MAX HEADROOM COMPLETE SERIES TV
(It was canceled after one season.) In the series, Max is the accidentally downloaded consciousness of a crusading TV newsman named Edison Carter. The concept was picked up in the US by ABC, and the pair (along with writer-futurist George Stone) poured all their tele-disgust into Max and his mythos - enough to fill 14 episodes of the short-lived prime-time drama. Hired to invent a new kind of free-floating veejay personality for Britain's Channel 4, British video artists Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton created him in reaction to the "false intimacy" of US television personalities in the Reagan era.
Max wasn't the first talking head, of course. Max was the forehead of today's mass punditocracy, presaging Glenn Beck, Keith Olbermann, and the rest of today's flesh-and-blood bloviators. "I'm an image whose time has come," he told us back then, and he wasn't kidding. Turns out he sold us more than sugar water. Two decades later, right around the time that future is supposed to be happening, Max Headroom is getting a DVD release, and maybe Max will get his due.
MAX HEADROOM COMPLETE SERIES SERIES
In 1987, he starred in a landmark cyberpunk series on ABC, a media-spoofing sci-fi adventure set in a dystopia that exists "twenty minutes into the future."
His creators designed him as high satire and dark prophecy. Though he spent most of the late '80s hawking New Coke ("C-c-c-catch the wave!"), Max was more than a Spuds MacKenzie-style spokesgimmick. Well, allow me to refresh your Memorex: Max was a computer-enhanced "talking head" with a freakishly sculpted scalp, chronic stutter, and a knack for one-liners. We think of him today as an empty-headed relic of the 1980s-if we think of him at all. The set will also feature something called "3-D lenticular packaging," which is apparently very, very special because it's helped jack up the price for the new Max to $49.97.Pity Max Headroom. The blank space will be filled by the always popular "bonus features," which in this case might mean the episodes that never aired because no one wanted to watch them.
Altogether, Max's 14-episode life will be spread across five DVDs-that's fewer than three episodes per disc. But there's a second chance and there's the second coming, which is how the rereleased version is being treated. Of course, nothing is forgotten in our recycled world, and Max Headroom is hardly the first extremely minor TV show to somehow earn a second chance on DVD. Undoubtedly, the creators would like to think that it was ahead of its time-there was a bit of early X-Files about it-but considering its short life, it was closer to a show that deserved to be forgotten. At the time, the show was billed as a breakthrough in cutting-edge sci-fi, one that used visual technology and a sharply satirical script to make it oh-so-modern. There's an irony in this: the 1987 TV series Max Headroom was itself about bringing someone back from the dead, a TV reporter (Matt Frewer) who crashes on his motorcycle (the last words he sees are "Max Headroom") and is resurrected as some kind of computer that looks like an old MTV video and speaks in a weird, stammering voice. And yet here it is, coming to a Best Buy near you: Max Headroom: The Complete Series. I can say that because: (a) I watched it (b) it survived only 14 episodes after an enormous marketing campaign (including a cover story in one NEWSWEEK magazine) and (c) like Lindsay Lohan behind the wheel, it seriously dented the careers of almost every actor who came near it.