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Although he probably appears a little underwhelming to today’s viewer, Max Headroom’s first appearances in the media were pretty mindblowing. It wasn’t so much that his character was mostly computer-generated, which was not all that dazzling by the mid-eighties. What was really compelling about him was that he basically operated in real time, and was invested with enough personality that you immediately accepted him as “real”. Max Headroom rarely gets the credit he deserves for predicting the advent of the soundbyte-driven talking heads that shape today’s news presentation. Or for pretty much creating a big part of Jim Carey’s shtick, several years before it was Jim Carey’s shtick. See this Letterman clip from 1986, for instance:

As a countercultural, club-dwelling, art movie snob in the 80’s, the most likely use of a television in my house was as a piece of furniture or a light source, i.e., in one of those typically 80’s “paint everything matte black and use old snowy-screen TVs as decor” apartments. I mean, I really, really hated television. That is, except for Max Headroom. In an era when lifestyle propaganda horrors like Charles in Charge, Silver Spoons, Full House, and Webster dominated the airwaves, here we had this stroke of utter genius in the form of a snarky, highbrow, digitally generated talking head. And in spite of this being cutting-edge technology at the time, the creators did the brilliant thing and made the special effects glitchy and somewhat secondary to the writing and character, letting the quirky, fidgety persona of actor Matt Frewer shine through. At the height of his popularity, Max was a shill for Coke, as in this presidential campaign themed ad. Hmmm. Maybe he should consider an actual run, he’d fit the 2016 election’s carnival vibe perfectly.

I was more partial to the earlier British Channel 4 Music video program  – I think the character worked best in short snippets – but there was also a Cinemax talk show and a British-produced ABC TV sci-fi series that lasted two seasons, in 1987-88. And guess what! The latter is available on DVD. The other productions may never see the light of day because of the labyrinthine copyright issues due to song and cable rights, but you can find many of them as bittorrents or with a YouTube search. And if you want to learn more about the arc of Max’s career and how the show evolved, The Verge has an excellently-assembled definitive oral history.

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Somewhere in the dark recesses of my unconscious is a place where for all eternity I sit with Han Hoogerbrugge, sipping tea beneath a sky of time-lapse clouds, trying to ignore the subtle but relentless humming sound in the background, as he mindlessly, mechanically mimes something over and over. And I’ve never even met the guy.

Hoogerbrugge does something I’ve always wanted to do; he takes a familiar medium (usually Flash animation) and utilizing simple images, unusual atmospheric sounds, and a bizarre vision of worlds that may be, creates mesmerizing multimedia pieces that become an art form unto themselves. And then creates virtual galleries of the work. The collection Nails has about a hundred of them.

Much of this work evoked an eerie mood when it was new, back around 2002. But it has a strange way of seeming even more eerie today, without feeling especially dated.

If you’ve never seen his work before, I recommend starting with his early interactive animation work like Modern Living  or Nails. These animations are featured in the images above. But he’s done other interesting interactive work as well, specifically, things like The Hotel, a surreal series that takes place in the anonymous space of an extraordinary and strange hotel.

And he has a few books out, but we don’t currently recommend visiting the related domain ProStress.com

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Luckily, your selective memory has protected you from things like the image above.

In a vintage fern bar somewhere in some small Florida beach town, there’s a forty-something couple in matching white polyester pants and Hawaiian shirts, bombed on Slippery Nipples and dancing to Olivia Newton John’s “Let’s Get Physical”. These two people are probably the only people alive who remember and enjoy the “real” music of the 80’s. I love it when people start reminiscing about all the great music of that decade, and proceed to name bands like Tears For Fears, Depeche Mode, New Order, the Pet Shop Boys, or the Pixies. Because that simply was not, in reality, the music of the 80’s. Although it may have been in some people’s reality, particularly those people whose reality was shaped by dark dance floors and copious quantities of alcohol and other drugs.

But in the real reality, things were much different. A fact that is overlooked even in the erudite commentary of a piece like Justin Erik Halldór Smith’s Against Eighties Music, which features a picture of The Cure’s Robert Smith and references Stereo MCs, who didn’t really even break until 1993. No, the fact is that if – like me – you readily remember an endless stream of masterful electronica and epically brilliant alternative bands, you were probably doing what I was doing, which was hiding in a club behind a drug haze to escape the horror of the pop music that was REALLY dominating the airwaves and record sales. Below is a year-by-year look at the best-selling music of the 80’s. No wonder we stayed out all night dancing to the club music most of us remember, and then slept all day. We were just trying to avoid accidentally hearing this crap by accidentally turning on the radio or something!

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The coolest toy WE had as kids. And they took them from us. Why, why, WHY???

We’ve all probably heard some story from a grandparent about how when they were kids, the only toy they had was a stick, and how their mom had to tie a pork chop around their neck to get the dog to play with them. Or how they couldn’t even play with string can telephones because the family was so poor they couldn’t afford canned food. And how they ate cereal with a fork to save milk. While no-one in our generation had it that bad, we sure did get gypped on the technology. The toys we could only dream of are now a click away on Amazon. Which is why I’m gonna go buy a bunch of these things and not let my friends’ kids play with them.

Video Walkie Talkies

When I got my first cellphone years ago – a Motorola flip-phone – I made the admittedly dorky remark “Man, we really would have had fun playing Star Trek as kids if we had these.” Now, just a few short years later, you can get video phone walkie talkies. Children of today, I both salute and hate you.

Laser Tag

These little babies would have prevented more real-world fistfights on the playground than all the “bully counseling” in the world ever could. No more “I got you” and “no you didn’t” brawls in the dirt. If the laser hits you, the laser hits you. End of debate. Better conflict resolution, through technology.

Hot Chicks As Action Figures

Even today, many parents still express a subtle discomfort when a boy wants to play with female dolls. But let’s face it, our GI Joe’s were very lonely, pent up guys. Perhaps a lot of their conflict and aggression could have been avoided if they’d had the sensibilities of a woman around, especially one who could kick their asses, like Marvel’s Black Widow.

Nerf N-Strike Elite Rhino-Fire Blaster

Speaking of conflict, many of us only had Nerf Balls, and the fun was restricted to pathetic games of indoor basketball or whatever. The closest thing to an assault weapon we had was probably a Super Soaker. This would have all been quickly remedied with a Nerf N-Strike Elite Rhino-Fire Blaster. You know what? I think I’m gonna go buy one RIGHT NOW, so I can use it on the little bastards of today, whose PC parents probably won’t let them have one.

Virtual Reality 3D Headset

I’ll never forget the first time I saw those stunning 3D images of the Grand Canyon with my GAF Viewmaster when I was a kid. Or how much it sucked to have to point the damn things at a light source to get a good view because my folks didn’t spring for the lighted version. Today’s over-privileged thankless youth need not worry about these issues; they can just stick their $400 smartphone in a VR-019 Virtual Reality Headset and see moving 3D images. Bastards.

LEGO Fusion Set

Personally, I always found the basic Lego sets available when I was a kid pretty constricting. With my un-diagnosed OCD issues, the fact that there’d always be one side of a building that had a yellow block because I ran out of white ones was maddening. This could have all been avoided if I could just upload the damn designs and build them virtually. Thanks LEGO. Thanks for bringing this to market decades too late for my mental health.

Radio Controlled Anything

One of my most vivid memories of being a kid is standing at the hobby or toy store, gazing with starry eyes at the radio-controlled airplanes and amazingly realistic train sets. And then being shoved rudely out of line by pot bellied old men, because they were the only people with the interest and disposable income to buy such things. This of course has all changed; never mind the dazzling variety of quadroter drones on the market, you can buy a radio-controlled anything these days, from a car, to a submarine, to a robot or even a dinosaur. Take that, pot-bellied old men of yesteryear.

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This is my old MySpace account today. I have no idea how to log into it.

The fact that some dork named “Tom” was automatically your first friend when you joined MySpace should have alerted us to the impending terror of it all. At the time, Tom was pitched as the down-and-dirty HTML-coding dude who started the site, and was still hanging around drinking Jolt and writing new code daily to make sure your animated GIFs loaded properly.

This of course was kind of clever and kind of stupid at the same time, because as we all learned later, “Tom” was a sock puppet account created purely to give the site a “connected feeling”. As in “Wow. I’m friends with the OWNER. This place can really connect you fast!” That was the “kind of clever” part. The “kind of stupid” part was the fact that since your animated GIFs never loaded properly, you’d sort of unconsciously resent Tom, if you hadn’t learned to actually hate him already because you learned the dirty secret that he was just a bogus account based on the CEO, who was never going to really be your friend.

Thanks For The Add!

Those are probably the things we all remember most about MySpace – pages that never loaded and were jammed with sparkly animated unicorns when they finally did, and a nagging, slightly disappointed feeling when you realized that all those people were right there with you, and yet somehow so unreachable at the same time. It was as if you had been invited to some huge party, but every time you reached out to shake someone’s hand and introduce yourself, invisible kidnappers hooded you like terror detainees, and led you to some other room. And in that room, you’d find a message on the wall that said “Thanks for the Add, Dude!”

