Clockwise from top left: "Rap God" by Eminem, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Back to the Future Part II, and the Max Headroom signal hijacking incident
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.A staple of 80's culture, Max Headroom has oft been referenced and parodied in many works. Max Headroom is a snarky, faux-CGI television host with a glitchy speech pattern. While not as culturally significant today, he still exists in public consciousness and continues to be referenced. Parodies of Max Headroom usually contain some, if not all of these common features:
- Is a human inside a television screen, seen only from the shoulders up.
- Has their consciousness inside the television through Brain Uploading or is an Artificial Intelligence.
- Wears a suit and sometimes sunglasses.
- Has a glitchy Electronic Speech Impediment, stammering random words.
- Stands in front of a dark background with moving colored lines.
- Has a sardonic and witty sense of humor.
- Appears in a work related to The '80s.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- Kaguya-sama: Love Is War: In one episode, we see a dummy head being used to show off some headphones. The dummy is wearing sunglasses and is in front of a colored lines background, and the speaker’s voice glitches when she talks about it.
Comic Strips
- Doonesbury: A Running Gag portrays Ronald Reagan as a Max Headroom parody named Ron Headrest.
Film - Live Action
- Back to the Future Part II: When Marty visits the Cafe 80s, his server is a roaming TV monitor with an avatar of Ronald Reagan, glitching and speaking in warped tones like Max Headroom. He's joined (and naturally argues with) an avatar of the Ayatollah Khomeni. Another television shows an avatar of Michael Jackson.
- Batman & Robin: The Batcave's security system is personified as a digital form of Alfred (who "uploaded half his brain" to the Batcomputer), who speaks glitched.
- The Game (1997): A camera is planted in Nicholas's mansion via a wooden clown (don't ask), and interferes with the newscast on his television, taking over the form of Real Life journalist Daniel Schorr. He toys with Nicholas with an odd, filtered voice and glitching effects before informing him that his Game has begun.
- Pixels: One of the messages from the aliens, who understand humanity only though 80s culture, is in the form of a CGI Max Headroom. Max's actor even reprised his role for this cameo.
- Spaceballs: Vinny is a mafioso subordinate of Pizza the Hut, modeled off of Max Headroom. He is a robot who glitches and stutters during his speech and wears sunglasses and a suit.
Literature
- Ready Player One: Wade has an AI personal assistant that takes the form of Max Headroom.
Live-Action TV
- Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: While in the 1980s, LMD Coulson has his body destroyed, and his consiousness is uploaded in a television. The background of the screen is a near copy of Max Headroom's, Coulson wears a suit, and he speaks glitchily. Coulson even directly compares his situation to Max Headroom.
- The Charmings: In one episode, the Magic Mirror wears a blonde wig in front of a moving lines background while inside a computer screen.
- Family Matters: A dream sequence shows Steve Urkel inside a computer screen with a Headroom-esque background.
- In the Farscape episode "John Quixote", a visit to a buggy virtual reality game results in John and Chiana encountering a version of John incarnated as one of the game's villains. He appears only on a TV screen, he's always wearing a suit, always standing against a dark background studded with neon blue tubes, and sports a noticeable Headroom-esque stutter and a warped sense of humour. In the climax of the episode, the real John is finally able to shut him up by putting a sword through his monitor.
- Late Night: In two 1986 episodes, David Letterman brings out a television featuring recurring character Larry Bud Melman dressed as Max Headroom and nicknamed "Larry Bud Headroom".
- Square One TV: One of the recurring bits played between sketches was of a nameless character talking of about a random math related subject that was a clear expy of Max Headroom: he was depicted as faux-CGI, shown from the waist up in front of a dark patterned background, wore a suit and shades, and would randomly glitch causing himself and what he was currently saying to rapidly twitch and stammer.
Magazines
- Playboy: While interviewing Max Headroom in one issue, the interview was accompanied by a picture of a naked female version of Max named Maxine Legroom.
- MAD: A cover of the magazine shows Alfred E. Neuman dressed like Max Headroom in front of a similar background, calling him "Television Superstar Alfred E. Headroom".
