Boot up your computer-generated parrots, because Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future is the Greatest Movie EVER!
Click on the Japanese DVD cover or the title above to download our review of the film, featuring Andrew from The Veef Show and Collection-DX.
Review in a Nutshell: Low budget but groundbreaking, 20 Minutes into the Future is one of the few films that really deserves the term ‘cyberpunk’. It has a droll, British sense of humor and great production design, and I highly recommend it to anyone that can manage to track it down.
The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast 
Is this the UK pilot for the MAX HEADROOM series, Paul? I haven’t heard the podcast yet because I haven’t gotten to my office yet to download the episode off iTunes….
That was pretty interesting – even the US series was surprisingly good, which is probably why it didn’t last.
The dude who played Max Headroom, in everything official, is Canadian. His name is Matt Frewer. 🙂
I’m aware of that. The title of this post is a gentle jab at a British friend of mine, Tim Maughan, the author of Paintwork. He has a thing or two to say about cyberpunk.
Paul, listened to the podcast finally – nice job! I watched the whole MAX HEADROOM ABC series when it was on, and it was surprisingly anti-corporate and progressive for a show on a major television network….
I was a fan of the TV Series and being in the part of Canada I am from never saw any of the Showtime show, although I have been told that it played on some independent stations down East. I used to have the whole series on VHS that I had taped myself, but little did we know about what time did to VHS Tapes and what was stored on them.
The reason that the series was cancelled was the American Public literally didn’t understand what was going on. Add to that it was put up against Dallas and Miami Vice. Add to that that interviews with people on the street had a large amount of people that couldn’t follow it, others that were scared of it because the rampant Cyberphobia back then, and the use of VCRs to tape one show and watch another was not very common yet and is it any wonder that the series was cancelled.
Conspiracy theories go that the flop of New Coke having people burning Max Headroom merchandise in the street and the anti-corporation heads, especially of a TV Network, had ABC purposely tank the ratings.
Urban Legends go that some Sci-Fi/Cyberpunk fans went so far as to sabotage the relationship between ABC and certain advertisers on some of their big projects using Social Engineering. There were stories of teenage hackers tracking credit cards, finding things like mistresses or improper charges on the bills. Of course most of it wasn’t true but people were so mad that allot of people believed it.
Max turned back up on British TV a couple of years ago, reminding us that terrestrial broadcast signals were being switched off in favour of digital. Strangely poignant to see him in an old folk’s home http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X18e113BRKE
Also the “Max Headroom” signal jamming from the eighties is worth looking into, the videos of that are pretty creepy (basically some young punks intercepted a local news channel with a guy wearing a cheap Max Headroom mask talking gibberish and getting spanked with a fly swatter)