max headroom : 20 minutes into the future
the show was based off of the tv movie max headroom: 20 minutes into the future .
legendy polskie are just that - fairy tales retold twenty minutes into the future .
you' ve found the home of ev - ev - everything max headroom. even after 30 years... he' s still “20 minutes into the future! ”
each episode opened with the
20 minutes into the future
legend, indicating when the action occurs. it was the series' tagline .
max headroom can do whatever he wants. why you may ask? because he' s max headroom .
the title of this production varies with the setting. the only title within the film is the opening
max headroom ,
but most promotional materials and the official
picture book of the film
extend it to
max headroom: 20 minutes into the future .
the max headroom tv show was not all max headroom the entire time; it was often edison carter and other characters .
the style of max headroom — in both the channel 4 tv movie and the american series — is cyberpunk, a hyperreal dystopic future setting, though this future is decidedly less - distant (only 20 minutes ahead) .
following the success of his sci - fi series
max headroom: 20 minutes into the future ,
the original talk show of the famous disembodied stuttering head with an over - inflated ego was brought... see full summary »
it’s kind of hard to explain max headroom if you didn’t experience him in the ‘80s. he started as the star of a british made - for - tv movie called max headroom: 20 minutes into the future, the story of a hard - hitting journalist whose brain is implanted into a computer after he suffers a serious head injury .
grim and gritty superhero comic batman the dark knight returns took place twenty minutes into a future in which batman has retired .
flash gordon started being published in the 1930s and took place in the future of 1970. adaptations have variously taken place in the present, twenty minutes into the future, or in the far future .
20 minutes into the future kicked off an extensive franchise, and max became a singular' 80s pop culture phenomenon that represented everything wonderful and horrible about the decade. max hosted music video shows; max interviewed celebrities; max hawked new coke; max headroom became us network television’s very first cyberpunk series. max was inescapable — and then almost just as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone .
max headroom (1987 – 1988) was a short - lived but ground - breaking american science fiction television series which aired on abc. the series was developed from a british television movie, 20 minutes into the future, that was developed to provide background for the max headroom (character), originally developed for channel 4' s the max headroom show in 1985 - 1986. the original max talking headroom show was a cinemax show that came out later in 1987 .
on thursday, april 4th, 1985, a blast of dystopian satire hit the uk airwaves. max headroom: 20 minutes into the future was a snarky take on media and corporate greed, told through the eyes of investigative journalist edison carter (matt frewer) and his computer - generated alter - ego: an artificial intelligence named max headroom .
urltoken gives fairly specific and plausible predictions for the near future, getting less so the farther into the future you go .
production on 20 minutes into the future got underway with steve roberts as the sole writer. the film is credited as being
from an original idea by george stone, rocky morton, and annabel jankel .
he just is max headroom... he' s perfect .
the many sons (and a few hot dah - daughters) of max headroom .
the max headroom broadcast signal intrusion incident, involved someone dressed as max headroom interrupting the signals of chicago television stations wgn and wttw. the person or persons responsible were never identified .
not the answer you' re looking for? browse other questions tagged max - headroom .
welcome to the max headroom chronicles... v3. 0 / 2016 and continuing .
since bryce appears to be 16 or 17 years old, this places the show in the real - world time frame of 2004 - 2005 (or 20 years after the channel 4 film was made -
20 years into the future
) .
in the uk telefilm 20 minutes into the future upon which the american series was based, the character was called grosman and was played by nickolas grace. rocket portrayed grossberg as an american yuppie with a characteristic facial (and neck - stretching) twitch .
both max headroom and brazil lampshade the zeerust problem by setting themselves explicitly
20 minutes into the future
and
somewhere in the twentieth century
, respectively (rather than identifying specific dates), and by mixing up production designs and costumes that would have been considered
futuristic
in the' 80s with random elements from previous decades .
black mirror a british sci - fi anthology show is often set in our world, just with some new technology some 20 minutes into the future. much like the twilight zone, it explores modern anxiety with how technology is taking over our lives .
max headroom wants you to know if you talk about pepsi, he will murder you .
the verge did a great retrospective of it. the definitive oral history of 1980s digital icon max headroom
this page was last modified on 26 december 2015, at 14: 20 .
back to the future also contains a reagan / headroom fusion battling a similarly digitized khomeni for menu suggestions .
at our recent culture now: twenty minutes later, rocky morton, annabel jankel and george stone discussed their involvement in creating the ground - breaking 80s virtual personality, max headroom .
