Vintage 1986 Max Headroom Coca-Cola Poster 🚀 "C-C-C-Catch the Wave" Space Theme Advertising Litho, Plate-Signed McKelvey

Size: 17 x 14 inches ~ New Old Stock, never hung.

🛸 A Soda Pitch Beamed in From Deep Space

Here's what you get: Max Headroom, dark sunglasses and a dark suit, grinning in front of a huge ringed orange planet, with Earth, a small moon and a spiral galaxy scattered through the starfield behind him. Down at the bottom a Coke can tips forward and pours out a stream of cola that curls up and becomes the planet's own ring - a genuinely clever bit of commercial art, turning a soda pour into a planetary ring system. "MAX HEADROOM" sits in a red-bordered box up top, and "C-C-C-Catch the wave." runs along the bottom beside the can, its "Coke" script marked Trade-mark, and the Coke logo again at the corner. Down in the starfield, lower left, it's signed in the plate: McKelvey. The back is blank. New Old Stock, never hung - and like anything printed decades ago and pulled from a stack, they vary a little one to the next.

🥤 Look Closer at That Can

Read what's actually printed on it: it just says "Coke." Not Coca-Cola Classic. That one word is the whole joke of this poster, because in 1986 "Coke" and "Coca-Cola Classic" were two different drinks sitting on the same shelf, and this poster was built to sell the one nobody had asked for.

The story starts on April 23, 1985, when The Coca-Cola Company announced it was changing the formula of Coca-Cola itself - a project developed in secret under the codename "Project Kansas," led by marketing vice president Sergio Zyman and Coca-Cola USA president Brian Dyson. The public did not take it well, and 79 days later, on July 11, 1985, the company brought the original formula back as Coca-Cola Classic. The reformulated drink didn't go away, though - it kept right on selling alongside Classic, and Coca-Cola needed someone to sell it to. In 1986 they landed on the strangest spokesman imaginable: a "computer" named Max Headroom, telling younger drinkers to "C-c-c-catch the wave!" That reformulated Coke was renamed Coke II in 1990. This poster is a piece of the campaign that tried to make it cool while it still just answered to "Coke."

📺 The "Computer" Who Wasn't One

Max Headroom was already famous before Coca-Cola ever hired him. He was created by George Stone, Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton, and he debuted for British audiences on April 4, 1985, in the Channel 4 film "Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future." He was billed as computer-generated, and a lot of people believed it. He wasn't. Under the stutter and the glitch was actor Matt Frewer, sitting in foam-latex prosthetic makeup and a molded fibreglass suit in front of a blue screen. The character went on to his own program on Cinemax and then an ABC series that ran 1987 to 1988 - and somewhere in the middle of all that, he became the face trying to convince America that new Coke was worth a second look.

👻 The Night Somebody Stole His Face

Here's the part of the Max Headroom story that has nothing to do with soda, and it's the one I like telling most. On the night of November 22, 1987, someone wearing a Max Headroom mask broke into two Chicago television broadcasts - first cutting into WGN's evening news, then, later that night, interrupting WTTW's broadcast of Doctor Who. Whoever did it was never identified, and the case has never been solved.

I love that this whole strange chapter - a fake "computer" hawking a soda nobody wanted - produced glossy, cosmic advertising art like this. It's a genuinely odd little artifact of a genuinely odd year for Coca-Cola.