Max Headroom
My original plan was to write a post about Max Headroom back on April 3rd. Because Max made his television debut on April 4th, 1985. So my post about Max would have been the day before the character’s 37th birthday. Happy (belated) birthday, Max!
But
instead of doing that, I instead didn’t post anything for a five month
stretch. Oops. Sorry about that.
BIG EXCITING NEWS!
Instead of holding the BIG EXCITING NEWS for the end of this post, I’m opting instead to lead with it. I didn’t want to take the risk that you’d become bored reading me gush about Max Headroom and not make it all the way to the BIG EXCITING NEWS. So, here it is…
On
July 29th, 2022, Deadline.com broke the news that there is a Max
Headroom reboot in production at AMC.
Matt Frewer is returning to play Max.
The adaptation is being written by Christopher Cantwell (co-creator,
executive producer, and co-showrunner of Halt and Catch Fire. The show is being produced by Elijah Wood and
Daniel Noah’s SpectreVision and All3Media.
Who (or What) is Max Headroom?
If you were watching television throughout the mid-to-late 1980s, you’re undoubtedly familiar with Max Headroom. But for those of you not familiar (or not familiar enough), let’s examine the origins of Max.
As I said in the intro, Max’s television debut was April 4th, 1985. But it occurred on Britain’s Channel 4, at least a year before the first New Coke commercial. Max’s debut was in a science-fiction TV movie entitled Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into the Future.
That TV movie was designed to tell a story explaining the origins of Max Headroom. This was deemed necessary because of just how unique and weird the character was. Unlike anything people had seen before. What was Max going to do that required this explanation?
Two days after the movie aired came the premiere of The Max Headroom Show, an MTV-inspired music video program. And while it’s airdate followed the TV movie, the music video show was why Max was created in the first place.
Channel Four wanted to capitalize on the whole MTV thing that was going on, but didn’t want your typical video jockey doing the spots between videos. They wanted something different.
There’s some controversy about who created Max, a lot of his creators arguing as to who contributed what. But as near as I can tell the basic character concept came from writer George Stone (including the name, which would have instant brand recognition from about a billion signs across Britain warning you as to whether or not your car would fit through that vertical space), and was fleshed out by computer animators Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton. Record executive Peter Wagg was hired on as producer, and writer Steve Roberts wrote the screenplay for the sci-fi TV movie that was the origin of the character. And, of course, we can’t discount the efforts of the man who performed the character, actor Matt Frewer.
Max was definitely the ‘something different’ that Channel Four wanted. The character was presented as the world’s first fully computer-generated character. Which was just creative bullshit. Frewer underwent a four hour makeup process, before being fitted into a fiberglass suit jacket, and wore haptic lenses in his eyes that ended up shredding his corneas. (Anytime you see Max Headroom in sunglasses it was because Frewer’s eyes were healing between stretches of using the torturous contact lenses.)
Keeping up the illusion that Max was a computer generated entity robbed the makeup team of the possibility of winning awards for their remarkable efforts.
The Max Headroom Show ran for three seasons (and a couple of specials), and evolved to include celebrity interviews. The show migrated to the cable channel Cinemax in America.
Max caught the attention of the Coca-Cola company when they were looking for a spokesperson for their New Coke product. Soon after, Max Headroom (and New Coke’s “Catch the Wave” slogan) quickly became well known world wide.
Peter Wagg then sold ABC on the notion of remaking the Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future TV movie as the American-produced pilot for a new science-fiction drama.
This
series ran for less than two seasons before ABC cancelled the show. And Max began a slow slide into
semi-obscurity.
Cyberpunk Pioneer
Max Headroom is widely recognized at the first cyberpunk television series.
Max himself is actually only a side character in this show that bears his name as the title. A computer generated entity based on the mental patterns of the actual protagonist, Network 23’s star reporter Edison Carter.
The dystopia in which the characters live is corporate run. The only real remaining growth industry is television. Television sets are no longer manufactured with off switches. And ratings are everything.