at our recent culture now: twenty minutes later, rocky morton, annabel jankel and george stone discussed their involvement in creating the ground - breaking 80s virtual personality, max headroom .
there were only 14 episodes of the tv series, and they' re all on max headroom: the complete series. the show is set, as it proclaims at the start of each hour ,
20 minutes into the future ,
but it' s a very dark, cynical, blade runner type of future. the biggest media giant in the world is network 23, a global operation - - and one of its biggest stars is edison carter, a hard - hitting reporter in the 60 minutes tradition .
there is an homage to max headroom in the 1997 film batman & robin when barbara encounters her uncle alfred in the batcave. he has programmed his brain algorithms into the batcomputer and created a virtual simulation. he appears and speaks (stutteringly) like max headroom .
here is a bit of nostalgia. the max headroom story. the rare pilot that became the 1980' s series
20 minutes into the future
staring matt frewer and amanda pays. the aired pilot episode for broadcast was a loose interpretation of this film but didn' t capture the same dystopic edginess of this original. copyright 1996 lorimar telepictures. all rights belong to the copyright holder .
max headroom is really one of those rare shows that was ahead of its time in terms of guessing how technology would be woven into society and media .
max headroom
science fiction drama was the first, and so far the only, cyberpunk tv series .
the entire max headroom saga began with a one - hour telefilm made for the uk' s channel four .
bolivian freedom fighters killed a 20 - person medic team trying to reach starving peasants .
max headroom wasn' t actually computer generated, he was really matt frewer in a shitload of latex .
everything i know about max headroom comes from ready player one, so i might not be the best source .
his appearance in max headroom is pretty much the same as in the hallmark sherlock holmes mini series 2 decades later .
you are correct. the movie you refer to was a british television pilot movie, intended to provide a backstory for the max headroom character, who presented a show called the max headroom show in the style of a music video host .
sum 41 wrote a song called
second chance for max headroom
on their album half hour of power .
abc went to work adapting 20 minutes into the future into the first episode of the us series ,
blipverts .
original cast members matt frewer, amanda pays (
theora
), and william morgan sheppard (
blank reg
) joined the new show, while all other roles were recast. however, the first attempt at rewriting steve roberts’ script proved less than successful .
see also next sunday a. d. , which is completely indistinguishable from the present, but claims to be happening in the future anyway. how much applied phlebotinum it takes to flip next sunday a. d. into full - scale twenty minutes into the future is an interesting question, since many stories employing fictional technology are actually set in the present. can result in i want my jetpack if the writers set the work not sufficiently far into the future, and the year the work was set in comes in real life without any of the new technology it featured. compare to urban fantasy as the magical version. inverted by twenty minutes into the past .
the x - men story
days of future past
, released in 1981, depicted a dystopian future in 2013 .
the second season of max headroom debuted on september 18th, 1987. less than a month later, abc pulled the plug .
max headroom was that awesome guy on tv that told you to catch the wave and even had his own sweepstakes once .
if you yearn for science fiction that is both dark and surreal, then binge - watch max headroom. offering both 1980s nostalgia and a vision of networked corporate power that feels uncannily contemporary, max headroom is a unique cyberpunk gem .
. note that many of the stories explicitly set in the 1990s and the 21st century aren' t really twenty minutes into the future; they' re really distant - future stories dated by a writer who didn' t realize that the year 2000 really wasn' t all that far off. however ,
we were talking about it, and rocky said ,
i think he should be a man. and i think he should be computer - generated .
that set me off on the whole narrative: network 23 ,
20 minutes into the future ,
blipverts, and everything else. it all came from that moment .
you kind of go ,
well, it is a good time for a comeback ,
because the whole
20 minutes into the future
business… we’ve arrived. we’re here now. and there was a certain kind of naive charm about making all this analog stuff look digital, but the amount of work that went into it … nowadays any 10 - year - old could throw it together on his laptop .
deus ex invisible war moves the setting 20 years and into the actually future. bio - modification (with super - advanced biological nanotech) is commonplace, the nation - state is gone and replaced with competing international interest groups, a borg - like hivemind of cyborgs controls the black market, and nanotechnology can now build or dismantle large cities in a matter of minutes .
the original movie was a prequel to the max talking headroom show. the main difference between the original movie and the american series' pilot is that at the end of the movie, max headroom ends up in the possession of blank reg and his big time tv music video show, which he then becomes the host of .
