Back to the Future

There are so many layers of this onion going on here that I feel the need to unpack it a little:

The late 1980’s ABC series Max Headroom (which I used to record on my VCR so I could watch it after basketball practice) is soon to be released on DVD. The show was set “20 minutes into the future.” It featured piles of electronic objects —televisions, video recorders, and computers— as artifacts of a society that had moved so far beyond them that it had become quaint to make use of them. And that’s exactly what the show’s cyberpunk cast did, they put to use whatever technojunk they could make work.

“In one prophetic episode, Edison reports live from a curious relic from the past: a movie theater.

“Years ago people came here for their pictures to share dreams and adventures together,” Edison intones. “These were the days when people sat in groups and watched a single movie, sometimes hundreds of people at one time. Must have been a weird experience, watching the same screen, and the same program.””

And so it seems strange to me that Max Headroom would, in late 2010, be released on these archaic DVD objects (disk media?!) which have been rendered irrelevant by the internetflixipod of our brave new world. But maybe therein lies the brilliance of the DVD choice —the medium is indeed the message.

Look Who’s Back: The Original Talking Head — New York Times