Max Headroom, the deranged 1980s faux-CGI, faux-AI TV presenter, was and is often mistaken as a true computer graphic creation. At Cartoon Brew (more than a decade ago!), Neil Emmet centered Max in the fading phenomenon of pseudo-CGI, where effects experts sought to convincingly portray unattainably advanced computer performance. This was typically done by doing an astonishing amount of meticulous work slowly, then speeding it up and carefully applying filters that subtly concealed any "tells". Classic examples are Wargames's giant vectorbeam displays (in reality rendered frame by frame on HP minicomputers and laboriously filmed using traditional animation techniques) and the "CGI" Manhattan in Escape from New York: a model painted matte-black but for phosphorescent lines where the wireframes would be.
Today (via Hacker News) I chanced across what is surely the high point of the pseudo-CGI genre: Max Headroom being interviewed "live" by the BBC's Terry Wogan in 1985. Not only is everything in it a practical effect, it's all being done in real time. It has a peculiar atmosphere. A moment of incipient cybernormality at the center of a venn diagram where the circles are "liminal spaces", "in-jokes" and "pre-internet TV monoculture."
Previously:
• Max Headroom recites the ABCs
• Max Headroom had a Christmas song and special and they're both weird as hell
• Max Headroom reboot in development
• Watch 'Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future' (1985)