Digital Natives “Go All CrySpace”

There were ways to message people, but they sucked. So you’d distract yourself by trying to customize your page to show all the people you’d never meet how cool you were, and by the time you got the layout to work, you wouldn’t care about connecting with other MySpace people. Which must be why they called it “My” Space. Because you were the only one who cared what you were doing there. This started coming to a head for digital natives around 2006, as they felt the existential tragedy of it all. As college student Gabe Henderson was quoted as saying in this Wired.com piece : “The superficial emptiness clouded the excitement I had once felt….It seems we have lost, to some degree, that special depth that true friendship entails.” Others took a harsher view. This Sean Bonner post on an earlier incarnation of Vox.com got a lot of link love at the time:

The Birth of Internet Celebrity

You have to give the site credit for one thing though: it launched a few celebrities, like Lily Allen, Katy Perry, and Tila Tequila. Granted, a record label, fundamentalist Christian fame, and posing nude may have played a part for those three. But MySpace also brought us one of the first real “internet stars”, Chris Crocker:

So Whatever Happened to Tom?

Apparently, you can find him on Facebook…

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The annoying creature that became an international sensation. Video further below.

It’s hard to believe there was a time when a telephone was mainly a communications device, and when it “rang”, it actually made a ringing sound, but it’s true. What’s perhaps even harder to believe is that someone could make an industry out of selling “ringtones”. Okay, fair enough. You have this fancy new mobile communication doodad, so to impress people, you’ll pay a buck to have it make some weird sound when a call comes in, mostly to announce to everyone that you have this fancy wireless doodad in your pocket. But what’s even stranger than all of these things are two other things: 1) That people would choose “Crazy Frog” as their custom sound, and 2) That this annoying sound would be the “hook” in an international pop hit  .

Meet Crazy Frog

If you live in the states, you may not be as familiar with this little fellow, who was the visual representation of the sound that was later to become the internationally popular ringtone and pop song. Originally, the sound and the character were aptly called “The Annoying Thing”. The song was a remix of the “deng deng” sound (details below) and the 1985 hit Axel F, from the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack. For some reason the song – which was a massive hit worldwide – barely made a (ahem) ding in the US market.

What is Crazy Frog riding? The existing success of the song Axel F, of course!

Crazy Frog’s Penis

There was originally a bit of a flap over Crazy Frog’s penis, but in the UK, they finally let it him keep it. Not so in the US, where iTunes immediately had the offensive appendage removed. There is some seriously Freudian stuff going on here; the image for the American release suddenly has Crazy Frog astride a huge rocket:

How Did This All Happen?

In 1997, a 17-year-old Swede named Daniel Malmedahl recorded himself imitating the noises produced by internal combustion engines. He posted them on a website and later caught the attention of a Swedish television researcher, who convinced Daniel to perform the sound live on air. After it debuted on television, recordings of his performance began appearing on file sharing networks and various websites under the filename “2TAKTARE.MP3″ (allegedly, Tvåtaktare” is Swedish for “two stroker”).

In late 2003, another Swede, Erik Wernquist, encountered the sound effect and, was inspired to create the 3D animated character he named “The Annoying Thing” to accompany it. The animation was a popular attraction at Erik’s website, but the sound was credited to “Anonymous”. Eventually, word reached Malmedahl that his impressions had been used in a now well-known animation. He contacted Wernquist, apparently giving an impromptu performance to confirm his claims. Wernquist was convinced, and gave credit to Malmedahl for his creation.

The animation received attention through filesharing and word of mouth, and Ringtone Europe and Jamster België (now both merged into Jamba!) capitalized on the underground cult-status of the sound, and licensed the rights to it, renaming it “Crazy Frog” and starting to market it in mid-2004. Wernquist expressed his displeasure at the choice of name, saying: “If I had known that this was going to be such a big thing I would not have allowed them to use that stupid name. It has nothing to do with the character. It’s not a frog and it’s not particularly crazy either.”

Crazy Frog Axel F Remix

Here’s the video for the international hit

Crazy Frog’s Greatest Hits?

