Big D! 'The Black Hole' was my favorite movie when I was a kid - and such a dark ending for a Disney picture too. That friggin' robot is the coolest though.
Recently I went on a quest to find this movie in an actual store for some reason instead of the internet, I guess is was some sort of homage to the good old days or something. But eventually I gave up and bought it online, watched it and confirmed that yes Maximillian is just as much a bad ass as I remember...
Yeah, Max scared the crap out of me as well as a kid! And how about Tony Perkins' "bloodless" death? Did that seem unusually violent? Like the people at Disney who put the script together after figuring out how to best cash in on "Star Wars"-mania thought THAT fit in? So gross, so icky! I guess it was because they couldn't achieve many more decent effects with his lasers.
And I had totally forgotten about the heaven-and-hell stuff on the "other side". LOL!