Candidates for public office are sponsored by networks, and are elected based on whichever network won the ratings during ‘election night’.
Security cameras and thug-like armored security guards are ubiquitous. Law and order are purchasable commodities. No money? No legal protection. Education is also something that is paid only, and offered exclusively to the upper echelon of society. Books are an obsolete medium.
Terrorist organizations make exclusive package news deals with unscrupulous networks for the rights to cover their strikes.
And everybody has an extensive computer file. Except for the Blanks. Hackers (and friends of hackers) who have ‘blanked’ their records from the system. Most notable among them in the show was the mohawked aging punk Blank Reg, who ran the pirate station Big Time Television.
The unsavory criminal element is represented in part by recurring characters Breughel and Mahler, who seem to make the majority of their living selling corpses (and not-quite-but-almost corpses) to the body banks (presumably for later transplantation). As well as doing the occasional unsettling odd job for the corrupt and truly villainous.
The outer edges of the city are the ‘fringes of society’, and the Fringers aren’t living the good life. (Although they do have access to street vendors who sell fried rat.)
A
lot of cyberpunk tropes either got their start or were popularized in the
show.
Where is Max Headroom Now?
If me raving about Max makes you want to see this show for yourself, you have two options. If you’ve got $35 to spare ($23 on Amazon), you can get the complete series on DVD.
But
if you insist that only a streaming option will due, you’re going to have to
sign up for the free (but with included commercials) Tubi network. Which, to be perfectly honest, I only learned
about doing internet research on where you could currently stream Max.
Treasure Hunt
The pilot season of Max Headroom was just a six episode run. When it was renewed, it was for a second season of thirteen episodes. But ABC pulled the plug on the show just as episode nine of those thirteen was about to start production. Which leaves five episodes unfilmed.
(Five official episodes, that is. There are apparently more, but… I’ll get to those shortly.)
As a budding writer, I wanted some examples of scriptwriting, and got ahold of a catalog to a company called Script City, that sold old television scripts. I was delighted to discover that they had several episodes of Max Headroom. Then I took a closer look and discovered that one of those scripts (“Theora’s Tale”) had the word ‘unfilmed’ in brackets behind the title.
I immediately sent off for a copy of that script, then increased the frequency by which I checked my post office box. It eventually arrived. I read it. And was instantly hooked. There were more unfilmed episode scripts out there, and I wanted them!
One day I was bored and thumbing through that month’s issue of Starlog, and ended up reading an interview with some writer named George R. R. Martin. (This was years before the publication of “A Game of Thrones”.) In the article, he mentioned having written the Christmas episode of Max Headroom, which was sadly never filmed.
I did some research, and found a mailing address for him. Sent off a letter explaining that I was the creator of a Max Headroom fanzine (more about that in a little bit), and that I would be very interested in any information he could give me about his episode of Max.
I
absolutely couldn’t believe it when he sent me a complete copy of the script (“Xmas”).
Along with the treatment for an
unwritten episode (“Mister Meat”) that he’d submitted for first season, but
which ABC’s standards and practices division had vetoed. The good Mr. Martin also provided a mailing
address for Michael Cassutt, the show’s executive story editor.
So, I sat down and wrote to Michael Cassutt. He not only provided me with a copy of his unfilmed script (“Families”), but a couple of pages of behind the scenes info… including an incomplete but still very informative list of unfilmed episodes. It was incomplete because he had just sent off all of his Max Headroom files to a media library in California. But there were at least eight scripts listed there.
Three more scripts than my simple math had accounted for. Were they simply treatments that didn’t get written? No, because George RR Martin’s treatment wasn’t on that list. Were they scripts that they were planning to buy if the second season got extended to a full season order? Who knows?
