temperament works a lot better. Unfortunately, the clip, put up by the official Talking Heads YouTube account, gets badly out of sync after a couple of minutes, but given that it’s Max Headroom, it hardly matters. Byrne is there to promote True Stories, his only directorial feature, so it must be about a year later than the Sting interview.

The Max Headroom Show, not to be confused with the narrative show Max Headroom, was the original Short Attention Span Theater. As many have noted, it was the perfect plastic entertainment for the Reagan era, so much so that Garry Trudeau in Doonesbury turned the sitting president into an unfunny imitation called Ron Headrest.

In retrospect what’s interesting is that the technology was so evidently driving the car—the technical feat of an electronic Matt Frewer cackling at Sting is actually impressive, but the form was miles ahead of the content. Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which hit in the 1990s, evened the scales a bit more successfully.
 
Max Headroom interviews Sting:

 
Max’s interview with David Byrne after the jump….

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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10.28.2014
04:38 pm
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