Astounding! Earlier in the week, I reported the DVD release date for the 1982-83 TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey; now this morning I read the even more unlikely news that Max Headroom is on its way as well!

Although I’m sure most children of the ’80s will remember Max from the Coke and New Coke commercials of the day, the series Max Headroom had nothing to do with those, aside from the character of Max himself. Based on a British made-for-TV movie called Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future, the American-made series followed the adventures of Edison Carter, an investigative journalist living in a near-future dystopia entirely dominated by massive corporations and television. When Carter gets a little too close to uncovering his employers’ nasty secret, they attempt to download his brain and create a virtual replica of their top-rated news personality so they can eliminate the troublesome original. The experiment doesn’t quite succeed, and a smart-mouthed AI named Max Headroom is born!

Max Headroom was a trippy show, a biting satire of consumerism and mass media wrapped up in a tissue of futuristic ideas that wouldn’t penetrate the consciousness of mainstream audiences for another 10 or 15 years. (I’m not ashamed to admit that I didn’t fully comprehend some aspects of it myself.) Weirdly prescient in a lot of ways, and just plain weird in a lot of others, the show failed to find much of an audience, and it lasted less than a single season. Nevertheless, it made an impact on those who liked it; I don’t think it’s a stretch to call it a minor landmark in the history of science fiction, and certainly in the pop culture of the 1980s. I can’t begin to imagine how well it holds up today, but I’m excited to add it to my collection.

The press release doesn’t mention anything about possible extra features on the DVDs — I’d love to have those old Coke ads at least, and ideally the complete 20 Minutes into the Future movie — but the way these things go, I’ll count myself lucky just to have the series itself.

The release date for this set is August 10. I ought to be finished with Gold Monkey by then, so that will be just about perfect…

Update: I’ve just remembered that I already wrote about Max Headroom a couple years ago, when I posted the show’s opening credits as part of my TV Title Sequences series. It appears that the embedded video in that previous entry has been removed by the copyright Nazis; for your viewing pleasure, here is another version: