This is the first weekly installment of my look back at 1987′s Max Headroom series.

“Blipverts”

Written by Joe Gannon and Steve Roberts, based on the British teleplay

“How’s your head?”  –Theora, upon meeting Edison Carter and noting his fresh wound

“Fine. How’s yours?”  –Edison, beginning his new work relationship with a soupçon of sexual harassment

The Story: TV viewers are mysteriously exploding, and Metrocops are covering up the evidence at the behest of Network 23′s skeevy CEO, Ned Grossberg. Crusading TV journalist Edison Carter and his new controller Theora Jones learn that their network’s “blipverts”–highly-compressed commercials that take up only a few seconds of airtime–cause fatal sensory overload in especially sedentary viewers. Edison is injured in a motorcycle accident, and Network 23′s resident whizkid Bryce Jones attempts to download the unconscious reporter’s memories. In the process, he accidentally creates Max Headroom, an artificial personality who lives inside the TV.

Behind the Screens: As I mentioned in my introductory post, the first episode of the American Max Headroom series was a remake of Channel 4′s TV movie, 20 Minutes into the Future. Yet there were a number of changes, both cosmetic and substantive.

The main difference is that the secondary plot involving the pirate television station BigTime was dropped. (Some of that material reemerged later in the series.) In the British telefilm, Edison Carter never met his digital doppelganger. Instead, Bryce’s hired goons Breughel and Mahler took the computer containing Headroom to BigTime for safe keeping. The movie ended with Max happily chattering away as the pirate channel’s new deejay. “Blipverts” has him taking up residence in Network 23′s systems, flitting from screen to screen and even interrupting programming at will.

Another change can be seen in the city itself. Originally, Network 23′s headquarters appeared to be the single skyscraper dominating its squalid surroundings. For the American version, there’s a much more elaborate cityscape.

Then there’s boy genius Bryce Lynch. The character was conceived as an amoral creep who had body snatchers on speed dial. He was softened in the remake, the better to make him a series regular.

Ned Grossberg, the evil network CEO, is played by Charles Rocket, best known for dropping a live F-bomb during the 1981 season of Saturday Night Live. He and his twitchy neck will show up again in season two when he becomes the head of a rival network.

Watching this episode again after so many years, I found myself most intrigued by the scenes set at Nightingale’s Body Banks. This is a world in which bodies are openly harvested for parts, and the nurse on duty (Florence, get it?) doesn’t seem especially bothered to learn that the freshly-delivered Edison Carter is still “a bit alive.”

The telefilm had Carter waking  just as he was about to be cut open and making a violent escape from Nightingale’s. Those scenes are dropped in the remake, presumably for time. Instead, Theora simply calls around and buys him back. Weirdly, it’s implied that it’s not all that unusual for someone to purchase a body for personal use. (“Do you want him alive or dead?”)

Arguably, the most important piece of future tech introduced in this episode is the “two-way sampler” through which the networks (and, presumably, anyone with the right access) directly watch their viewers. The sampler delivers real-time ratings and demographic information; note the “does not vote” in the screen capture. This allows the networks to modify their programming in instant reaction to audience trends.

Most important for the purposes of this show, it’s what allows Max Headroom to interact with the rest of the cast.

The Ratings Report:

Theora’s Level of Concern

How Minutes Into the Future Is This Now?

Preventing viewers from “channel surfing” continues to be an obsession of network executives. Ten second commercials aren’t uncommon. There have even been tongue-in-cheek attempts at “subliminal advertising,” some of which have resembled “blipverts.” To my knowledge, no couch potatoes have exploded.

We don’t yet have the ability to watch you through your TV screen*, but ratings companies have developed “personal people meters” that allow them to determine which members of their sample audience are currently in the room.

Computer technology has made great leaps since 1987. The Commodore boxes seen at Network 23 have long since entered our ground water. We might not be able to download a person’s memories, but if we could, we would certainly have enough buffer space to give our digital duplicates bodies beneath their shoulders.

outdated computers  -5 minutes
real-life surveillance technology  -2 minutes
common use of credit tubes instead of paper money  +1 minute
Theora parking her car in her bedroom  +2 minutes

= 16 Minutes Into the Future

*Or do we?