Music
- Eminem: In the music video for "Rap God", Eminem dresses as Max Headroom in front of a moving lines background and is shown inside televisions. The glitchy speech impediment is incorporated into the feel of his rapping.
- Selena Gomez: The music video for "Love You like a Love Song" shows Selena dressed in a suit and sunglasses inside a TV screen.
- 50 Cent appears as a cigar-smoking Max Headroom speaking to nerds visiting his website in the music video for Tony Yayo's "Pass The Patron". (Three years before his mentor Eminem would more famously wear the suit and tie in "Rap God".)
- The video for Front Line Assembly and Jimmy Urine's cover of Rock Me Amadeus features a glitchy image of the latter delivering half-rapped, half-sneered verses on an old Sony CRT TV Max Headroom-style under Miami Vice lighting, wearing red-rimmed shades and a skinny pink tie. There are laser lights, models in old-school threads, and vintage video effects, plus a rotating bust of Mozart. It is aggressively '80s until the end where the effects turn into Vaporwave, the screen begins distorting, and skulls start appearing everywhere.
Tabletop Games
- In the Toonpunk 2020 1/2 setting for Toon, "Max Playroom" is an artifical intelligence who appears as the digitised face of a cat, and can make any screen he appears on grow arms and legs.
Video Games
- Deltarune: While it may be coincidental, Spamton shares a lot of similarities with Max Headroom. Like Max, he is an Uncanny Valley morally ambiguous virtual character with slicked back hair, sunglasses, and an Electronic Speech Impediment.
- The Black Signal of The Secret World. He's essentially a ghost haunting the electronic systems of Tokyo, regularly taking over TV screens, PA systems, phones, and even the game's Lore entries. He will regularly glitch and repeat random words, including in text-only appearances. Furthermore, it's made clear that he was once human: he was John Copley, the terrorist behind the Filth-bomb on the Tokyo subways, having been transformed into an intangible monster as a result of being at the very epicenter of the blast. Though he doesn't manifest an avatar at any point in the game, the preview comic for Issue 10 makes the Max Headroom parallel all the clearer by having his human face appear in multiple TV screens across Tokyo.
- SHODAN is the Artificial Intelligence main antagonist of System Shock and has a Headroom-inspired glitchy, stuttering voice.
- Fitting it's 80's asethetic, Wasteland 3 has the God-President Reagan AI which is a direct copy of Max Headroom. And is glitching out for the same reasons Max did in the pilot: lack of memory storage and processing power.
Web Video
- Glove and Boots: In "Worst Game Show Ever!", the first round of Hanzi's game show is based on The Hollywood Squares and features Zombie Max Headroom in the center square, who's represented by a Zombie puppet dressed as Max Headroom, is inside a TV like him, and electronically stutters like him.
Fafa: Why is he a zombie? Max Headroom's not dead.Hanzi: His career is!
Western Animation
- Harley Quinn: After Sy Borgman sacrifices himself to defeat Doctor Psycho, it is revealed that he has a copy of his brain saved. He is portrayed inside of a television screen with Max Headroom's glitchy manner of speaking.
- In the "Hollywood Jem" episode of Jem, at one point there are Max Headroom-esque copies of Jem and actor/Kimber's sometime boyfriend Sean Harrison.
- Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?: The Chief is an Artificial Intelligence shown as a floating head wearing sunglasses in a screen. He has a zany sense of humor similar to Max.
Real Life
- On November 22, 1987, televisions around Chicago watching WGN-TV 9's 9 PM newscast (and those watching the WGN superstation feed across the country) were hijacked, and what they saw was a man dressed as Max Headroom moving around with weird static noises playing in the background. It ended after less than 20 seconds after WGN engineers changed their microwave signal to lock out the pirate. Later that night, Max hijacked WTTW-11, the PBS affiliate (which was airing Doctor Who), only this time he spoke. He had a voice filter (ring modulator) on, and some notable things he did included throwing a Pepsi can and getting spanked with a flyswatter. To this day, neither the perpetrator nor his companion have been identified or caught.
