Max Headroom
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40 free Max Headroom trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Max Headroom was sold to viewers as the world's first computer-generated presenter: a smug, stuttering talking head in a shiny suit who mocked the medium he lived in. The truth behind the illusion, and the dystopian story invented to explain him, made the character one of the strangest hits of the 1980s. This quiz covers the whole phenomenon: the British origin film, the music video show, the American drama series and its cast of reporters, hackers and network bosses, plus the adverts, the hit single and the parodies that followed. It also revisits the night a masked impostor took over the airwaves. It is written for anyone who remembers the glitching voice, and for newer fans who met Max through the films, music videos and novels that still borrow his look.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Billed as computer-generated, 1980s TV host Max Headroom was really created with which technique?
Prosthetic makeup
Prosthetic makeup, a moulded plastic suit and a blue screen did the work, because mid-1980s computers could not yet animate a talking human head for television.
Q 02Max Headroom is named after the last thing a crashing motorcyclist sees in his origin story, which is what?
A car park clearance sign
A car park clearance sign reading Max. Headroom 2.3 m gave the character his name, and his creators liked that the phrase already hung over garage entrances all over Britain.
Q 03Which Canadian-American actor improvised his way into playing stuttering TV host Max Headroom?
Matt Frewer
Matt Frewer won the part with a long burst of comic improvisation, after a friend who had already auditioned suggested him to the producers.
Q 04Max Headroom became the stuttering face of which soft drink in a 1986 campaign aimed at young people?
New Coke
New Coke hired Max to win back young drinkers who preferred a rival cola, and he took over as spokesman from comedian Bill Cosby.
Q 05A masked Max Headroom impersonator hijacked the signals of two TV stations in which American city?
Chicago
Chicago viewers saw both intrusions on a single Sunday night in November 1987, about two hours apart, with the second lasting roughly 90 seconds.
Q 06A pirate in a Max Headroom mask interrupted a PBS station's showing of which British sci-fi series?
Doctor Who
Doctor Who was partway through the 1977 serial Horror of Fang Rock when the masked figure cut in, and the episode simply resumed once the pirates stopped transmitting.
Q 07Which 1989 film sequel shows a glitching, Max Headroom-style Ronald Reagan as a video waiter in the Cafe '80s?
Back to the Future Part II
Back to the Future Part II staffs its nostalgia diner with video waiters, and computerised versions of Michael Jackson and the Ayatollah Khomeini work alongside the Reagan one.
Q 08Which rapper played a stuttering Max Headroom lookalike in a 2013 video nominated for three MTV awards?
Eminem
Eminem borrowed the Max look for Rap God, a video that also nods to The Matrix and Pong and later passed a billion views.
Q 09Which fantasy novelist wrote a Max Headroom script that went unfilmed because the series was cancelled?
George R. R. Martin
George R. R. Martin, years before Game of Thrones, wrote an episode about a shopping holiday called Xmas, but the axe fell while it was still in pre-production.
Q 10Max Headroom creators Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel later directed which film based on a hit video game?
Super Mario Bros.
Super Mario Bros. was the pair's second cinema feature, following a big-screen debut with the Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan thriller D.O.A.
Q 11Max Headroom made his 1985 debut in a one-hour science fiction film made for which British broadcaster?
Channel 4
Channel 4 wanted a host for a new music video programme and gave him an origin film first, launching The Max Headroom Show just two days later.
Q 12Which American network remade the Max Headroom origin story as a prime-time drama series in 1987?
ABC
ABC ordered the drama after seeing the British pilot, and it ran for two short seasons before being cancelled partway through the second.
Q 13Max Headroom has been called the first TV series in which science fiction subgenre, shared with Blade Runner?
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk suits its world of teenage hackers, punk pirate broadcasters and corporations that rule through television.
Q 21How did the hunt for the masked figures behind the 1987 Max Headroom signal hijackings end?