max headroom (matt frewer) appeared in music videos, a feature film, a tv series and commercials for products like new coke .
max headroom has been referenced subtly throughout pop culture since the ‘80s, but is probably most remembered for the illinois tv broadcast hikacking in 1987, where a weirdo in a max headroom mask and an accomplice stole the airwaves during an episode of dr. who? for a couple minutes, and did things like spank their bare ass and say mostly unintelligible things. if you go and check out any max headroom episodes (you can find them on youtube), it’ll probably quickly become apparent to you that jim carrey was a fan, too .
a volkswagen commercial has someone debating about buying a car, only to have his future self (wearing nifty
futuristic clothes
) from
13 days in the future
pop into the showroom and tell him to buy the car .
grosman and lynch are quite evidently out - perhaps even delivered to the body bank by breugal and mahler - cheviot takes over network 23, and blank reg and dominique drive off into the hazy sunset with their new ratings booster, max headroom, on board. they knock one of its antennas off the bus as they pass under an underpass labeled... max headroom 4m .
x 1999 is set in, you guessed it, 1999. when it began publication in the early 1990s, it was twenty minutes into the future. the series remains unfinished since 2003. clamp now admit that they guessed wrong on some noticeable details, such as the rise of cellphones .
well, why not? max headroom, 2. 3 million, well, that' s what you want, idn' it ?
we had a laugh because we [ envisioned ] 20 channels — nobody could believe that there were 20 channels. i mean, it was the highest number we could think of. now we’ve got 500, and nothing but crap on most of them .
today’s cult shows live on thanks to the passion and dedication of their online fan bases. in many ways max headroom was the perfect candidate for that kind of following: quirky and weird, with an unlikely underdog spirit. but while max lived in the future, his shows were confined by the pre - internet era .
brief plot description: dogged video reporter edison carter pursues the truth in a future where television networks wield tremendous power. his allies include his controller theora jones, young hacker bryce smith, and a mercurial digital presence named max headroom .
i was being ironic. to me, mh: 20 is as much a staple of cyberpunk as gibson' s sprawl trilogy. a lot of friends i know cite it as their first steps into the genre .
extant takes place at an unspecified point in the future where deceptively human robots exist .
that’s even truer of max headroom, which debuted in 1987, the same year as star trek: the next generation. i was 2 years old when channel 23 first hijacked the abc signal, so any real impact the show had on me and my viewing habits occurred years later, when you could still stumble upon max headroom on one cable outlet or another. but the flashy presence and wiseacre humor of the title character lingered—more so than the show’s harrowing near - future setting, which proved oddly disposable when max exploded into a full - blown icon of the greed - is - good ’80s .
this site aims to be the complete word on everything related to max headroom:' 80s icon, tv show host & star, satirist and meme. if it' s max... you' ll find it here .
the series began as a mid - season replacement in spring of 1987, and was sufficiently popular to be renewed for the fall television season, but the viewer ratings could not be sustained, due to direct competition with cbs' s top 20 hit dallas (tv series) and nbc' s top 30 hit miami vice, and max headroom was canceled part - way into its first broadcast season; leftover episodes aired in spring 1988. plans for a cinema version titled max headroom for president were mentioned in the media, but the film was never produced .
eager to capitalize on max’s popularity, cinemax launched a third variety show anchored by the character in the summer of 1987. the original max talking headroom show was shot in new york and featured max chatting it up with guests like penn and teller, dr. ruth, and william shatner. fears over max media saturation didn’t stop the abc show from getting another season — but there was a catch .
at the same time, we needed to try and find a max fellow .
grossberg :
max, this is the executive board of network 23 .
max :
you mean you' re the people who execute audiences ?
a month after the cancellation, in november of 1987, television viewers in chicago were hit by a
broadcast signal intrusion
when pirates broke into two local tv broadcasts with footage of a person in a max headroom mask. the culprits were never found .
we had the show title first: max headroom. i mean, there was a list of about 40 — one of them was called
the tube ,
i think. i did it one weekend, and max was the one that won .
max headroom (matt frewer) appeared in music videos, a feature film, a tv series and commercials for products like new coke. shout factory hide caption
the world trade center is still standing in the first film, which seems to make the' future' early 2001. however ,
the not too distant future
subtitle gets a bit confusing by the time the third movie happens. simply because two scenes occur before the opening credits, and they are stated to be
10 years ago
and
20 years ago .