Dave Sci-Fi Max Headroom M-m-mondays

Last month, one of my few remaining “Holy Grail DVDs” was released: ABC’s cyberpunk series Max Headroom. With a mere fourteen episodes over two short seasons, Max was a curious footnote of ‘80s television. Yet I’d argue it’s one of a relatively few network shows to dabble in honest-to-Asimov, speculative science-fiction.

The character of Max Headroom was conceived as a video deejay and pitchman in his native U.K. He was the idealized TV host, one who existed solely from the shoulders up. While intended to appear as a computer-generated image, he was in fact actor Matt Frewer fitted with makeup prosthetics and subjected to jumpy editing that turned him into a chattering, jittery ghost in the machine.

A British TV movie, 20 Minutes into the Future, detailed Max’s origin story. It was set in a dystopian world ruled by broadcast networks; the gleaming tower of #1 channel Network 23 dominated a grimy cityscape of couch potatoes, punks and Blanks. (The latter were street people who had managed to remove themselves from the information network.) Here, televisions watched their viewers, collecting demographic data as well as second-by-second audience ratings. It was one of those timeless environments in which manual typewriters were used as computer keyboards and most of the well-to-do drove vintage cars.

Against this backdrop, heroic journalist Edison Carter (also played by Frewer) ran afoul of his own bosses and suffered a head injury in a motorcycle accident. While unconscious, his memory was duplicated and translated as data in the form of a glitchy artificial personality who named himself “Max Headroom.” (The last thing Carter saw before his near fatal wipeout was an automated gate bearing the words “Max Headroom 2.3M.”)

Carter’s back-up was a “controller” named Theora Jones. Her mad hacker skills served Edison well as she used the omnipresent “securicams” to monitor his whereabouts for guards, open locked doors and behave as a pair of rear-mounted eyes. Theora was played by English beauty Amanda Pays, one in my long line of BILFs.* Pays’ chief skills were her aptitude for worriedly looking at computer monitors and sexily biting her lip, both of which came in handy a few years later when she played scientist Tina McGee on The Flash.

By movie’s end, Edison’s alter ego Max found himself happily employed as the new host of a pirate television channel named BigTime. And that was pretty much the end of that story, as far as the Brits were concerned. The character continued on hosting videos, appearing in commercials and eventually landing a talk show.

However, ABC saw potential for a weekly adventure series and commissioned a six-episode run for the summer of 1987. They brought back both Matt Frewer and Amanda Pays–and later W. Morgan Sheppard, who reprised his role as BigTime’s “Blank Reg”–and remade the British movie as the first installment. Apparently it did well enough to earn a second-season pickup…where it was quickly crushed by the killer combo of Dallas and Miami Vice. The final episode, “Baby Grobags,” didn’t air in the U.S. until years later when Bravo ran Max under its “TV Too Good for TV” umbrella.

With the DVDs out, I think that now is a great time to take an in-depth look at the show that puzzled audiences and, frankly, looked and acted like nothing else on television of its time. Tune in next week for the first Max Headroom M-m-monday!

*You figure it out.

Dave Sci-Fi Max Headroom

If you’re a fortysomething like me, or just interested in ’70s sci-fi, I’d encourage you to check out Space:1970, Christopher Mills’ love letter to the era of Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run and Jason of Star Command. It’s the sort of site I’d want to run if I could manage to restrict myself to one topic.

If you’re a Doctor Who fan, you owe it to yourself to check out WhoFix, another one of those “random image of the day” blogs. It’s an exploration of the weirdest corners of the Whoniverse.

And while I’ve mentioned this one before, I cannot stress how much I appreciate The Wrong Side of the Art. It’s a magnificent treasure trove of high-resolution scans of genre movie posters: horror, sci-fi and all manner of exploitation cinema. Some of it is decidedly Not Safe For Work, but all of it is wonderful. (Most of my recent Windows backgrounds have been cribbed from this site.)