Cleverly, the song was marketed on an album called Crazy Frog Presents Crazy Hits, presumably banking on people’s general ignorance of how big the character really was internationally. They later rolled out creepy videos like this one, which remixed the Knight Rider theme with Chacarron . They generally bombed:

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You kids today don’t know how easy you have it when it comes to music being marketed to you. Pretty much everywhere you turn you’re getting clobbered over the head with content marketing about Kanye or whoever; you don’t even really see actual “advertising” any more. But confarnit, back in our day, we had to walk barefoot 12 miles through three feet of snow, uphill both ways, just to get on the internet to get some music marketed to us. In some cases, it was worth the effort, like when Radiohead ingeniously rolled out “Blips” to market their album Kid A. If you were alive back then, you might recall the excitement around these quirky and brilliant short clips that preceded the release of the album. There was no such thing as reliable streaming video at the time, so if you were hip to them, you might spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get your hands on these little clips, which were mostly created as 20 to 60 second QuickTime files. They’d never play properly in the browser, so you’d download them, and watch them offline. The resolution was horrible, but the content created for them was perfectly suited to the medium They would look like this in the QuickTime player:

If you grew up with the music marketing of the last several years, this probably all sounds absurd. But at the time, it was sheer genius on the part of Radiohead. No-one in the established industry at the time believed there was a way to market music on the internet. Mostly because they were too stupid and lazy to figure it out, and were hell-bent on destroying Napster and filesharing with multi-million dollar campaigns that accused you of being a thief in short ads before every movie you went to see. See this Wikipedia highlight for more on the details, but the gist of it all was that the fans were DYING to hear the new album (which was taking quite a while), and were pursuing the advertising (the “blips”) before it was even released. As opposed to the ads chasing them, as is the case today, when your browsing history tracks your every move to show you disturbingly specific ads wherever you go. Radiohead, as we all know, continued with this kind of innovation the years to come.

Watching the Blips

You can view all the blips below in a single YouTube video, or a selected set in better resolution in the Vimeo clip further below. But to get the authentic vibe of the originals, you should visit this page that has them collected in their original .mov and .asf formats.

All Radiohead Kid A Blips:

Blips by Shynola:

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This is how it looked in 2003, but now you can even stream it on Amazon

If you were nerdy enough in 2003, you may remember the original episodes of the web series “Red vs. Blue” (view Amazon trailer here). If you’re not familiar with it from its later incarnations, Red vs Blue was a web-only video series created by Rooster Teeth Productions (clips further below). The typical description of the series on sites like Wikipedia will talk about how it was “produced using the machinima technique of synchronizing video footage from a game to pre-recorded dialogue”, but this misses probably the most important point about the series, which is that it was a brilliantly-crafted existentialist absurd comedy created mostly by recording dialog over the telephone (yup, a land line) and giving voice to faceless, stiff video game figures from the game Halo. Although it relies on the video game characters to deliver the stories, the stories themselves aren’t driven by the game concept at all; the comedy is in fact often derived from an always-subtly-present narrative self-awareness about the surreal setting of the episodes.

Video in the Year 2 BYT (Before YouTube)

Especially back in 2003 AD (the year 2BYT), getting your hands on the latest episode of Red vs Blue could be laborious (especially if you were a budding young pirate who hated paying for anything) because the series was released in a controlled fashion to limit the creators’ bandwidth bill. With hindsight, a lot of us should probably feel guilty, because by September 2005, the official Rooster Teeth website was serving 400 terabytes of data monthly. To help you grasp what that really means, the entire collection of the US Library of Congress would be roughly 10 terabytes; the human brain is estimated to require about 100. You have to remember, YouTube didn’t even exist yet, and when it finally launched in 2005 it looked like this:

Already, view numbers were proportionate to how stupid you were. Wow! 2,237 views! Good job, COBALTGRUV!

No, you’d have to download the darn things, and even though the clip was probably only 360×240 and about 5MB, that meant a fifteen minute wait on dialup for a 2 minute video. Then, when you finally got it downloaded, you’d have to watch it on one of these godawful platforms:

But it always felt like it was worth it. As we said at the top, the genius of the show is in its existentialist humor, and somehow the settings, voiceovers, tiny viewscreen, and surreal humor all “felt right”. It was like you were getting some hint of the future of entertainment before everyone else, and well, you probably were. But luckily for you if you’ve never seen the series before, you don’t have to endure this misery, because it’s all available on YouTube now, and in better quality than the originals. You can even buy it on Amazon!

Important Note About YouTube Viewing

If you plan to watch episodes on YouTube, look for the older uploads starting in 2008. Although the later uploads of the same episodes are in HD, they also have a really terrible “character intro” with awful music that’s over a minute long, almost as long as the clips themselves! Besides, you wouldn’t be enjoying them in their original gritty form, which is half the appeal. It’s like listening to an old slightly scratched Coltrane LP.

Here are the first two episodes, in all their low-res glory:

Episode 1: Why Are We Here?

The first episode perfectly sets the tone for the episodes to come, with its Existentialist 101 titularity.

Episode 2: Red Gets A Delivery

Borrowing a little from the “Hollywood Movie Drill Sergeant” cliché, the second episode brings a clever cornball vibe.

If you’re enjoying this and don’t feel like paying for them, the rest of the older YouTube versions are HERE

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