Many years ago, when Max Headroom<\/i> first came out in the U.S., I and my fellow computer animation friends used to watch it religiously. We knew that Max wasn’t actually a computer animated character — he was really Matt Freuer with prosthetics and video effects — but that made it even more fun.<\/p>\n
I still recall my favorite moment from the series, a moment which I now take as an eerie harbinger of the future. It’s in a scene in which intrepid reporter Edison Carter (also played by Matt Freuer) enters a room that a group of renegade anarchists had recently made their secret lair.<\/p>\n
The anarchists had apparently fled just minutes before the authorities discovered their existence. The great moment comes as Carter is looking in puzzlement at a television set. He is clearly trying to figure out why it looks strange.<\/p>\n
Then, all at once, he figures it out. “This TV set,” he proclaims in astonishment, “has an off switch!”<\/p>\n
In 1987 that scene played well as absurdist science fiction humor. Today it hits a little too close to home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Many years ago, when Max Headroom first came out in the U.S., I and my fellow computer animation friends used to watch it religiously. We knew that Max wasn’t actually a computer animated character — he was really Matt Freuer with prosthetics and video effects — but that made it even more fun. I still … Continue reading “Off switch”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24788"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24788"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24788\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24789,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24788\/revisions\/24789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}