Vintage Max Headroom Coca-Cola Poster 🚀 "C-C-C-Catch the Wave" Space Theme Advertising Litho, Signed McKelvey

Remember When a Stuttering "Computer" Almost Talked America Back Into Loving Coke? 📺

There was a strange, wonderful sliver of the 1980s when a smirking, slicked-back "digital" man in mirrored sunglasses convinced half the country he was a real artificial intelligence — years before most households owned a computer, let alone one that could crack jokes back at you. He glitched. He stuttered. He called everyone "friend" in that jagged, pitch-shifted electronic warble. And somehow, a soda company still reeling from one of the biggest marketing missteps in American business history decided he was the guy to win the country back. If the words "C-c-c-catch the wave!" ever crackled out of your television speaker, or if the New Coke story gets told at your family's dinner table like a small, beloved national scandal, this poster is the physical proof it all really happened — and that it was every bit as gloriously strange as everyone remembers.

This is a vintage Coca-Cola advertising poster produced by The Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia, built around the "Catch the Wave" campaign and its unlikely spokesman, Max Headroom. It is an offset lithograph print, the workhorse process behind so much glossy retail and point-of-sale advertising of its day, rendered in bold black, orange, yellow, red, white, and blue. Max's grinning, slicked-back head fills the composition, floating in front of a glowing, ringed planet, with a distant blue Earth and a spiral galaxy scattered through the starfield around him. A Coca-Cola can tips forward at the bottom of the scene, pouring a ribbon of cola that curls and sweeps through space, doubling as the planet's own glowing orange rings — a clever bit of commercial art that turns a soft drink pour into a cosmic special effect. Across the top, blocky red-and-yellow lettering spells out "MAX HEADROOM," and across the bottom, the campaign's signature stutter-slogan reads "C-C-C-Catch the wave!" beside the Coca-Cola script trademark. The artwork itself is signed "McKelvey" in the lower left corner. This piece measures 17 x 14 inches (roughly 43 x 36 cm) and is New Old Stock — meaning it was printed and warehoused decades ago and never actually put up for retail display, so what you're bringing home is a genuine, unused survivor of Coca-Cola's advertising history. Its exact print date was never legibly marked, so rather than guess at a single year, it's best placed broadly in the 1980s into the early 1990s — the wider window in which Max Headroom's cultural moment and Coca-Cola's "new Coke" era both played out.

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🥤 The Soda That Needed Saving: A Crash Course in "New Coke"

To understand why a stammering fake robot ended up on a Coca-Cola poster, you have to understand the mess Coca-Cola was climbing out of. On April 23, 1985, The Coca-Cola Company took what is still considered one of the biggest risks in consumer goods history: it announced it was changing the formula of the world's most popular soft drink, marking the first formula change in 99 years. The project had been developed in total secrecy under the internal codename "Project Kansas," headed by marketing vice president Sergio Zyman and Coca-Cola USA president Brian Dyson. The public reaction was immediate, loud, and largely furious — and the company reversed course. The return of the original formula, rebranded as Coca-Cola Classic, came on July 11, 1985, capping off what the company itself later described as 79 days that revolutionized the soft-drink industry and transformed The Coca-Cola Company.

But the reformulated drink, now simply called "new Coke," didn't disappear — it kept selling alongside Coca-Cola Classic, and now Coca-Cola needed two separate advertising identities to keep the two products distinct in shoppers' minds. Coca-Cola's own corporate history confirms that by 1986 the company was running two campaigns side by side: the warm, sentimental "Red, White & You" for Coca-Cola Classic, and the youthful, forward-looking "Catch the Wave" for new Coke. At the beginning of 1986, Coke's marketing team went looking for a way to win back the younger drinkers who had drifted toward Pepsi, and they found their answer in the strangest spokesman imaginable: a purportedly computer-generated media personality named Max Headroom, brought in to replace Bill Cosby as the face — such as it was — of new Coke.

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📺 Meet Max Headroom: TV's "First Computer-Generated" Star

Max Headroom was not a Coca-Cola invention. He arrived as a fully formed, licensed British media character, created by video directors and artists George Stone, Annabel Jankel, and Rocky Morton, and played on screen by actor Matt Frewer. He was marketed, quite audaciously, as "the world's first computer-generated TV presenter" — a claim that made for irresistible headlines at a moment when home computing was still a novelty and the very idea of an artificial personality on television felt like science fiction come to life. In truth, Max was Frewer himself, sitting in front of a blue screen in prosthetic makeup, contact lenses, and a molded plastic suit, with his voice electronically pitch-shifted and chopped into that signature stuttering warble. The illusion, though, worked. Audiences believed it, or wanted to.