it is never specified when exactly those two scenes were supposed to be 10 and 20 years ago from, now or from the not too distant future. (confused yet? )
like the tv show was an attempt to spin off the same story into a tv show. : p
interstellar takes place far enough into the future for there to be the launch of an interstellar mission, yet close enough to the present for farms and pick - up trucks to look twentieth - century .
world of warcraft: played with in the final content of cataclysm. the hour of twilight instance and the dragon soul raid both take place in modern azeroth' s dragonblight, with deathwing and the old gods laying siege to wyrmrest temple, but are both accessed through the caverns of time. also, for obvious reasons regarding wrath' s content, non - instanced dragonblight looks exactly the same. to any character it can seem like these two instances are set 20 minutes into azeroth' s future .
in episode 7 of farscape' s season 4 ,
john quixote ,
john crichton enters virtual reality where he encounters a max headroom - like version of himself .
the dirk pitt series of novels by clive cussler are usually set a year or two into the future, with the united states switching to metric and super a. i. computers with hot chick holograms .
we introduced live guests into the proceedings, and it kind of evolved into this bizarre talk show format. it sort of became the rite of passage for various pop stars and film stars to come on and shill their latest project. but in turn they would get roasted by max .
a 1985 cyberpunk television movie. only people of a certain age will remember max
and they said,' let there be m - max.'
if max headroom ever got angry enough, he could crash every pc or macintosh ever in less than 5 seconds. it was a close call when his show got canceled .
in 1987, lorimar in the us acquired the rights to the character, and produced one season (fourteen episodes of about 45 minutes each) of a series based on the british movie. the first episode was a somewhat shorter version of the original story, featuring some of the same actors; later episodes continued the story of max headroom, reporter edison carter, and network 23 .
matt frewer played the main role as edison carter and max headroom in both series. other actors in both versions where amanda pays as theora jones and william morgan sheppard as blank reg .
max was featured on the 1986 hit uk single
paranoimia
by art of noise .
. the viewer is initially given no reference frame for when it occurs relative to earth history, but it fits the pattern of twenty minutes into the future in that it combines highly advanced, futuristic technology with a culture that is almost indistinguishable from the usa of 2005, down to the clothing. as the series progresses, more specific elements of american culture start appearing, and the fleet discovers
garry trudeau' s daily comic strip doonesbury featured a character, in the late 1980s, named ron headrest, the first computer - generated politician, a cross between max headroom and ronald reagan .
i love matt frewer on orphan black as dr. leekie. i' ll have to check out max headroom - was it a tv show as well or am i mistaken ?
digimon adventure 02 is set in 2002 in the original. since the show was first premiered in 2000, the anime was set 2 years into the future. digimon tamers also plays with the trope, but is set in 200x .
i recall there was a documentary, a survey of the ‘80s that went out obviously at the end of the ‘80s, in which max headroom was judged to be more important than michael jackson. which was good. i think people got it; that was the thing. max headroom was coming out of the air, really. and we were in the fortunate position that we were able to synthesize it .
obviously, 20 minutes into the future is the setting of most flash forward stories, though they usually don' t make a big deal of it except as a minor joke. of course, science marches on, so it' s fun to watch 10 years later to see how wrong they got it. television series are especially prone to this, as they tend to make use of various props, costumes, and effects that reflect the sensibilities of their time but become increasingly dated over a long run .
when a computer genius back at network 23 downloads edison' s brain into a computer file, the result is a slightly jumbled visual talking head, whose first words - - edison' s last thoughts - - become his name: max headroom. and, as one of the show' s creators explains on a separate disc of special features, it was a brilliant case of countrywide free advertising: at the time, every parking garage in england featured the same
max headroom
sign .
it' s interesting, because there' s lots of talk about it coming back. here we are in the digital world, and the whole conceit of the show was 20 minutes into the future. well, we' ve arrived. it could be wonderful. it' s still somewhat tied up in a log jam of rights issues and so forth, so it' s difficult to explore it fully. but it would be great fun, as i played max again in a series of commercials for channel 4 when they went digital. we made him grumpy because he was older and crotchety; a liver - spotted version of max. [ laughs ] i remember thinking just before the cameras rolled, i distinctly remember thinking ,
holy s * * *, it' s been 20 years since i' ve played this character !
then i immediately went into it and time was out of joint and fused together two decades suddenly .
illegal broadcast showing max headroom impostor doing non - sense things and obscenities, shown over sports news and
doctor who
episode, which became cult phenomena as culprits were never captured .
