![\"Edison](\"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/images\/maxheadroom_edison%2Btheora.jpg\")
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Astounding! Earlier in the week, I reported<\/a> the DVD release date for the 1982-83 TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey<\/i>; now this morning I read the even more unlikely news<\/a> that Max Headroom<\/i> is on its way as well!<\/p>\n Although I’m sure most children of the ’80s will remember Max from the Coke and New Coke commercials of the day, the series Max Headroom<\/i> had nothing to do with those, aside from the character of Max himself. Based on a British made-for-TV movie called Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future<\/i>, the American-made series followed the adventures of Edison Carter, an investigative journalist living in a near-future dystopia entirely dominated by massive corporations and television. When Carter gets a little too close to uncovering his employers’ nasty secret, they attempt to download his brain and create a virtual replica of their top-rated news personality so they can eliminate the troublesome original. The experiment doesn’t quite succeed, and a smart-mouthed AI named Max Headroom is born!<\/p>\n Max Headroom<\/i> was a trippy show, a biting satire of consumerism and mass media wrapped up in a tissue of futuristic ideas that wouldn’t penetrate the consciousness of mainstream audiences for another 10 or 15 years. (I’m not ashamed to admit that I didn’t fully comprehend some aspects of it myself.) Weirdly prescient in a lot of ways, and just plain weird in a lot of others, the show failed to find much of an audience, and it lasted less than a single season. Nevertheless, it made an impact on those who liked it; I don’t think it’s a stretch to call it a minor landmark in the history of science fiction, and certainly in the pop culture of the 1980s. I can’t begin to imagine how well it holds up today, but I’m excited to add it to my collection.<\/p>\n The press release doesn’t mention anything about possible extra features on the DVDs — I’d love to have those old Coke ads at least, and ideally the complete 20 Minutes into the Future<\/i> movie — but the way these things go, I’ll count myself lucky just to have the series itself.<\/p>\n The release date for this set is August 10. I ought to be finished with Gold Monkey<\/i> by then, so that will be just about perfect…<\/p>\n Update:<\/b> I’ve just remembered that I already wrote about Max Headroom<\/i> a couple years ago, when I posted<\/a> the show’s opening credits as part of my TV Title Sequences series. It appears that the embedded video in that previous entry has been removed by the copyright Nazis; for your viewing pleasure, here is another version:<\/p>\n