12 Days of Christmas - Day 9: 20 minutes into the Christmas future

Today's installment of Armagideon Time's ill-conceived holiday countdown features a heartwarming piece of retro-futurism in the form of Max Headroom's 1986 single:

Max Headroom - Merry Christmas Santa Claus (You're A Lovely Guy)

Lovely, isn't it? It makes me want to twitch my head and weep virtual tears each time I listen to it. I'm no expert in audio issue troubleshooting for futuristic artificial intelligences, but it seems to me that Max's sysadmins could probably clear up that stuttering problem by uninstalling the sound card drivers, disabling the onboard sound from the BIOS menu, then getting the updated drivers from the manufacturer's website.

Despite the character having reached a toxic level of overexposure in his mid-eighties heyday, I still retain a certain fondness for Max. As a synthetic personality for a synthetic age, he not-quite-successfully tread a very thin line between satire and symptom of that era's style-over-substance ethos, making subversive wisecracks one moment and serving as a pitchman for New Coke the next.

Such ambiguity was to be expected, I suppose, from a faulty personality simulation based on an investigative reporter from a cyberpunkadelic future, especially one created (by the same people who did the Tom Tom Club's "Genius of Love" and Elvis Costello's "Accidents Will Happen" videos) using a be-latexed Matt Frewer and 1980's video editing wizardry with the purpose of hosting a UK Channel 4 music video program. According to a 1985 interview with one of Max's creators, the original intent was to weave the sci-fi backstory in segments between the music videos, but the concept proved too unwieldy to manage and was spun off into a separate project.

As is usual with my retrologistic obsessions, my affection for Max Headroom is best kept at nostalgic arm's length. The specials and miscellaneous host appearances starring the character simply feel dated and only interesting as historical curiosities. My first exposure to the Circle Jerks came via a Cinemax showing of one of the specials, where the band's "Junk Mail" (or a lousy cover of it) was used as a bumper for a "letters to the host" segment. Max's Christmas Turkey special (which includes a performance of today's holiday track) features appearances by "Saint" Bob Geldof and a very Auntie Entitized Tina Turner, and mostly serves to remind me that, yes, 1986 really was that long ago.

The British TV movie, Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future, still holds up pretty well after all these years, and is a minor classic of the presciently quaint genre the kids call "cyberpunk." (One of my more fortuitous popcult finds was a copy of the oversized and photo-heavy "novelization" of the film, purchased at a dollar store in the early 1990's.) The film also featured a great synth-instrumental end theme courtesy of Ultravox's Midge Ure. I had planned to post the theme, but the extraction program I use keeps distorting the sound beyond use.

As a teen, I loved the American Max Headroom television series, which was based on the film but featured different actors (except for Frewer and the lovely Amanda Pays). Having watched it again when it played on Bravo a few years back, I found it to be rather flat and oddly preachy -- the kiss of death, given the cynical basis of the cyberpunk genre. (I could honestly live happily without seeing another attempt to directly reference Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in a quasi-serious work of sci-fi. The novel only really succeeds as a broad parable, where the threshold for suspension of disbelief isn't as high as it is for similar elements used as ongoing plot points in a less abstract piece.)

To be fair, it's a case of the series being of its era and excelling in that stratified context. Compared to then-contemporary fare like Small Wonder or Full House, the American Max Headroom series seems like high art, and Grand High Poobah of Cyberpunk William Gibson's praise for the show makes a lot more sense. Viewed today, isolated from 1987-88's topographical map of banality, it resembles nothing so much as Lou Grant if filmed by Ridley Scott.

Special bonus: Since I'm already on the subject of Max Headroom, and I doubt I'll ever do another post about it, I figured I might as well toss in Max's other bright shining musical moment:

Art of Noise - Paranoimia (from a 1986 12" single; collected on Best of Art of Noise, 1997)