i was a fan of this canadian cyberpunk tv series when i was young and own the first two series on dvd. one night recently watching late night tv i watched a
max headroom
movie. this featured the plot of the first episode of the tv series yet it featured an entirely different english cast (except matt frewer who played edison carter / max headroom). why are there two versions of this story? was it an english movie that later got adapted into a canadian tv show ?
the original command and conquer game' s non - secret history backstory begins in late 1995 (the year it was released), and subsequent games are generally set twenty minutes into the future. the canonical dates are 1999 - 2002 for tiberian dawn, late 2030 for tiberian sun, 2031 - 32 for firestorm, 2047 - 49 for tiberium wars and 2077 for tiberian twilight .
in 1987, the story told in 20 minutes into the future, a made - for - television movie, formed the basis of a full - fledged drama television series. the film was re - shot as a pilot program for a new series broadcast by the u. s. - based abc television network. the pilot featured plot changes and some minor visual touches, but retained the same basic storyline. the only original cast retained for the u. s. version series were matt frewer (max headroom, edison carter) and amanda pays (theora jones); original cast member w. morgan sheppard later joined the cast as
blank reg
. among the non - original cast, jeffrey tambor co - starred as
murray, ” edison carter' s neurotic editor .
people complain about the low production value, but i feel that worked for the film' s favor. it looked truly grisly and scrapped. one of the first and most influential works of cyberpunk in film. max headroom himself is awesome as always. i' ve never gotten into the show, but i may now .
incidentally, from the birthdate and age given for bryce lynch (in the novelisation by steve roberts), it can be deduced that
max headroom
( at least the british version) takes place in the year 2004 .
but so are some of the ideas this series floats, very sneakily, into a broadcast television program. like max headroom the character, who is an irrepressible talking head, max headroom the series dares to bite the hand that feeds it. plots have to do with network 23, or other broadcast operations, trying to increase their audience share and maximize their advertising revenue through all sorts of nefarious means - - like subliminal ads called
blipverts ,
for example, that run too quickly to fast - forward through .
when it becomes critical to keep carter on ice, grosman allows bryce to perform a cerebral scan of the unconscious carter, transferring his memory into an ai program that theoretically could impersonate carter on television. when the ai clone is started up, all it can remember at first is
max... max headroom .
grosman is disappointed and angry; the simulation is far too crude to pass for carter .
but i wasn’t a preschooler with a lenticular max headroom belt because this show boasted crackerjack storytelling or thrilling combat choreography. i was a preschooler with a lenticular max headroom belt because this was exactly the kind of show that could spawn such ludicrous merchandise: it’s all visuals and atmosphere, and despite the occasionally musty computer graphic, max headroom still has a smart, singular look. i especially love the way it frames its human characters like they’re stuck in a box like max—when you’re depicting a world dominated by television, you may as well render every citizen as a talking head. it’s especially effective anytime this happens to charles rocket, whose dick tracy chin makes him look like a computer rendering, too .
it just caught fire. we' d doubled ratings within three weeks. we were renewed three weeks into the run .
rendered by pid 84756 on app - 490 at 2018 - 07 - 09 20: 16: 17. 735747 + 00: 00 running 320594c country code: us .
there was never much of an organized fan community. it was very, very scattered until the internet picked up the pieces. there was alt. fan. max - headroom; it was reasonably populated and vibrant in the usenet days .
fist of the north star takes place in a post - apocalyptic future after an atomic war in
199x
.
and subsequent unit stories were always intended to be set just a few years in the future. this was ignored in
in the dystopic near future, a crusading tv reporter investigates news stories with the help of a wisecracking computer version of himself .
visited the second quarter of the 21st century. when tos visited the near - future world of 1968 in
assignment: earth
and
comico comics also had plans to publish a graphic novel based on the story, but never fulfilled them. a few posters were produced for comic shops, with a picture of max headroom saying comics will never be the same again .
the countdown novels are set vaguely in the near future, with the prologue of the liberators (the first book) taking place around the time of the american withdrawal from afghanistan .
me: i think we’d be remiss in discussing “blipverts” if there was no mention of the so - called max headroom incident (recently covered in mike vago’s wiki wormhole column). in 1987, a man wearing a max headroom mask broke into the broadcast feeds of chicago stations wgn (showing a bears highlight show) and wttw (airing doctor who). in the latter intrusion, which lasted about 90 seconds, the man speaks in seeming non sequiturs before getting his ass spanked by someone in a french maid outfit. the hacker was never caught, becoming the d. b. cooper of the television hijacking .
