The Max Virus

Lately, I've been watching a lot of strange 80's pop sci-fi... Flight of the Navigator, Short Circuit, and - here's a good one - the old-skool Max Headroom series. I grew up oddly surrounded by Max stuff - folders... posters... horrifying Halloween masks - my film MidLife's even got quite a bit of Headroom-biting going on; so, I figured I ought to dig in to the source material.

The pilot, directed by live-action Super Mario Brothers visionaries Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, was wicked; essentially following heroic journalist Edison Carter's discovery and takedown of the deadly hyper-advertisements "Blipverts" being pushed by the all-powerful Network 23, inadvertently spawning the supernatural digital doppelganger Max Headroom - a deranged corporate reflection of Carter's altruism - as he fights for the truth. 

I adore the freakout nightmare that is the '93 Mario movie, and its unique brand of strange, saturated cyberpunk is just as present, if not even moreso, in "20 Minutes Into The Future". Creepy, tense... sardonic, parodical... surreal, in that tough, 80's sense. Insanely cool.

Methinks I just really like the directors' style.

The actual series is a bit less artistically biting, less wholly subversive, but still very distinct in its smoky post-apocalyptic urban hellscape. I caught the first episode - a sort of rounded-down redux of the pilot - an episode about a war being falsified via television, and one about dreams fatally extracted and sold to an HBO-esque subscription service. Trippy stuff, but I'm not sure it reaches the pilot's potential. 

Finally, I dozed thru "The Best Of Max Headroom", some kind of Japanese LaserDisc comp of The Max Headroom Show. Not the one I just mentioned - this, like, other one. It's sort if Space Ghost was a bit more vaporwave, and evilly obsessed with golf. Funny, zany, Max-y madness, it's just what you'd expect as the talking head verbally assaults ancient unknown guests (and Sting!) and mugs like the Looney Toon he is - though, I can't deny the distinct ALF's Hit Talk Show vibes. Even if you don't know that show, its title alone should explain that away. Still, the style carries. Iconic!

The Max Virus awaits... C-C-C-Catch the wave!