After Action Report: Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future

The Wing Commander movie club has traveled twenty minutes into the future to experience Max Headroom and... well, it was hard to see why this was such a big deal in 1984. This telemovie kicked off three separate televisions serieses and countless of ads and cameos for the character but it really feels like a 1980s Doctor Who or (complementary) a Privateer 2 cutscene. I also checked out the US version which retold this story as a 45 minute TV episode and found that although there was some more money spent on the sets it was pretty similar!

Max Headroom may not have been much of a movie but it helped us find some new Wing Commander history! You may recall that the big connection for our series was that the design pitch for the cancelled Privateer 3 listed Max Headroom as an influence on the game's world... which surely means that punk 1980s cyberpunk dystopia sense from the story's setting. But while researching material for the week's event I happened to connect with a veteran artist who worked on the Loose Cannon team in 1998. They still had access to a VHS tape from an executive review which included a number of never before seen ship renders and sketches! The resolution isn't great (we're going to try for a high quality transfer of the tape) but it's pretty fascinating to get a new look at all the incredible work done for this game that never saw the light of day...

The other small Wing Commander connection was that the film's female lead was Amanda Pays who played a Kindred assassin in Privateer 2: The Darkening. Here she plays the controller who helps out Edison remotely while he's reporting. She would reprise the role for the American television series there years later!