i' m outside a pub in north london with rocky and anabel. the sun is shining and we' re all laughing. we' re working on what - ifs?' what if max headroom was a man? what if he were computer generated? what if we used five minutes of our pop video show each week to tell the story of how he got that way...'
the credits roll over a shot of the overpass that our heroes just passed under. after a few minutes the van owned by the thugs that
killed
edison passes under it - apparently going after our heroes .
on may 10, 2007, nickelodeon' s me: tv made a
you' re watching me: tv
clip with ryan knowles impersonating max headroom on the webwall. in the clip, ryan' s hair was combed back like max' s, and he stutters occasionally and the background panned vertically with purple and blue neon stripes .
but with a whole disc for extras, why aren' t there any of those max headroom music - video shows? why couldn' t we have seen him, once again, interview some of the era' s big pop stars, like an unforgettably amused sting? and why not show a new coke ad or two, for old time' s sake? when tv of the future becomes our collective tv past, we have a duty to preserve it. what there is, on this max headroom set, is delightful - - but i want more .
earlier in the series, however, a bad future episode has the world trade center as the only piece of the new york city skyline still standing .
george had so many brilliant, genius ideas. a lot of it we would just compile and put into essentially a bible that i think made its way into the subsequent american tv series. but i don' t know because i never saw the tv series .
a box office slump in the united states starting in 2004 due to the availability of
on demand media
was predicted in the episode
dream thieves (max headroom), ” in which it is revealed that there are no more movie theaters .
poked fun at in the lake house, when the female lead (who lives two years in the male lead' s future) teases him by claiming that people eat food pills and drive flying cars in her not - at - all - distant future .
max headroom also predicted the proliferation of tv viewing (and video surveillance) into every walk of life. evidence of this can be seen in some restaurants, bars, and even grocery stores and self - service gasoline stations where news reports, sports events, and cooking shows are broadcast to consumers in the hopes of drawing in more customers and / or improving sales .
we all showed up there and had the usual drinks. we still had at least one or two episodes yet to air. [ we ] kicked around the idea of giving max a little speech, which they were able to insert into the last episode .
the idea, then, is to find humanity in this world of boobs and boob - tubes. it’s present in edison’s sense of justice and theora’s compassion, but the most human part of the max headroom landscape is max himself. unlike his coding, he’s imperfect and unpredictable; as grossberg finds out when he presents max to the network board, he can’t be controlled, either. not that i would’ve picked up on that when i was an impressionable youngin’ in front of my own tv set—i just thought max was funny, which is a human trait in its own way .
both the conduit and conduit 2 take place in the near future; the backstory of the conduit even includes a second terrorist attack in the united states on september 11 .
takes place in the grim, cold future of 1999, only a few short years after the conquest of earth by the new order nation .
in the near future, an intrepid investigative tv reporter does his job with the help of his colleagues and a computerized version of himself .
far cry 3 blood dragon (released in 2013) parodies this trope .
the year is 2007. it is the future .
john stith' s manhattan transfer is far enough into the future from the publication date of 1993 that they have tiny memory disks and something mentioned in passing called a
virtreal simulation
, but the world trade center is still standing and there' s no mention of the internet .
set in a near - future where global corporations control all media and citizens are hopelessly addicted to dozens of tv channels, the movie follows carter — working for the mysterious network 23 — as he discovers that network executives have created a form of subliminal advertising known as
blipverts
that can actually kill. while tracking the story, carter is flung into a barrier marked
max. headroom — 2. 3m .
desperate to maintain ratings with its star reporter, the network enlists a young hacker to download carter’s mind and create a virtual version of the journalist. but things don’t go quite right. the result: the stuttering, sarcastic max .
the glimpse was published in 2012 and is set in 2041 england which a global depression and petrol wars have turned into a dystopian state .
channel 4 was switching over to 100 percent digital [ broadcasts ] so they wanted to warn their audience, and they thought that max headroom — someone who was created for channel 4, originally — would be the perfect spokesman to do that .
thirty years after the premiere, i spoke with the writers, directors, producers, actors, make - up artists, and network executives that helped bring max headroom to life. and it all began, like so many things in the ‘80s, with music videos .
in an episode of family matters, a computer program steve urkel uses to aid in constructing and managing an atomic bomb features an interface of steve' s head and personality; the polygonic face and stuttering nature of the visage are a reference to max headroom .
with their lead in place, the team turned their attention to what would become the most important element of the entire phenomenon: max’s look .