One of the scripts on the list Michael Cassutt gave me was written by John Shirley, widely considered one of the founding fathers of cyberpunk. It is my theory that this is the basis behind the popular but untrue rumor that William Gibson (the most popular cyberpunk writer at the time) had written a script for the show. The letter I wrote to John Shirley went unanswered.
To
date, I have had no further success in obtaining more of these scripts. But I’ve always got my eye out, just in
case.
Parody and Homage
The whole Max Headroom concept was rife with potential for parody. The late 80s would see a lot of sit-coms do an episode that featured an incredibly similar character.
Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau combined President Ronald Reagan and Max Headroom, creating the (new?) character of Ron Headrest. A character which I’ve been told outlasted Max’s own popularity.
Back to the Future II had Headroom-ized versions of both Reagan, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Michael Jackson in their future’s retro 80’s Café.
And
for each sarcastic parody of the character, their seems to also be a heartfelt
homage. Fairly recent examples of this
include Eminem appearing as Max throughout a large portion of his “Rap God”
video, and a ton of Max Headroom references in Ernest Cline’s excellent novel Ready
Player One (along with its incredible dud of a sequel, Ready Player Two).
The Incident
And, since we were already speaking of parody and homage…
If you attempt any online research at all on the subject of Max, one of the first things you’re going to run into is “The Max Headroom Incident”. (Also sometimes called “The Max Headroom Broadcast Signal Intrusion”)
On November 22nd, 1987 the tv signals of two stations in Chicago were hijacked. The 9:00 News was broken into for almost 30 seconds before they were able to shut it down. The signal which replaced their broadcast was a man wearing a latex Max Headroom mask (just part of the avalanche of Max Headroom merchandise available at the time) standing in front of a rotating panel of corrugated metal meant to represent Max’s computer generated background.
About two hours later, the signal jackers struck again, this time during an episode of Doctor Who airing on the local PBS affiliate. This time the interruption was 90 seconds long, and ‘Max’ spent that time engaged in a bizarre rant. Followed by footage of someone’s bare ass getting spanked with a flyswatter. High class stuff, that.
To this day, the identity of the perpetrators remain unknown.
Max by Me
In 1989, I felt very strongly that there needed to be a Max Headroom fanzine. So, I got to work and produced one.
1990 saw the debut of a photocopied ‘small press’ publication called The Two-Way Sampler. (Named for the fictional data gathering technology that allowed you to use any television as a temporary video camera.)
I recruited my artist friend Michael Reinsch to create logos, feature headings, and cover art for me. My friend Wade contributed several incredibly bizarre one-page comics that were a mash-up of Max Headroom and Married With Children. Everything else in the zine was written by me.
The five issue run included five parts of a (never to be completed) six part fanfic. Some feature articles about the world 20 Minutes Into the Future. I even had my own column, “Static Interference”. (Yes, that’s right. I was exactly pretentious enough to have my own column in a publication for which I also wrote ALL the other text.)
I had tons of ideas for the future of the zine, but as each issue took longer and longer to produce than the one before it, I eventually just gave up on it.
I continued to write Max Headroom fanfic. Though, as was typical of me, I had far more notes for unwritten stories than I had actual completed stories. Most of the stories revolved around the characters in the show, but there were a few tales of the 20 Minutes Into the Future mythos where none of the established characters appeared. And then there was that other thing…
I had developed a look into the future of the universe with the working title of 30 Minutes Into the Future: Max Headroom – the Next Generation. The protagonist was still the star reporter for Network 23, but this time that character was Blank Mink, the adult version of a child who appeared in a second season episode of the show. I leaned heavily into the dystopian aspect of Max’s world during my exploration of this future incarnation of the story.
But the vast majority of my Max fanfic ended up being destroyed in a heartbreaking hard drive crash.
MOCs Headroom
(Wow, That’s Just Terrible)
My enthusiasm for LEGO and my enthusiasm for Max Headroom have always wanted to join forces into a single mega-enthusiasm. In fact, whenever anyone asks what my most wanted LEGO theme is, I either tell them it’s Max Headroom (not likely to happen) or the shared universe occupied by 80s independent comic mainstays Nexus and Badger (also not likely to happen.)
