20 Minutes into the Future is here

When I was in high school my favorite shows were often old reruns on the Sci-Fi Channel, (before they all 80's hair metal and started spelling their name wrong) and my favorite of them all was the cyberpunk drama Max Headroom.

It definitely says something about my teen years that my favorite show was one that had been canceled 10 years earlier.

With it's rather prescient take on the future of technology and media in society, it's amazing more hasn't been made of a show so ahead of it's time.

It's also amazing that the creators behind Max Headroom never really did any major after that.

Nothing you can mention in polite company, anyways.

However I never really expected Max Headroom would ever be released on DVD. Fortunately, I was wrong.


As for the show itself, the picture looks as good as mid-80's TV can be expected to look, which is actually pretty good.

Plus the episodes are the full cuts that ran on ABC and later on Bravo and I always went to great lengths to track down tapes of those instead of the cut-down ones that ran on the Sci-Fi Channel and the butchered ones on Tech TV.

The special features are more than thorough; more than 2 hours of interviews with writers and producers and actors. The big disappointment is that they couldn't get an interview with Matt Frewer, which casts rather gray shadow over the whole ordeal. You couldn't get Max Headroom for your Max Headroom DVD?

It's also too bad they couldn't have put the original British movie on this set as well. I doubt it'll get it's own release so I'd have gladly paid a few extra bucks to have tossed it in here.

If you've never seen Max Headroom, give it a rent. The future isn't as distant as you think.