Max Headroom Coming to DVD on August 10th

A-a-a-a-attention: On August 10th, you’ll be able to ‘catch the wave’ that is New Coke all 660 minutes of beloved cult ’80s sci-fi TV series Max Headroom, on DVD for the first time ever. Amazon has just made the DVD available for preorder, and though it won’t be released until August 10th, it’s already the #2 bestseller in sci-fi, #5 in all of television, and #19 in movies and TV combined.

The DVD sells for $34.99 on Amazon, versus a list price of $49.97. One question still unanswered, as Amazon doesn’t list the extras: Will 20 Minutes Into the Future, the film on which Max Headroom was based, be among the “robust range of extras” indie distributor Shout! Factory said will be part of the DVD release?

Since the DVD isn’t yet out, the 35-odd customer reviews on Amazon thus far can’t complain about the format, yet! Instead, the reviews — which stretch back as far as 2005, when no one even knew there was a Max Headroom DVD on the horizon — band together to express nostalgia and adoration for the show, many in entertaining ways. From 2006:

“Here it is over 20 years later, and you still haven’t figured out that there is MONEY TO BE MADE off this thorn that is still in your sides. People want to buy this show. They WILL buy this show. You can have a tidy little income coming in continuously off it, and you can laugh yourselves sick because when it comes in, most of us will be watching it on–you guessed it–television.

So load it up with commercials (not Blipverts, please!) or do whatever else you have to do, and get it on the market. We’re w-w-w-w-w-aiting!”

Blipverts = unskippable pre-menu previews? (Let’s hope not.)

No geeky mention of Max Headroom would be complete without bringing up the epic troll that was the WTTW pirating incident, when a man in a Max Headroom mask hijacked the signal from two Chicago television stations in 1987 and proceeded to use his platform to utter obscenities on-air, hum the theme to Clutch Cargo, and pull down his pants to get spanked with a flyswatter before disappearing two minutes later:

(Amazon via Retro Thing)