Break the Cutie: In Dream Thieves: During an assignment, Edison runs into Paddy, an old friend and colleague who lost nearly everything thanks to Edison breaking a story before him.
In later episodes the "Max Headroom process" is brought up as a potential method of saving the life of a terminally ill billionaire, as well as letting those visiting graves talk to their departed loved ones via a "Max" type image in the headstone. Max stutters because the 23 mainframe's video memory bus wasn't QUITE fast enough to generate the 3D image frames of Max in real time ("it takes a moment to read out the frame store"). The process was less than perfect, and Bryce only allocated enough of 23's system memory to simulate the head and shoulders. They're very sweet.especially with pickles.
The teleplay book of the original movie gives Bryce's age as 16, pinning the setting down to about 2004, in the line:īreughel: I love babies.
In 2010, it was announced that the US series would be getting a DVD release in August of that year, with an amusing lenticular cover. The character was resurrected in 2008 as part of Channel Four's marketing for the digital switchover, in a number of (full-length) adverts. Also, everything had silly sci-fi names: "Blipverts", "Baby Grobags", "Credit Tubes", "Neurostim", etc.
The world presented by the show was strange and unwieldy, full of corporate greed, corrupt politics (elections to all political offices were decided by TV ratings: each network backed a candidate, and the highest rated network at the close of polling got their man installed), and a legal system that could not possibly have worked (it was illegal to turn a television off, books were banned in order to disenfranchise those who couldn't afford pay-per-view educational TV, bloodsports were mainstream, and trials for all but the rich and powerful were carried out in game show format). Many believe the network intentionally killed it, scheduling it opposite two hugely popular shows, Dallas and Miami Vice (where, ironically, Matt Frewer played a villain in a two-parter shortly after his show was cancelled). Max Headroom straddled the line between Black Comedy and (mostly) serious Cyberpunk for two half-seasons before being cancelled and largely forgotten. In the series, he and Edison became partners, breaking the Blipvert story together. The Teen Genius was changed from a villain to an unwitting patsy, and Max's role was greatly increased in the original, Max and Edison never met, and Max spent the rest of the movie as a VJ for a pirate TV station. It was remade by Lorimar in 1987 as the first episode of the Max Headroom TV series, keeping only Frewer, Pays, and Morgan Sheppard (Blank Reg) from the original cast, and substantially rewriting the second half of the movie (but using all the video effects so the money budgeted to effects could be used elsewhere). But it was in the US that the pilot was picked up.
Max Headroom was a huge hit, especially in the UK. *BZZZZZZZZZT* Er, we apologize about that. That does it! He's a freakin nerd! *giggles* Yeah, I think I'm better than Chuck Swirsky! Frickin' liberallllllllll-l-l-ll-l-l. The character was later picked up by Coca-Cola, for a series of TV spots for New Coke and appeared on T-shirts and mer- *BZZZZZZZZZZT* The Max Headroom show was the first to play with the music-video format, with Max frequently talking over lousy videos and making jokes, or cutting the video off partway through, a technique later picked up by Beavis And Butthead and other satirical video shows. The pilot wasn't picked up, but the rights to the Max Headroom character were sold to the makers of a music-video program on British television, on which Max appeared later in 1985.