pdn: i wouldn’t say that. if any acid that was in the original got watered down, i see that more in things like the conception of bryce, the teen computer wizard. in 20 minutes into the future, he’s really creepy, a kind of avatar of a new, ruthless generation that can do anything with technology but has zero empathy or moral intelligence. he’s a shark - in - training who even gives the network suits a bit of a chill. here, he’s just a little bit softer, more of a kid who hasn’t grown up enough to grasp the implications of what he’s doing. i think he came to sum up the inherent problems in building a series around max, especially one for american network tv, because over the course of the series, you got the sense that the producers really weren’t sure what to do with him .
i got called in to do this 10 - minute improvisation around six lines of what was then ostensibly max headroom dialogue. they just encouraged me to riff around, and it seemed like more of a weatherman or a newsman or something .
two unaired episodes from the series premiered in 1988, although the final episode ,
baby grobags ,
would never air on abc. one year later, back to the future part ii signaled the show’s influence with a retro - future arcade that included max - inspired versions of michael jackson and ronald reagan, but aside from a few sporadic reruns on cable, the character largely went silent… until 2007 .
the polly show, also mentioned later as a possible max - ratings killer, appears to be the most popular program on television .
commando had a series set in the near future where war was effectively outlawed. instead, nations solved their issues using virtual reality .
the variety show version of the max headroom show — complete with a live studio audience — soon followed, with max facing off against the likes of michael caine, jack lemmon, and vidal sassoon. with two books, trading cards, and a legion of other merchandised tie - ins, max was everywhere — and every single item was copyright chrysalis visual media. around the same time, coca - cola was looking for help as a reformulation of its flagship product, dubbed new coke, was flailing .
i watched that back then too! i was really into it but also thought it was very weird. i should watch those again
i was waiting for this future but instead i got one in which trump gets elected so, close enough i guess .
sure you do - this was a hot show in 1986 and they are currently rerunning this on tv and the show hasn' t lost its charm. max headroom, as you may remember, is the hipper alter ego of edison carter (matt frewer) and his adventures in the future. carter is a top notch tv reporter, the lovely theora ward, the controller, is played by the lovely amanda pays. the show gives you a dark smokey view of the future - and this book, the starting movie of the seiries, replicates that look, it has the script from the movie, as well as action shots. if you' re interested in how 1986 viewed the future or just a fan, this book is for you .
i gradually realized what i was getting into as plaster of paris head molds were made, and this prosthetics rubber make - up business goo was happening. you suddenly realize that it' s going to be a pretty arduous process creating the look for max .
this is smart stuff - - and way ahead of its time, as a good sci - fi series should be. to me, the most brilliant aspect of all is the origin of the title character. edison carter, being chased by bad guys while covering a story, is trying to escape by motorcycle from an underground parking garage. instead, he goes airborne, and nearly dies when he crashes into an exit barrier. the last thing he sees is the warning on the barrier :
max headroom [ an abbreviation for maximum headroom ] - - 2. 3 meters .
grossberg, with his secret prodigy bryce lynch, develop a rapid - speed advertising delivery medium known as pilot episodes, which condenses a full advertisement into a few seconds. when carter discovers that blipverts are killing people, grossberg orders lynch to prevent carter from getting out of the building. knocked unconscious, carter' s memories are extracted into a computer by lynch in order to determine whether carter uncovered grossberg' s knowledge of the danger of blipverts. the resulting computer file of the memory - extraction process becomes max headroom (character), making grossberg directly responsible for the creation of the character .
later that year, matt frewer told columnist marilyn beck about a max - related film that was in development. the title ?
in the pilot episode, grossberg is the chairman of network 23, a major city television station with the highest rated investigative news show in town, hosted by edison carter. in the max headroom world, real - time ratings equal advertising dollars, and advertisements have replaced stocks as the measure of corporate worth .
lampshaded in stewie griffin the untold story, where present - stewie and future - stewie travel 30 years to the future and present - stewie remarks that nothing seems different. future - stewie replies
well, it' s been only thirty years
. they do have time - tourism, and present - stewie expected to be emperor of the world by that time. presumably he' d have made some changes .
marks of time is set in 2024, which was twenty years into the future at the time of publication. technology has some improvements: cell phones have become small earpieces, televisions and laptops are thin, and some devices understand voice commands. also, hair dye is convenient and popular .
edison carter (matt frewer) was a hard - hitting reporter for network 23, who sometimes came close to uncovering things that his superiors in the network would have preferred to keep private. eventually, one of these instances required him to flee his workspace, upon which he was accidentally injured; bryce lynch downloaded a copy of his brain into a computer, giving birth to the character max headroom (character) .
grand theft auto 2 took place' in the near future'. 3 hints to its time were given, yet they all contradict each other. the manual states
3 weeks into the future
while entries on the official website are dated 2013. as if that wasn' t enough to throw you off, a dj on the radio states
the millennium' s a' commin' !