The character made his debut in the UK with the television film "Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future," which aired on Channel 4 on April 4, 1985, followed the next day by the first episode of "The Max Headroom Show." The film, a cyberpunk vision of a near-future dominated by television networks and ratings wars, was produced by Chrysalis Visual Programming, with the story developed by Stone and screenwriter Steve Roberts. Max quickly crossed the Atlantic, landed his own American talk show on ABC, and became one of the most recognizable — and strangest — pop culture faces of the decade. It's easy to forget, looking back, just how novel the whole idea was: a glitching, sarcastic "AI" host, years before anyone had a home computer that talked back, let alone the internet as we know it. That novelty is exactly why Coca-Cola came calling.

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🌊 C-C-C-Catch the Wave: Coke's Campaign to Win Back the Kids

Once signed on, Max Headroom became a genuinely global spokesperson for new Coke, fronting a wave of television commercials built around the stuttering catchphrase "Catch the wave!" — the very phrase splashed across the bottom of this poster. The campaign was, by contemporary accounts, a real hit. A Newsweek write-up of the era called Max's "C-C-Catch the wave" spots for Coke "the most cleverly structured pitches ever aimed at the under-30 viewer," and noted that two of them were directed by none other than Ridley Scott — yes, the director of Blade Runner and Alien, lending his own cinematic eye to a soda commercial. John Reid, Coke's senior vice president of marketing at the time, reported that 76 percent of teenagers had heard of Max after just the first flight of ads — a staggering awareness number for any campaign, let alone one built around a rubber-suited stuttering "hologram."

Coca-Cola's own consumer hotline reportedly received more calls about Max Headroom than about any spokesperson before him, with callers going so far as to ask whether he had a girlfriend. The campaign carried on through 1987 and was recognized as one of the best advertising efforts of 1986 by Video Storyboard of New York — a genuine industry nod, not just nostalgic memory talking. For a company that had just weathered the most public consumer backlash in its history, "Catch the Wave" was proof that Coca-Cola's marketing instincts hadn't deserted it; it had simply needed the right strange, sunglassed messenger.

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🏙️ Atlanta, Georgia: The Hometown Behind Every Can

Every poster like this one traces its roots back to a single afternoon in Atlanta, Georgia, on May 8, 1886, when a local pharmacist named Dr. John Stith Pemberton mixed up a syrup and carried it over to Jacobs' Pharmacy, where it was sold for five cents a glass. It was Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank M. Robinson, who suggested the name "Coca-Cola" and hand-lettered the flowing script still instantly recognizable on every can and bottle today. Pemberton himself sold off his remaining interest in the business before his death in 1888, never living to see what he'd started. It was Atlanta businessman Asa Candler who bought full control and formally incorporated The Coca-Cola Company, founded in January 1892, in the same city where the syrup had first been stirred at a soda fountain counter. The company has called Atlanta home in the century-plus since — and a full hundred years after Pemberton's first batch, it was that same Atlanta headquarters that gambled on reformulating the drink, weathered the backlash, and then turned to a sunglassed British television character to help set things right again. This poster is a direct descendant of that Georgia pharmacy counter, carried forward a hundred years and change into the era of cable television, video culture, and a soft drink war being fought as fiercely on the airwaves as on store shelves.

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🎨 A Cosmic Sales Pitch: The Artwork Itself

Whoever was tasked with illustrating "Catch the Wave" for this particular poster leaned all the way into cosmic spectacle rather than simple product photography, and the results are genuinely fun to look at up close. Max Headroom's head and shoulders dominate the frame, rendered with an airbrushed, almost sculptural glow against the burnt orange face of a ringed planet — a clear visual echo of Saturn, though reimagined in warm sunset tones rather than pale gold. Behind him, a small moon, a distant blue Earth, and a hazy spiral galaxy are scattered into the black of space, giving the whole scene real depth and scale. The showstopper, though, is the cola itself: rather than simply showing a can sitting still, the artist has the poured stream of Coca-Cola curl outward from the can and sweep across the composition as one of the planet's rings, blurring the line between advertisement and science-fiction poster art in a single, clever visual trick. The piece is signed "McKelvey" in the lower left corner, a small but genuine artist's credit that ties this illustration to the commercial art studios cranking out this kind of big, glossy, high-concept advertising work throughout the decade — the same visual language that gave the era its movie posters, its album covers, and its arcade cabinet art.

