In each of Max Headroom's 14 episodes, Edison (who has recovered from his injuries) sets out with a mini-camera to expose crime, while Theora tracks his movements from the TV studio and guides him around the city.
Super Mario Bros., which, though critically scorned, appears to count as the first movie based on an existing video game. Morton and Jankel went on to make the film Max's creators - writer George Stone and writer-directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton - were left behind when the project moved to ABC ("It made us kind of angry, really," Morton says), but they are good enough sports to talk at length about Max's British birth. The British original isn't included, but as compensation there is a disc of bonus features, notably a 35-minute discussion by four cast members (not, alas, including Frewer) and an hour-long chronicle of the show from its first British inkling. Those are the 14 episodes that appear on next week's five-DVD set Of the original cast, it retained Frewer, Amanda Pays (as Theora Jones, Carter's colleague) and William Morgan Sheppard (as Blank Reg, operator of a pirate TV channel). In 1987, ABC turned the special into an American series. He appeared in commercials marketing New Coke, Coca-Cola's fumbled attempt to out-Pepsi Pepsi. Paranoimia ("What am I doing? T-t-t-talking to myself"). He starred in a video for Art of Noise's song The character appeared on television in Britain and the United States as a veejay linking music videos. Viewers were wild about Max, whose seeming computer generation was in fact achieved by enveloping Frewer in latex prosthetics. And Max, who affected the breezy tone of an advertising shill while making wisecracks about the network and the advertisers, was the trickster in the machine.
The theme, of television going to extremes in the service of advertisers, was borrowed from The look of the special, set "20 minutes into the future," was influenced by the dystopian filmsīrazil.
And, with a streamlined face, stuttering voice and jerky movements familiar to early users of memory-challenged personal computers, Max was free to pop up on Network 23 whenever he chose. Since the last words Edison saw before crashing were "max headroom" on a security gate, his electronic alter ego identified himself as Max Headroom. The network's resident whiz kid uploaded a copy of Edison's brain waves to the computer as insurance. In an hour-long special made for British TV in 1984, reporter Edison Carter (Canadian actor Matt Frewer) crashed his motorcycle while trying to escape goons hired by his own network. The Old Spice guy and the smoking baby may have gone viral in cyberspace, but they can't outdo Max Headroom.