TV & VIDEO - Aug. 10, 1987

TV’s Max Headroom, the incredible facsimile of a computer-animated character who sports his own brand of fractured speech, has joined Porky Pig on a list of fictional characters offensive to stutterers and their therapists. When children “start imitating Max by saying, ‘I’m J-J-Johnny,’ the act of talking consciously has begun and confusion about how to talk will set in,” said Theodore E. Emery, a Florida speech therapist attending a San Francisco speech convention. But an ABC spokesman denied that Headroom is a stutterer: “The speech is a computer glitch.” ABC begins airing the show again Friday.