On the night of the 22nd of November 1987, viewers of WGN were watching a sports program when the screen went blank and they were treated to a few seconds of a slightly home-made dancing in front of those trademark moving lines. But that wasn’t the whole story of his appearances, back to that unexplained hack of Chicagoland TV. The character proved to be something of a hit, with a TV spin-off series, VJing, adverts, and more. Meanwhile the reporter escapes, recovers, and prevails over the villains. They scrap the computer and it falls into the hands of a pirate TV station operating from a decrepit campervan, the Alphabetti-eating proprietor of which turns the character it contains into a TV sensation. The network try to cover it up by producing a computerized facsimilie of the reporter which turns out to be an embarassing failure. An investigative journalist seeking to uncover the sinister owners of his network (they run speeded-up adverts with the unfortunate side-effect of causing overweight viewers to explode) is pursued, causing a road accident in which he is injured by a collision with a safety barrier. He strung upon us by rising out of a title screen full of static in the Channel 4 TV movie : 20 Minutes into the Future. The real (Fair use) Via Wikimedia Commons.If you were a bored British teenager and future Hackaday writer vegging out in front of your parents’ TV on an April night in 1985, you’d have caught ’s genesis. He also made unscheduled showings on two Chicago TV stations in an audacious hack that has never been explained and whose culprit has never been found.

He looks a little quaint for viewers with a few decades viewing experience of CGI, but in his day he was cutting-edge cypberpunk TV. was a supposedly computer generated TV show host and VJ with a pseudomechanical stutter, a slightly blocky rendered head, and a moving background of rendered lines. Those of you with long memories and a compulsive TV viewing habit might remember, a quirky piece of TV ephemera from the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Max headroom wgn