Bigfoot

In my mind, this sasquatch is the alien robotic Bigfoot from The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. I think he looks pretty good, and I even managed eyes with pupils. 
 

Steve and Jaime On the Run

Here's a 28mm-scale bionic couple out for a leisurely 60 mph (100 km/h) run. These two are messier than I was hoping for, and the skin tone looks quite zombie-like. Maybe one more thin coat of flesh tone? 
 

Six Million Dollar Mag

Many years ago, almost certainly in Leaf Rapids, I bought this issue of Charlton's The Six Million Dollar Man magazine. Published in black and white, the magazine included comic stories and photo essays. 

The story descriptions on the table of contents provide a decent preview of the writing style used for the scripts. It's a very strange style; dry, with sudden jolts of emphasis. The art inside is quite decent, although the male gaze was definitely heavily in play when it comes to the women characters. 

If I still had the cover, I might have considered keeping this. But I lost it so many years ago I honestly don't remember what the cover looked like. And so the one and only issue of this magazine I ever read slipped into the recycling yesterday as part of my merciless quest to create space. 

Legends of Yesterday

Today's experiment in "If intellectual property wasn't a thing:" 

I present The Legends of Yesterday, a secret cabal of extraordinary individuals long thought lost, retired, or dead. No one but their mysterious, never-seen leader (voiced by Bruce Campbell) knows that these reluctant heroes are not only alive and restored to their primes, but gifted with immunity to aging and disease. How will the 21st century react to these relics of yesteryear? What is the hidden agenda of their secretive leader? And what about M.A.L.I.C.E., the Malevolent Alliance of Lawless Individuals for Crime and Extortion? Can they be stopped, even by the Legends of Yesterday?

The Legends: 

The Six Million Dollar Man (television) - pilot, astronaut, espionage and brute force

The Bionic Woman (television) - teacher, tennis, espionage and brute force

Michael Knight and KITT (television) - crimebusting, infiltration, policing

Rollin Hand (television) - espionage, disguise

Barney Collier (television) - engineering, invention, mechanics

Colt Seavers (television) - stunts, brawling

Robby the Robot (film) - food and drink synthesis, driving, butlering, comic relief

Foxy Brown (film) - revenge, infiltration, knife fighting

Kelly Garrett (television) - infiltration, seduction, karate, pistols

John Clayton, Lord Greystoke (novels) - brawling, jungle survival, exploration, animal handling, hunting

John Shaft (novels, film) - investigation, pistol, brawling

Big Jim (toys) - kung fu, camping, driving, SCUBA

Alan Carter (television) - astronaut, pilot, wisecracks

Stretch Armstrong (toys) - stretching, brooding

Isis (television) - animal friendship, elemental control

April Dancer (television) - espionage, glam

Roy Hinkley (television) - science

Mary Ann Summers (television) - morale, logistics

John Drake (television) - espionage, rage

Belt Jones (film) - brawling, martial arts 

The Cyborg Quartet

Thanks to the wonderful world of online shopping, I now possess all four of Martin Caidin's Cyborg novels: Cyborg, Operation Nuke, High Crystal and the imaginatively-titled Cyborg IV, which is also #6 in the Six Million Dollar Man series of novels. Say what?? Yes, it's confusing, but at the same time Caidin was writing his Cyborg novels, other authors were penning adaptations of the television show adapted from the original book. The non-Caidin titles were cycled in with the canonical Caidin works, which is why you have the odd situation above. 

In any event, I've already read the first three and I'm looking forward to Cyborg IV, definitely the most elusive and expensive of these long-out-of-print pulp confections. 

Fembots!

 I just finished watching "Kill Oscar!", a three-part crossover story comprised of two episodes of The Bionic Woman and one episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. These are the infamous "fembot" episodes that so terrorized children of the 1970s, myself included. When Steve Austin or Jamie Sommers ripped the face off one of these robot women, the ghastly electronic visage and creepy, soulless computer sound effects were the stuff of guaranteed nightmare fuel.

Now that I'm all grown up (after a fashion), I'm not scared of the fembots anymore, though I do find them somewhat unsettling even now. It's the eyes, I think, and that horrible speaker grille that acts as an ersatz mouth.

Of course this story's central appeal is pretty simple: Steve and Jamie team up to fight robots. In the 1970s, what could be cooler than that? And yet the show toys with some pretty adult themes; for one, the fembot creator, Dr. Franklin (John Houseman) displays unapologetic misogyny (and a rather kinky sexual subtext) as he introduces a shady financial backer (and the audience) to his creations:

"I call them my fembots. The perfect women...programmable, obedient, and as beautiful or as deadly as I choose to make them."