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📉 What Happened to Max — and Why This Poster Still Matters

For all its buzz, the "Catch the Wave" campaign couldn't fully turn the tide for new Coke in the long run, and Max Headroom's own American television run wound down by the end of the decade as well. Years later, in 1995, Coca-Cola chairman Roberto Goizueta looked back on the entire new Coke saga with remarkable candor, saying the company had set out to change the dynamics of sugar colas in the United States — and had done exactly that, "albeit not in the way we had planned," adding that the most significant result of new Coke, by far, was the powerful signal it sent. That kind of corporate self-awareness is rare, and it's part of what makes this whole chapter of Coca-Cola's history so endlessly fascinating to collectors and casual soda historians alike: a company famous for playing it safe took an enormous swing, missed in the way everyone expected, and then recovered by hiring the strangest, most futuristic pitchman on television. Pieces of that specific, short-lived campaign — genuine period point-of-sale material rather than later reproductions — don't turn up often, and each surviving poster is a small, tangible artifact of one of the most talked-about missteps-turned-comebacks in American advertising history.

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🖼️ Display Ideas

• 🥤 Hang it behind a home soda bar or bar cart, where the space-age color palette plays beautifully against glassware and vintage bottle displays.
• 📺 Pair it with other 1980s pop-culture memorabilia — VHS tapes, cassette art, arcade collectibles — for a dedicated decade-themed wall.
• 🎉 Feature it at a retro or "new Coke" themed party as a genuine conversation starter about one of Coca-Cola's strangest chapters.
• 🏢 Frame it for an office, den, or man cave, where its bold graphics and sci-fi imagery hold up as striking wall art on their own.
• 🎁 Give it to the Coca-Cola collector or child of the 1980s in your life who remembers the commercials firsthand and will recognize the reference instantly.

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🎁 Who Collects These

This poster tends to draw two overlapping kinds of collectors: dedicated Coca-Cola memorabilia hounds who chase every era of the brand's advertising history, from the Victorian-era soda fountain trays right up through the video-age campaigns, and pop-culture collectors chasing anything tied to Max Headroom's brief, brilliant moment in the spotlight — a character niche unto itself, with its own devoted following among 1980s television and design enthusiasts. It also appeals simply to anyone who lived through the new Coke controversy and wants a genuine physical piece of that story, rather than just the memory of it. Because this specific campaign ran for a relatively short window and was tied to a product Coca-Cola eventually phased out, surviving retail advertising material from it holds real interest for anyone building out a complete picture of the brand's marketing history.

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❓ FAQ

Is this poster from the original "new Coke" era, not Coca-Cola Classic?

Yes — this poster promotes reformulated "new Coke" specifically, using the "Catch the Wave" slogan that Coca-Cola created to distinguish new Coke's advertising from Coca-Cola Classic's separate "Red, White & You" campaign.

Who is the character on the poster?

That's Max Headroom, a British-created media character played by actor Matt Frewer and marketed as the first computer-generated TV presenter. He became Coca-Cola's spokesman for the "Catch the Wave" campaign after Bill Cosby.

What does "New Old Stock" mean here?

It means this poster was printed and stored decades ago but never actually put up for retail display or sold — it comes to you as a genuine, unused survivor rather than a piece that was taken down off a wall.

What are the poster's exact dimensions?

It measures 17 x 14 inches (about 43 x 36 cm).

Do we know the exact year it was printed?

No legible manufacture mark survives to confirm a precise printing year, so it's best placed broadly within the 1980s into the early 1990s, the window spanning Max Headroom's television run and Coca-Cola's "Catch the Wave" campaign.

Who is "McKelvey," whose name is signed on the artwork?

The illustration carries a signature reading "McKelvey" in the lower left corner, crediting the artist behind this particular piece of commercial poster art — a common practice for the illustration studios producing high-concept advertising artwork of the period.

Did Ridley Scott really direct Coca-Cola commercials for this campaign?

According to contemporary reporting, yes — at least two of the Max Headroom "Catch the Wave" television spots for Coca-Cola were directed by Ridley Scott.