Remade almost scene-for-scene as the first episode of Max Headroom (1987). Only Frewer, Pays and Sheppard appeared in both versions. The obese TV viewer's death by "blipverts", and Carter's reaction to it, as well as the live TV doctor's topic on colon health were discarded. ("Blipvert" was basically an ultra time compressed high speed advert, within the story universe, not unlike fast-forwarding through an advert now in 2019 - truncated from "Blip Advert". The later Lorimar-Telepictures version would expand on this advertising gimmick and its use by Zik-Zak)
Max Headroom would re-appear in 2007, in a series of 6 adverts for Channel Four's "Get Set for Digital" awareness campaign. Within the adverts Max, still played by Matt Frewer, had aged and become bitter and twisted about how Channel Four had treated him. In one, Max also makes a bitingly pointed comment that Jim Carey stole Max's schtick. (It has been noticed that Jim and Max do have very similar manic personas).
The character of "Max Headroom" was originally apparently created as a literal talking head that would host a music video show, produced by Chrysalis Visual Programming for the broadcaster Channel Four (UK). At the time the production company was a division of the record label Chrysalis Records, so presumably featured only music videos from their artists and labels. This film was actually in effect the pilot for the music video series, setting up a backstory setting up his character's stylised sassy talking head existence. The various bits of Max hosting between the music videos, such as his thoughts and monologues was not unlike the later MTV series "Beavis and Butthead". Some of his hosting sequences were later re-used in the Lorimar-Telepictures re-boot.
The film is set "20 minutes into the future".