There’s a good chance that many of you reading this know Max Headroom only as 80s nostalgia*. You never experienced Max firsthand, whether as a talk show host in England, where he got his start, or a commercial pitchman in the US. And even if you’re old enough to have been around when Max Headroom was gracing the cover of Time Magazine, Nielsen rating figures indicate that you likely didn’t watch his ABC TV show, a preternaturally prescient science fiction program that, like all very good TV shows, got canceled very quickly.
It’s that show that makes me sort of excited that Max Headroom is back, if only in a limited and gimmicky capacity. An aged, balding Max Headroom (played, of course, by Matt Frewer) will be doing a series of commercials for Britain’s Channel 4, reminding Britons that analog signals are being switched off and it’s time to switch to digital. This isn’t a big deal except as a joke, but deep in my heart I’m hoping that the return of Max to the airwaves will spark new interest in him and that interest will in turn spark some movement on a DVD release of the short-lived show.
And of course there’s always the possibility of Max returning in general. Matt Frewer had dropped some hints over the last year about a new Max TV show, although it’s possible that the only thing that came of it was these commercials. It’d be interesting to see a really computer generated Max Headroom, and not just Frewer in a latex headpiece.
By the way, last week marked the 20th anniversary of a guy in a Max Headroom mask taking over a Chicago TV station’s signal and ranting unintelligbly. Click here to see video of it – but you’ll have to sit through like a minute of boring ass Dr. Who first.
*There was a 16 year old hacker character on ABC’s Max Headroom who was born in 1988. I wonder if there’s a real Bryce Lynch out there?