Product Details

• Rating: Unrated
• Format: NTSC
• Original language: English

Customer Reviews

Ahead of Its Time
"Max Headroom" was originally a character used by Channel 4 in Britain, in 1984. Matt Frewer portayed Headroom, as he did in the ABC television programme in America.
Predicting a 500-channel smorgasboard of channels, reality television and webcams, MH was clearly ahead of its time. Let's hope we get a DVD soon, complete with clips from the original broadcasts, and even the entire made-for-tv movie by Channel 4.
Incidentally, going by Steve Roberts's novelisation, MH takes place in the year 2004.

A Word to Our Sponsors....
...and I don't mean Amazon! This is for you, TV Powers-That-Be.

When Max Headroom came out we watched it devotedly, because we knew good and well that you'd get rid of it as soon as you figured out which switches to throw.

Here it is over 20 years later, and you still haven't figured out that there is MONEY TO BE MADE off this thorn that is still in your sides. People want to buy this show. They WILL buy this show. You can have a tidy little income coming in continuously off it, and you can laugh yourselves sick because when it comes in, most of us will be watching it on--you guessed it--television.

So load it up with commercials (not Blipverts, please!) or do whatever else you have to do, and get it on the market. We're w-w-w-w-w-aiting!

Unique
Given some of the stuff that's made it onto DVD, I'm amazed that we've yet to see "Max Headroom" appear. Heck, the original UK TV movie must be approaching the age where the rights revert to creators - in the UK at least, they didn't sell their soul to Coke. What I'd like to see most (and what I think is most likely to make an appearance first, probably as a PAL DVD) is the original UK TV movie. It's basically the same plot as the US pilot but doesn't pull its punches quite as much, Bryce gets his just desserts, and it's generally got a grittier, darker feel. Oh, and it also benefits from an excellent soundtrack by Midge Ure and Chris Crosss of Ultravox, which I wouldn't be surprised to see as an audio-only release of this appear before any DVD, since I'd be pretty sure that the rights belong to Ure/Cross again by now. The fact that Rocky Morton and Annebel Jankel were behind this one contributes at lot - and explains why Max turned up later on an Art of Noise video.

Me, I'd be happy with just the original UK movie and the soundtrack, but it'd be interesting to see the US series released on DVD - most were aired in the UK much later and while there's a large cast overlap, they just weren't the same.

The third thing that'd complete the set is, alas, unlikely ever to see DVD. That's Max's UK TV series, also aired on Channel 4, which was shown in the UK before the US series and after the original movie. It didn't run for very long, and was only 30 minutes or so, run at something like 11pm on Channel 4, which pretty much doomed it to falure, but it was an interesting mix of "Interviews" (i.e. Max briefly tolerating the presence of celebrity guests, who he proceeded to interrupt and talk over, These alternated with an interesting and often eclectic mix of music videos - stuff like Jean-Michel Jarre's "Zoolook" video. If anyone's got a list of all the videos shown on this show, I'd love to see it.

However, the likelihood of this ever appearing is near nil, just because of the rights issues involved with all of the music videos.

So, a DVD release of the original UK movie and a box featuring the US series would do very nicely. I'd accept both in the same set, but would be very disappointed to see the UK original tacked on as a "bonus". The US series had already been toned down for the US audience (by making Bryce one of the good guys - I can just see the network exec saying "Can't we make this characer more sympathetic to increase popularity with the teenage demographic?).

Oh, and the original deserves a good quality digital remaster - I hope it was originally recorded on film rather than tape - since while the Max graphics themselves show their age, the rest of the "computer graphics" have withstood the test of time for the same reason that the computer graphics on the BBC "Hitchhikers" series did. The reason? Like the HHGTTG graphics, they're not computer graphics, they're all conventional animation courtesy of Peter Lord.