Television shows were only irregularly brought to VHS release because of cost considerations, since only four half-hour or two one-hour shows could be put on a single tape. Those limits put most TV shows well below true cinematic offerings from video rental stores and sales outlets.
Max had all the handicaps of being a television creation, which made him harder to package and sell in the expensive, short-duration recording era.
Which meant that someone had to produce them from TV shows and movies, and then sell them across counters like ham sandwiches. In both cases, he ruled all he could see, and all those who could see him.īut in a pre-internet, pre-streaming, pre-OnDemand world, video could only exist in two forms: that which was broadcast or cabled to your set in realtime, or on hard, fragile and fairly primitive memory storage devices. and he was created for an era when 'videos' on the telly were the hottest market in all of media. He was born into a fictional world where video is all, even most of reality. In his era and beyond, Max Headroom was virtually a standalone definition of every version of the word 'video' - but his history on video is a puzzling mess.