Dave General blogs, Doctor Who

Dave Sci-Fi m-m-max

You may have noticed (but really, why would you have?) that I’ve stopped blogging about Sarah Palin. There are two reasons for this. One is that she feeds on attention, and I want to do what I can to starve the beast. The other is that it’s no longer fun mocking someone whose willful ignorance is her chief marketing asset.

Besides, I was dismayed at how large she had grown in the tag cloud over there in the right-hand bar. I thought about removing the tag entirely, but decided instead to rename it “despicable fame whores.”

Dave Rant despicable fame whores

I’ve still never seen an episode of American Idol, but its country cousin America’s Got Talent has been a frequent guest in the Thiel household this summer. I’m not addicted to it, but I generally find it entertaining. The judges–Howie Mandel, Sharon Osbourne and Piers Morgan (the resident rude Brit, aka The Guy Who Is Always the First to Press the Buzzer)–are a fizzy mixture, and the broad range of would-be talents give the whole thing a bit of a freakshow appeal.

Current king of the freaks is the self-styled “Prince Poppycock,” who, as Piers Morgan put it last night, manages to out-camp Freddie Mercury. And while there’s a certain “look at the train wreck” quality to his act, I have to admit that the guy puts on one hell of a spectacle. While I have to think that the Justin Bieber clone will likely win the competition, Monsieur Poppycock may give him a run for the title.

Dave TV America's Got Talent, Prince Poppycock

The six-minute cinematic trailer for the upcoming DC Online MMORG has hit the Internet. It’s exciting…and just wrong.

First, take a look. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Pretty neat, huh? No argument here. I like watching people being punched through buildings just as much as the next guy, especially if the next guy is Chris Sims.

But it loses me when Wonder Woman is electrocuted and inexplicably begins oozing Kryptonite slime from her mouth. Not to mention when Luthor rams a spear through Superman’s torso, and twists.

Look, I get it. This is what the folks who buy current DC Comics like. It’s the same grim ‘n’ gritty crap that has dominated superheroic lore for the last 24 years.

If you pay only cursory attention to stories about grown men in spandex, you may not understand the significance of 1986. That’s when Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns depicted an apocalyptic near-future in which Batman emerged from retirement to mete out brutal justice. That same year, Alan Moore’s Watchmen miniseries began spinning its own deconstructive tale of costumed crimefighters with all-too-human foibles.

The problem was that what were meant to be meta-commentaries on the four-color fantasies of childhood rapidly became the definitive version. Since then, Batman’s default mode has been one only slightly less sociopathic than the criminally insane clowns he repeatedly tosses into Arkham Asylum. It’s as if the four decades prior to Frank Miller hadn’t happened, that Batman had only ever been the pulp-inspired vigilante of 1939 who willfully tossed crooks to their deaths.

Let’s not forget that less than a year after Batman’s debut, the comic introduced Robin, the Boy Wonder. From that point forward, Batman softened. He told terrible puns. He fought aliens and robot dinosaurs. He became best pals with Superman. For two entire generations, Batman hewed much more closely to the Adam West live-action TV series* than he ever did to the joyless, broken figure sulking in his Batcave.

Here’s the thing that I think most people–including many of Batman’s official biographers these past 24 years–have missed. Batman isn’t a misanthropic nutjob who can only express his damaged psyche when he dons a pointy-eared suit. He’s a guy who wants people to think he’s a misanthropic nutjob. Bruce Wayne dresses up as a bat because he wants to frighten “superstitious, cowardly” criminals. In other words, it’s a bluff.

Of course, Batman isn’t the only hero to get the “grim ‘n’ gritty” treatment. The intrinsically optimistic Superman has all too often been portrayed as angst-ridden and out of touch with humanity.

Wonder Woman has become a bloodthirsty warrior woman. Who just flat-out murders people. Never mind that her original raison d’être was to preach love and non-violence to a war-torn world.**

Oh, and the poor Marvel Family. Captain Marvel began as the purest form of wish-fulfillment: a kid–and not just a kid, but a penniless orphan–who said a magic word to become the World’s Mightiest Mortal. We can’t have that in the modern DC Universe, so Captain Marvel is now either kind of a doofus, or–even worse–a dupe of the bad guys who exists mostly to fight Superman. And don’t get me started on his sister Mary. Sure, there’ll always be a fourteen-year-old inside me who sees Mary Marvel as a fantasy girlfriend. But she’s a teenager, and a young one to boot. If you sex her up, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.