. there wasn' t much future technology to be seen, although a few examples exist - one of the weapons is an electric arc gun and one of the gangs is hinted to use expendable clones as mooks .
the setting of the first half of power rangers lost galaxy, until the writers outright forgot that they' d claimed the show was
in the not - too - distant future
.
this telefilm was created to explain the origin and backstory of max, who was conceived as a talking - head host and vj for a british channel 4 music program - sorry, programme. the ending of the film, with max in the hands of blank reg and big time television, was the final setup for max' s position as the music programme' s host. the ending of the us remake is different, to better set up the series .
meanwhile, the anchor, vj and technical whiz - and burned - out ex - heavy metal fan - blank reg of big time television has started max up and discovered, to his and the (improbably elegant) network owner dominique' s delight, that max is self - aware and interactive. big time' s ratings soar within hours of putting max on their broadcast .
several episodes of the original twilight zone were set in a future that has come and gone. some episodes refer to the setting as
the day after tomorrow
.
pokemon games have all look like they have been 20 minutes into the future, although its not clear if this was intentional (it could just be a technologically advanced universe). the pokémon - related technologies (tms, hms, pokémon centers, poké balls) all seem to work consistently within the universe, and seem to be extensions of normal technology. robotics and genetic engineering are well advanced beyond the real world, but within the realm of reason... until you get to the apricorns, which just confuses everything. and never ask bill about that time he turned himself into a pokémon. this trope seems to be played fully straight as of gen vi though. previously pokedexes were based off the current nintendo handheld (or the ipod in gen v) and the communication device was some sort of portable cellphone - esque watch. in gen vi both your pokedex and your holoclip are completely hologram based, playing off of the system' s 3d capabilities .
with all of the prescient issues in max headroom, the idea of media conglomeration, as ryan discusses, caught my eye. as a print journalist by day (yeah, yeah, yeah…), it’s an issue i face daily. despite the ratings bump he’s getting, edison carter is initially silenced because he’s investigating a major advertiser, the zik - zak corporation. it has to feel the same for any washington post journalist who wants to look into issues at amazon .
the
catch the wave
campaign garnered praise, national attention, and raised max’s profile: coca - cola senior vice president john c. reid later told newsweek that coke’s research revealed 76 percent of all american teenagers knew max after the first series of ads. but it wasn’t enough to save new coke’s crashing sales. meanwhile, wagg lined up another business opportunity as max’s popularity skyrocketed out of control .
has — into
art - crime
, muggings and now a murder performed and presented as works of art. let' s all be happy
tom clancy' s first jack ryan novels, written throughout the 1980s, were set at an indeterminate point in the near future; the cold war is still in full bloom and there' s a vaguely reaganesque republican in the white house. the sum of all fears, however, tied the series to a specific point in history (the end of the first gulf war), and from that point on the lead time inherent in the writing and publication of clancy' s novels meant that the series turned into an alternate history of sorts; the bear and the dragon, published in 2001, must occur no later than june 1997 for the internal chronology to hold up. with the teeth of the tiger, clancy moved the series back into an indeterminate near - future setting.
max headroom : 20 minutes into the future is a 1985 cyberpunk television film created by chrysalis visual programming ltd. for channel 4 in the uk to provide a back story for max headroom , a computer generated tv host . a british produced , yet american broadcast , television series , max headroom , was later developed from the original film . hbo provided some of the original funding . 
max headroom: 20 minutes into the future is a 1985 cyberpunk television film created by chrysalis visual programming ltd. for channel 4 in the uk to provide a back story for max headroom, a computer generated tv host. a british produced, yet american broadcast, television series, max headroom, was later developed from the original film. hbo provided some of the original funding.
max headroom: 20 minutes into the future is a 1985 cyberpunk television film created by chrysalis visual programming ltd. for channel 4 in the uk to provide a back story for max headroom, a computer generated tv host. a british produced, yet american broadcast, television series, max headroom, was later developed from the original film. hbo provided some of the original funding.