Watch "Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future" (1985)

This is soooooo good. I have every episode of the series but this UK tv movie is the original.

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P-p-p-poetry… That’ll work.
“Arise sweet slumber, and shroud me in the purple cloak…”
pfff. It doesn’t even rhyme.

-Max Headroom and Art of Noise “Paranoimia”

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Wait, that IS a young Joe Biden, is it not?

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The original Max was old school Matt Frewer in makeup and video editing mostly. They couldn’t do rendering that cleanly back then.

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Even if it were just his voice I’d still expect to see him credited.

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I still have every episode on VHS. Don’t know if they’re still playable. What a great show!

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I was in the same boat. Almost afraid to pop the tape in unless I had a digitial converter plugged in.

Then the DVD set came out!

The ABC show worked surprisingly well … they really honored the spirit of the movie while injecting a little bit of American flavor into it … was really surprised the two were able to co-exist and blend like that …

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I’m only 5 minutes in, but so far this is identical to the first episode of the American show. Did they reshoot the same script for ABC?

I shall continue watching to find out!

ETA: Looks like they did!

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I saw Max (on a big screen) open for Emerson, Lake and (at this point) Powell in 1986.

He was the best part of the show.

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The actor plays a semi-small recurring character named Carnage in Altered Carbon on Netflix. Highly recommended, BTW. There’s no mistaking him.

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Nitty-gritty time:

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“Rutger Hauer” ^^’.

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Hm, Freudian slip?

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Know Future.

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“Max Headroom …” was very ahead of its time in the 80s. It became an instant cult-classic, which is naturally why ABC cancelled the show after only a couple of seasons.

The show gave rise to all the cyberpunk tropes we now know and love, condensed into a Gibson-esque philosophy of “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

This show got me interested in the effect of media manipulation and such movie classics as “Network.”

It remember it as truly the intersection for a lot of odd ideas in the geek sub-culture back when it was dangerous to be a nerd:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-modern-kids-dont-understand-about-being-nerd/

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… And then there’s politicians.
It’s easy to tell when a politician is lying:
their lips move.
-Max Headroom

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I recall he was going to say that about network executives, but his network executives, in real life I mean, forced a change.

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And low hanging clearance signs over exits?

I was really tickled by Frewer in “Short Time”, a cop-buddy-comedy-action movie with Dabney Coleman; especially as the two leads were channeling Bert and Ernie throughout the film.

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Being old, I don’t feel it. That stuff was fun back then, but I think I still was too old even then. Not to sound too wisecracking, but the CGI looked weird to anyone playing on their Amiga 1000. It was as if someone without any knowledge of actual computers imagined how the future world would look like.

The same happened again in 1992. Again, at the time, it already felt retro in a weird way, while showing a future we were really eagerly awaiting.

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/WelldocumentedReasonableFoxhound-size_restricted.gif

Disclaimer: I went to one of the first Cyberspace Cafés in Berlin, possibly equipped with some of Cybermind’s devices, and spent far too much DM on a rather bland experience. I dropped all gaming after I finished the first Deus Ex, but I feel I should give modern VR a try. AR, for one, has gone a long way.
I’m a bit impressed, I have to admit. Tested IKEA’s Place app yesterday, and it’s rather what I thought AR would be than what people told me. Room to improve, of course. But quite impressive, nevertheless.

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