No one was ever identified
No one was ever identified, and once the five-year statute of limitations ran out in 1992 the pranksters could no longer be prosecuted anyway.
Q 22After his own programmes ended, Max Headroom made a late-1980s cameo on which long-running children's series?
Sesame Street
Sesame Street hosted one of his last appearances of the decade, ahead of a cameo on a Comic Relief programme in the spring of 1989.
Q 23The actor behind Max Headroom later gave a speaking voice to which usually silent cartoon cat in a 1993 series?
The Pink Panther
Q 14In the Max Headroom series, the all-powerful networks have had which television feature outlawed?
Off switches
Off switches are banned by a government that acts as the broadcasters' puppet, in a world where sets can also monitor their viewers' movements.
Q 15In the Max Headroom story, the AI host is copied from the mind of which crusading TV reporter?
Edison Carter
Edison Carter and his on-screen twin are played by the same actor, though in the original British film the two never actually meet.
Q 16In Max Headroom, what name is given to the Network 23 broadcasts that can make some viewers explode?
Blipverts
Blipverts were designed to stop viewers switching away during the breaks, and the discovery of their deadly side effect sets the whole story in motion.
Q 17Which comic strip spoofed Max Headroom with Ron Headrest, a stuttering computer-generated Ronald Reagan?
Doonesbury
Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau was a fan of the original, and named Headrest after the long naps the real Reagan was notorious for taking.
Q 18Which 1987 comedy film features Vinnie, a glitching robot henchman of Pizza the Hutt modelled on Max Headroom?
Spaceballs
Spaceballs director Mel Brooks slipped the parody into his science fiction spoof in the same year the Max drama reached American screens.
Q 19Max Headroom has a cameo in which 2015 comedy about aliens attacking Earth as arcade game characters?
Pixels
Pixels gave Max a brief message scene, and for once he really was computer-generated, built from a facial capture of the original actor's performance.
Q 20Max Headroom's classic look pairs a shiny dark suit with which famous style of Ray-Ban sunglasses?
Wayfarer
Wayfarer shades joined the costume only because the bright contact lenses first used for the character became too painful to wear.
The Pink Panther was given a humorous American accent to appeal to younger children, having spoken only briefly in two cartoons back in the 1960s.
Q 24In which 2011 science fiction novel does hero Wade Watts keep a Max Headroom AI in his OASIS account?
Ready Player One
Ready Player One author Ernest Cline brought the Max AI back for the sequel, although Steven Spielberg's 2018 screen adaptation left the detail out.
Q 25Which English synth-pop group put Max Headroom's stuttering vocals on the 1986 hit single Paranoimia?
Art of Noise
Art of Noise reached number 12 in the UK with the single, whose title blends the words paranoia and insomnia.
Q 26In the Max Headroom series, which Network 23 controller steers the star reporter through his investigations?
Theora Jones
Theora Jones was poached from the rival World One Network, and the romance hinted at between her and the reporter was never explored before cancellation.
Q 27Which teenage prodigy runs Network 23's one-man research department and creates the AI in Max Headroom?
Bryce Lynch
Bryce Lynch uploads a copy of the unconscious reporter's memory on his chairman's orders, to find out how much the journalist had uncovered.
Q 28Which actor, later a regular on The Larry Sanders Show, played anxious news producer Murray in Max Headroom?
Jeffrey Tambor
Jeffrey Tambor played Murray as a man forever caught between backing his reporter's stories and keeping the executives upstairs happy.
Q 29Producer Peter Wagg tried and failed to sell a Max Headroom cinema film in which the AI host ran for which office?
President
President was the goal: Max Headroom for President was meant to start shooting in early 1988 to ride that year's American election, but it was never made.
Q 30Which subtitle of the original British Max Headroom film later opened every episode of the American series?
20 Minutes into the Future
20 Minutes into the Future promised a tomorrow uncomfortably close to the present, one where corrupt corporations manipulate the public for ratings.