I realize that for some of you, I’m preaching to the choir. And that for others…well, you like this sort of thing. The rest of you are probably wondering why I’ve spent more than 600 words bitching about comic books that I don’t even read anymore.

It’s just that I grew up loving these characters. To me, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and the Marvel Family represent optimism. Yes, even Batman. You don’t go out and fight crime every night if you don’t think doing so will make the world a better place to hang your cape.

I’d love to see the pendulum swing back to the more innocent fantasies of youth, but I doubt it’ll happen. The relatively few adults who still buy DC Comics want their cynical, gruesome exploits, and blood will be served.

*I believe that a big part of the reason older comics fans hated the ’60s Batman TV series wasn’t because of its campy qualities, but rather that the silliness was an accurate reflection of the stories they were so desperate to outgrow.

**Yes, even back in the ’40s the Amazons were well-armed and armored fighters. But they explicitly espoused and practiced non-lethal combat, and employed devices such as their pacifying Venus Girdles to capture and reform their enemies. Portraying them as an island of Red Sonjas is entirely missing the point.

Dave Comics DC Online, grim 'n' gritty, MMORG

Jack Horkheimer, Star Hustler, is dead at the age of 72. I offered a few words about the public TV astronomy host at TV Worth Blogging.

Dave TV Jack Horkheimer, obituaries

In the month since my last blog post about Star Trek Online, I’ve had quite a career. I’ve been promoted from Lt. Commander to Commander, then again to Captain.

Friday night I reached the rank of Rear Admiral (Lower Half). Yes, “lower half” is actually part of the title; apparently there’s a similar demarcation in the U.S. military. Still, it’s kinda weird when the non-player characters in the game refer to me as Rear Admiral (Lower Half) Caitlin Howard.

I felt that my new rank deserved a new uniform!

I’m now Level 42, which means that I’ve gone a good bit higher in Star Trek Online than I have in any other MMORG I’ve played.* I consider it both a testament to my joy in watching shit blow up, as well as the copious amounts of “fan service” in the story-based missions.

Confronting the Crystalline Entity.

It did not go well.

There was a pretty nifty bit that involved stopping the evil son of the “Mirror Universe” version of Miles O’Brien from using the Bajoran wormhole to bring through a massive invasion fleet from his own dimension.

Another story was about the Founders (the shapeshifting leaders of the Dominion from Deep Space Nine) establishing a new “Great Link” in the Alpha Quadrant.

Swimming in the Great Link. Founder? You're soaking in it!

Then there was a mission to Empok Nor, a formerly-abandoned Cardassian station turned into a terrorist outpost. In an especially clever touch, Empok Nor always appears tilted, just as it did in the Deep Space Nine episode in which it first appeared.

It wouldn’t be Star Trek without some Tribbles, and I saved an entire planet of them from some scurvy Klingons.

There will be no songs of the Great Tribble Hunt this day!

Yesterday took me down into the Bajoran Fire Caves in search for someone who’d been possessed by the evil Pah-wraiths. I had fun kicking Cardassians off the catwalks into the lava below!

Each rank increase brings with it new ship choices. For the most part I’ve stuck with the canonical starships. As a Commander, I tooled around in an Akira-class escort.

Flying between the towers of a Romulan asteroid base.

With Captain came the option of a Galaxy-class cruiser (think Enterprise-D from The Next Generation), a Defiant-class escort (Sisko’s ship from Deep Space Nine) and an Intrepid-class science vessel (a dead-ringer for the U.S.S. Voyager). I tried out all three, but instantly fell in love with the Defiant, a scrappy, zippy craft that made the stately Galaxy look like a lumbering cow.

As a Rear Admiral (Lower Half) I opted for a Sovereign-class cruiser, similar to Picard’s Enterprise-E from the latter Next Generation motion pictures. It’s only a little bit sportier than the Galaxy, but it certainly packs a punch!

