![]() By then, like most pop-culture addicts of a certain age and mindset, I had tracked down 20 Minutes Into The Future on videocassette and had watched the reruns of Max’s original British pop-clips-and-chat show on Cinemax. I remember thinking that while watching the American network broadcast version of Max Headroom in my dorm room in 1987. Phil Dyess-Nugent: I hate to be that guy, but… the original is better. So did anyone catch Max Headroom during its initial run? If so, did it seem unlike anything else in primetime to you, too? Through the show, I learned that sci-fi could be earthbound, and I learned that it could be kind of a bummer, too. Max Headroom made up my first brushes with dystopian fiction, and that was revelatory for someone raised on optimistic space operas like Star Wars and Star Trek. Produced by an HBO or an FX 15 years later, Max Headroom could’ve gotten at the grit and menace (and maybe some of the gore) that “Blipverts” can only hint at. Of course, if that were the case, it would’ve been placed on a shelf too high for younger viewers like myself to reach. ![]() Like a lot of short-lived series, Max Headroom frequently receives the “ahead of its time” stamp, and to me that goes beyond the various technological advances it did and didn’t predict. (The original RoboCop was released a few months after the debut of “Blipverts”-1987 was a big year for on-screen sci-fi.) Restricted by budget and broadcast standards, “Blipverts” is nowhere near as visceral as those comparisons imply, though I wonder if it would’ve received a creepy-crawly booster shot if Max Headroom was produced 10 or 15 years later. There’s an echo of Cronenbergian body horror in the demise of the exploding Network 23 viewer, and 23’s board of directors behave like they’re climbing the corporate ladder to a position at Omni Consumer Products. I remember being both scandalized and entertained by its central coverup when TechTV (which later merged with G4) reran the series in the early ’00s. “Blipverts” isn’t the best representation of Max Headroom, but it’s the episode that’s lingered in my memory the longest. Nearly killed while gathering evidence for a story that would reflect poorly on his employer, Edison’s consciousness is duplicated in the Network 23 mainframe, an artificial intelligence that names itself after the last thing the reporter saw before blacking out: the “MAX HEADROOM” label on a descending barricade. The top dog in this world is Network 23, the home of hard-hitting first-person reports from journalist Edison Carter (Matt Frewer). The story remains the same, though: In a dystopian society where it’s illegal to turn off a TV, a handful of networks scramble for the biggest slice of their ever-watching audience. He then had his own music-video show on the U.K.’s Channel 4, which led to a brief stint at the helm of Coca-Cola’s attempt to salvage its “New Coke” formula. What we’re watching here is a cut-down version of the TV movie, which repurposes some footage from 20 Minutes Into The Future while recasting a few key roles and restaging a number of the scenes. The incident made national headlines and the people responsible have never been identified.The character had a torturous path to American television, beginning with the British TV movie Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future. The first incident took place for 25 seconds during the sportscast on the 9:00 PM news on WGN-TV Channel 9, and the second, two hours later, after 11:00 PM on PBS related WTTW Channel 11 for about 90 seconds during a broadcast of an episode of the Doctor Who serial Horror of Fang Rock. The incident happened two times within a course of three hours. ![]() A homemade Max Headroom background rocked back and forth in the background. Two Chicago television stations, WGN-TV and WTTW, had their broadcast signals hijacked by an unknown person wearing a Max Headroom mask and sunglasses. It is an example of what is known in the television business as broadcast signal intrusion. It involved at least three unknown people. The Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion was a television signal hijacking that happened in Chicago, Illinois, United States, on the evening of November 22, 1987. Video of the event video of the WTTW signal intrusion
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