The Six Million Dollar Man

From this distance it’s difficult to appreciate just how popular “The Six Million Dollar Man” actually was in the mid-1970s when we first saw it in the UK. It established the name of Harve Bennett as a producer, and made a star out of Lee Majors. A popular range of toys based on the show was launched. For Christmas one year I had a model kit with Steve Austin – the eponymous $6 million man – beating up on a bully on a bike. My younger brother, however, had not only the action figure, but also his enemy, in this case a sort of robot man figure who could change his face to look like Steve Austin.

Coming back to the programme itself, the show was based on the 1972 novel “Cyborg” by Martin Caidin”. This had no relation as far as I know, to the 1966 film “Cyborg 2087”- good job too, in my opinion. The opening sequence of the show must be one of the most parodied that there is – actually, though, it’s a brilliant piece of condensed storytelling. First of all we see what must have been genuine footage of a futuristic looking air vehicle crashing. It’s actually an experimental Northrop aircraft, but it looks like a space vehicle and that’s what matters. Then we see a heavily bandaged figure on a hospital bed, and hear the voiceover “Steve Austin – a man barely alive.” Then we cut to Oscar Goldman, who will be his boss, saying, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man.” By this point we are seeing what looks like computer schematics of his new parts, and then the parts themselves, while Oscar goes on, “We can make him better than he was. Better – stronger – faster.” And then we cut to Steve himself in a red tracksuit, running at 60 mph in a piece of speeded up film. Then we see him head on, and the action freezes, with just his face in the middle of what appears to be a gunsight, and the title of the show. Brilliant. Seriously, when you’ve watched this short sequence you already know pretty much all you’re going to need to know to access an episode. Essentially it’s an hour long origin show in about half a minute.

So, Colonel Steve’s new bits are a bionic eye, one bionic arm and two bionic legs. The eye has telescopic vision, we’ve already seen that the legs enable him to reach speeds of 60 mph, and the arm is super-strong.

So what do they do with Steve Austin then, once they’ve made him into a virtual superhuman? Well, Oscar Goldman works for the OSI – which I always presumed was the CIA by any other name. Steve Austin then became a sort of special agent, trouble shooting and sorting out mundane (mostly) problems for them, while making quips at the same time – how did you jump like that? Austin – I ate a lot of jumping beans. Well, maybe it’s not exactly Oscar Wilde, but when you’re 10 years old it’s still pretty good. This is not to say that there weren’t any memorable episodes. An obvious one was always going to be having Steve fight against another bionic human, and this happened when he encountered one Barney Hiller. It turned out that Barney was a secret backup that Oscar had his tame scientists make up – a former racing driver who’d been rescued from a crash. Barney, so it turned out, had cost $7 million, and had more bionics than Steve. Which didn’t matter, since Steve still beat him, and enabled Oscar’s boys to turn down Barney’s bionics so that he was just a normal human again.

One interesting thing about “The Six Million Dollar Man” was that it spawned a spin off which was every bit as successful. Steve’s girlfriend, Jaime Sommers, was a successful tennis player. One day, out parachuting with Steve, she has a terrible accident. Steve has Oscar and the boys make her into a bionic woman – same bionics as Steve except that she has a bionic ear as opposed to a bionic eye. The trouble is though, that her body rejects the bionics, and in the end, she dies. Awww…

Except that she doesn’t. As the spin off series begins, Steve finds out that he’s been lied to. Jaime has survived. Naughty, sneaky old Oscar kept it from him since he had some missions he wanted Jaime to fulfil. Steve is not best pleased. Still, it becomes fairly clear that their relationship is going to be a difficult one to continue, and he and Jaime drift apart. Apparently the two characters did eventually marry in a made for TV movie, but this was long after both series finished.

When you look at “The Six Million Dollar Man” now, it does seem pretty formulaic. Oscar tells Steve there’s something he needs to investigate, but he must be careful. Steve investigates. Steve finds out the truth, but is discovered, and placed into a situation that a normal human being could never escape from. Steve uses his bionics though to escape and save the day – along with much slowed down film and accompanying sound effects. Formulaic and samey, yes, and we liked it like that. For a while. The problem which bedevilled it, though was that there was limited scope for originality. Essentially, once you’ve got over marvelling at Steve Austin’s incredible bionic abilities, where do you go with it? Steve Austin inhabits a world which is essentially contemporary America of the mid 70s, or a Hollywood version thereof. In this world, there is little or nothing that his bionics cannot defeat, and as it is anyway nobody knows that he IS bionic, and the level of threat they pose to him is the level of threat they would pose to a normal human being, and not a superhuman. Essentially it is the problem that DC comics came up against with Superman – how can you come up with something to pose a realistic level of threat? The answer DC came up with was kryptonite. Yet in the world Bennett and others wanted to create  in “The Six Million Dollar Man” there is no kryptonite.

This was probably one of the reasons for the show’s ultimate demise. It’s noticeable that some of the plots of “The Bionic Woman” were considerably less mundane. There were episodes I can remember in which she defeated a killer computer which had the capacity to set off a nuclear bomb, and another in which she defeated alien invaders. Also, “The Bionic Woman” maybe benefitted from the fact that in the USA, the mid to late 70s was the era of the ‘jiggle’ shows. Jiggle shows were TV shows which , while being ‘clean’ enough for a prime-time family audience also traded on the sex appeal of their female stars. “Charlie’s Angels” and slightly later, “Wonder Woman” were prime examples of popular jiggle shows par excellence – ironically one of the original stars of “Charlie’s Angels” was Lee Majors’ then wife, Farrah Fawcett. In the original series of “The Bionic Woman” Jaime Sommers was played by Lindsay Wagner, a former Miss America, and her appeal certainly can’t have hurt the show’s popularity.

After the shows were over, producer Harve Bennett would later go on to rescue the Star Trek film franchise, being the producer of the smash hit “Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan”. Lee Majors himself would find he had another international TV hit a couple of years later in “The Fall Guy” in which he played movie stuntman/bounty hunter Colt Seivers. Incidentally that show was created and produced by Glen A. Larson, who also produced the contemporary “Battlestar Galactica” and “Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century” shows. As for Lindsay Wagner, she continued to pop up in guest slots in various shows, but never had a continuing leading role with anything like the popularity of Jaime Sommers.

A new version of “The Bionic Woman” starring former Eastenders actress Michelle Ryan was made in 2008, but it was brought to a halt by a screen writers strike when only  8 or 9 episodes had been filmed, and cancelled almost immediately after.