Real question; likely only for people who've lived in Germany for a substantial period of time:
How "big" / popular of a cultural phenomenon was Max Headroom, back at the time (1980s–1990s)?
I kinda get the sense that it was a large thing, or at least larger than it was in other non-UK/US countries, based on the fact that there seem to be a lot of German-language books & memorabilia out there, which I don't see in other languages....
But perhaps that just represents the size of the market.
Just after having posted this, I feel like I'm not going to get any replies with insights into the answer, just because nobody on the Internets these days remembers the show anymore.
If you don't believe me, rewind a couple of weeks to the "cow tools" news story and witness how few people even in the nerd-saturated Mastodon space had any idea what The Far Side is.
@jeremiah_ I certainly wish that was how it worked.... Personally I first discovered this crisis last year, the previous time it was in the news (possibly when Jane Goodall passed away?).
To be brutally fair, I think Larson's reluctance to publish online (for losing-revenue-by-resharing fears) kept it from being rediscovered by a lot of potential new readers once it went out of production.
@jeremiah_ I definitely agree on the first; humor gets dated fast. Don't know if I concur entirely on the second, though — there's always some kind of "the cool people get it; the squares don't" factor, & I'm not up-to-speed on the young people these days.
I did feel kinda bad after I wrote that, since it sounds like I was blaming Larson. It's also plausible that his syndication/distribution deal make it difficult/impossible to embrace online publication.
@n8 Yeah, he passed relatively early in the internets growth, the business models hadn’t caught up yet, at least with syndication which was lucrative.
Gen Z and alpha seem to favor absurdism and nihilism over non sequitur humor, at least judging by things like skribidi toilet.
@n8 if it helps you:
I was born 1977 and definitely and positively remember Max Headroom, but I can't tell you how "big" / popular it was back then, sorry.
@knurd42 Cool. Do you by any chance recall if it was on broadcast TV in Germany (vs, say, paid cable)?
Just the fact that it was aired roughly contemporaneously is a big deal; not all TV exports got that, much less found an audience....
@knurd42 well, yeah, I'm not intimately familiar with the details of the 80s television business in Germany — that's why I hedged it with 'say"....
The big question is really whether it ran somewhere available to everyone or on something that was a specialty service. (For comparison, the sci-fi series ran on OTA broadcast in the US, but the music-video series was simultaneously on Cinemax, which was subscription-only / premium). US cable was slowly growing in the 80s till satellite lapped it.
@n8 yeah, I was trying to answer that, but then felt unsure and threw too much away, sorry.
Everybody who had a TV back then had public broadcasting (ARD, ZDF, ...). But Max Headroom was shown on commercial/private broadcasting (SAT1 iirc; or was it RTL); and those only really came up during the mid/late 80s; I think that's when we (I come from a rural area) started to have those (first via antenna/later via satellite), so in the citys it might have been more popular. But according to wikipedia the show was first shown in 1989 anyway.
@n8
I'm of a similar vintage as @knurd42 and growing up in 🇩🇪, #MaxHeadroom was definitely a thing. Probably not as big as Knight Rider or Tron, but bigger than Captain Power and Automan.
I also remember the Video of "Paranoimia" by the "Art of Noise" which featured Max Headroom (and now I'm humming along).
@ostueker Cool. Good comparison.
Almost everything was bigger than Automan, to be fair....
But I do suspect, unscientifically, that The Kids These Days are more familiar with Knight Rider than with Max — partly courtesy of the reboots, partly because of memes. Also I guess it's a more fun project to built a KITT in your garage than to build Edison Carter's camera. Or, IDK, a Max suit.
@knurd42
n8 Doesn't follow you 🇺🇦
Jeremiah C. Foster 🇸🇪🇺🇸🍥
Stephen Foskett
Thorsten Leemhuis (acct. 2/4)
Oliver Stueker
Indra Kupferschmid 💙💛