The U.S.S. McAuliffe battles a Borg sphere.

Nothing gladdens the heart quite so much as an exploding Borg cube.

There was a major update to the game a few weeks ago. Among the additions was a dabo game in Quark’s Bar, complete with the voice of actress Chase Masterson as a holographic version of her DS9 character Leeta. Admittedly, she gets a bit annoying after a while.

The game is still kinda buggy. Here’s a screenshot of the time I found a whole bunch of NPCs repeatedly walking into the wall.

And then there was the time when the walls aboard a starship vanished, opening into deep space.

The first step was a doozy.

Still, I suppose that’s par for the course in such an incredibly complex game. Doesn’t matter, I’m still having a blast!

I spend a lot of time petting my Tribble, if you know what I mean.

*And yet it took me until this weekend to realize that there was an option to “hide” the armor suits that my characters are forced to wear during planetary missions. I’d gone to a bunch of trouble to outfit my gals in Original Series miniskirts, and was annoyed that most of the time they wound up wearing head-to-toe speed suits. Chalk it up to shitty online documentation; the in-game instructions are maddeningly superficial.

Dave Videogames fan service, petting my Tribble, Star Trek Online

My friend Mark responded to my recent “Me of Little Faith” post with the following:

Dave! While you were “Facebooking,” you wrote:

“Alternately, we’re all just tiny, briefly-existing specks in an incomprehensible vast and uncaring universe who have created gods in our own image to keep the nightmares away.”

But, you forgot to write the most important part of your comment! Namely:

” . . . and soon, Cthulhu will awake, the seas will boil off, the continents will shake like gelatin, the electrons in the carbon atoms that comprise our bodies will be forcibly torn from their orbits, and our souls will be used as the clay for his obscene and inscrutable purposes.  Have a nice day everyone.”

I’m reposting this not only because I think it’s funny, but because Mark correctly identified the intersect between my personal beliefs and the writings of author H.P. Lovecraft.

I’ve long been fascinated by Lovecraft. At first it was mostly due to the absurd names he gave to his indescribably horrible horrors. (Oh yes, I’m so very terrified of Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young.) Later, I came to recognize the massive influence he’s had on horror and fantasy literature, comics and movies.

The central themes of Lovecraft’s body of work describe a universe which is incomprehensible and, at best, uncaring. Mankind is neither the first intelligent life to walk on the Earth, nor will it be the last. Cosmic forces lurk in the gulfs of space and in the most inhospitable parts of our globe, biding their time until “the stars are right” and they reemerge to smite victims and followers alike.

Now, I don’t believe that extradimensional nightmares with far too many consonants in their names are anticipating the day when they can squoosh humanity between their rugose and squamous toes. But the notion of a universe that defies understanding has stuck with me.

When I think of our relationship with the seemingly infinite voids that surround us, I cannot help but be reminded of ants. Ants do some of the things that humans do: form castes, build structures, farm and fight. And their senses allow them to perceive much of the larger world around them.

But does that ant crawling up your pant leg comprehend the surface upon which it treads? Does it recognize you as another living creature? Can it have even the tiniest inkling about how denim is made, or about the Chinese sweatshop in which your garment was assembled?

I think that humans are perhaps a bit better off than ants in our understanding of the universe. We have complex equipment that has allowed us to look deeply in the darkness, and a scientific method that analyzes data and tests hypotheses.

But I believe that the universe is simply too large and too weird for us to ever truly figure it all out. And it strikes me as supreme arrogance for any of us to declare that they understand the nature and purpose (if any exists) of our shared reality.

If someone today arose from the rabble and claimed to be the living embodiment of God, we would (rightly) laugh them out of town. Well, most of us would, anyway. But a great many are all too willing to accept hearsay testimony on behalf of people who once claimed to have first-hand knowledge of God…or even to be God. And these people conveniently lived thousands of years ago, before mass communications or sensitive scientific instruments were invented, in a part of the world that, to be blunt, most modern-day Americans don’t exactly trust.

I hope you’ll pardon me if I say that I don’t believe that any of us understands it all.

Dave Rant ants on your pants, Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft, me of little faith