So with official sets and minifigures not on the table, the only real remaining avenue is building Max Headroom MOCs (MOC = My Own Creation, to differentiate if from a LEGO-produced set that comes with building instructions) to display at LEGO conventions.
There are several difficulties to me producing Max Headroom based MOCs. The first is my skill level. Most of what I want to do is stuff that I haven’t yet figured out how to build. The other main concern is who among the general populace is even going to know what these MOCs are?
Max Headroom, as a character, is probably recognizable enough to the older generation. But MOCs from the Max Headroom mythos / 20 Minutes Into the Future universe that don’t include that familiar face? Probably recognizable in the wider sense as ‘some sort of cyberpunk thing’, but wouldn’t really stand out as a Max Headroom-themed MOC.
The main Max MOC that I’m both interested in building AND is within my capabilities is recreating the full cast of the show in miniland scale. (Miniland is one of the traditional attractions at the LEGOLAND theme parks. The occupants of Miniland are stylized brick-built characters that stand about 11 bricks tall. The adult Minilanders do, anyway. Children are smaller. But the scale of these figures has become popular among LEGO builders.)
Max Headroom has a very unique looking cast of characters, and building them in miniland scale seems like it would make for an excellent MOC.
I’m not great with microscale (teeny-tiny buildings, far smaller than a minifigure could enter – most microscale cars are 1x2 studs long, and 2 plates high), but despite that I’ve also given some thought to constructing a micro version of the city skyline that includes the Network 23 building at its center.
I’ve always thought that if I were to ever build a LEGO mosaic, it would be one of three things: The LEGO Logo (because nobody has ever built a mosaic of that before), the Ghostbusters symbol, or… Max Headroom.
There are a couple of very distinctive vehicles in Max Headroom, but I can’t build a vehicle to save my life. (People who saw the van in my “Attack on the Lair of the Calendar Man” MOC can attest to that.) But that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t love to build both Breughel and Mahler’s van, and the pink Big Time Television Bus.
But
my ultimate dream of producing a Max Headroom MOC is building a life-sized bust
of Max, and then building an old school CRT television around him. That’s the goal. (Does anyone know how you go about learning
to build a LEGO bust?)
Idle Speculation on the BIG EXCITING NEWS
The Max Headroom fandom has lots of questions about the forthcoming reboot. But at present, there are few-to-no actual answers. We know that Matt Frewer is back as Max. And scriptwriter Christopher Cantwell has hinted that the character of Edison Carter will be involved in the story in some way. But will Frewer be playing him?
Is this a full reboot, or a continuation? Matt Frewer is 35 years older than he was when he played Edison Carter. Will we get to see a 35 year older Edison in this show? Or was Max created when Edison was older? And is there a chance that the current fandom outcry will be heard, and the show will hire Mark Sheppard to carry on his father’s legacy by playing Blank Reg’s son?
The original show was definitely the near future of the 80s. But would that even play with today’s audience? All important data in the world was stored on floppy discs, and all TV shows were on videotape. All of the TVs were CRTs, as the show predated the flatscreen.
If I were in charge of this (and right there are the words that indicate this next bit is not even just outright wild speculation but a pointless flight of fancy) it would be half soft reboot and half continuation. All of the important characters would be involved (except for those whose actors have since passed, like Grossberg, Cheviot, and Blank Reg), just 35 years into the future of their story. But the world? That’s where the reboot aspect comes in, taking us into the near future of today’s real life.
The stories would continue on, but the background they happened in would be different. Updated for a new generation.
I went on Twitter and asked Christopher Cantwell if he could give us a ballpark timeframe as to when we might watch the first episode of the new series.
His response was, “It’s in development and I’m writing the pilot now. So it’s going to be a bit.”
I can’t wait. But I guess I’m going to have to.
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