Franklin, a former OSI scientist, plots revenge on his former employers and arranges to replace OSI secretaries (there apparently being no women in any positions other than secretarial - this is the 70s, after all!) with his fembots. The fembots infiltrate OSI and kidnap its head, Oscar Goldman. Franklin hopes that he can convince Goldman to give up the secret of the OSI's new weather control technology (!), but of course Goldman would never do that.

In fact, in what I thought was a rather cool twist, Oscar has left behind videotaped orders to be played for Steve, Jamie and the assorted OSI head honchos: in the event of his capture, all OSI resources are to be devoted to his assassination so that he can't give away any secrets. So the "Kill Oscar!" title is clever misdirection; viewers must have assumed that the titular directive comes from the bad guys, but in fact it comes from Oscar himself, and Steve and Jamie may very well be the agents assigned to the job.

Of course it doesn't turn out that way - these shows never got quite that dark, however creepy the fembots may have been. The first one and a half episodes are full of juicy paranoia as the leads attempt to figure out which of their friends has or has not been replaced; the latter half of the story is a daring action-adventure rescue plot, with plenty of bionics-vs.-robotics action.

In many stories of this nature, the villain would die at the end, a victim of his own madness or hubris. And in fact Houseman's Dr. Franklin attempts to go down with his metaphorical ship in the final minutes, but Jamie (Lindsay Wagner, who played Houseman's daughter in The Paper Chase) refuses to let him die, risking her own life to save the villain and bring him to justice - and perhaps even mercy.

And this, to me, is why these shows remain important - not for their cheesy SF trappings, but for the very real goodness and empathy expressed by not only the leads, but their OSI colleagues. Steve, Jaime, Oscar, Dr. Rudy Wells - these are all clearly the Good Guys, and over the course of dozens of episodes their altruism and decency is utterly unfailing. These days, that kind of storytelling might seem simplistic or naive, and perhaps there's some truth in that. But even for a show rooted in sci-fi action, the show producers, writers and actors clearly wanted to send positive messages about honesty, tolerance and solving problems with as little violence as possible - even when they're using their bionics, Steve or Jamie almost always use their powers to immobilize, stun, or just embarrass their foes.

The short-lived Bionic Woman revival of a few years back failed, I believe, because the producers tried to make Jaime a typical darkly ironic, self-loathing, "complex" character thrust into a shady world of betrayal and double-dealing. It seems that these days we can't have heroes who are simply heroes - Steve the astronaut, Jamie the schoolteacher, Goldman the dedicated public servant/bureaucrat (can you even imagine a hero bureaucrat on television in today's government-is-inherently-bad zeitgeist?). And yet I would argue that good-hearted, idealistic folk like Steve, Jamie and Oscar are more realistic than the angst-ridden protagonists of today's drama, if only because I've known a lot more people like Steve and Jamie than I have the new bionic woman or, say, any of the characters on The Shield or Dexter (and don't get me wrong; I do love those shows).

I believe there's still room for old-fashioned altruism in television and film, if for no other reason than people still need role models. Real people - parents, scientists, artists, philanthropists and so on - can fill some of that need. But for unambiguous displays of essential human values in narrative form, stories about genuine good guys can't be beat. I wouldn't be the person I am today had I not seen Jamie rescue Dr. Franklin, or Superman forgive Lex Luthor, or Tarzan dish out justice against slavers. In a complex world, we need to be reminded of the simple universal human values that have the power to help us face our most daunting challenges: cooperation, trust, compassion, critical thinking, honesty and love.

Against all that, fembots don't stand a chance.

Six Million Memories

Fans have been waiting for The Six Million Dollar Man (and its spinoff, The Bionic Woman) to appear on DVD since the format’s debut. At last Time-Life has released the entire series in a handsome box set that includes all five seasons of the show, all the crossover episodes of The Bionic Woman, all the reunion telemovies and a collection of comprehensive featurettes and audio commentaries. The first season of The Bionic Woman is also available, with a less impressive but still satisfying collection of special features, including The Six Million Dollar Man crossover episodes and some very informative – even moving – audio commentaries from Bionic Woman creator Kenneth Johnson, later famous for The Incredible Hulk and V. I just finished watching the first seasons of each show, and they still stand up as wholesome entertainment, generally uncomplicated and sometimes less ambitious than they could have been, but fun.   

Here's a look at the packaging:

The Six Million Dollar Man tells the story of “Steve Austin, astronaut…a man barely alive” thanks to a terrible plane crash that costs him three limbs and an eye. His lost parts are replaced with bionics, artificial replacements that make him “better…stronger…faster,” in the immortal words of the show’s opening montage. The spinoff series, The Bionic Woman, arose out of a popular second-season two-part episode of The Six Million Dollar Man that introduced audiences to Austin’s high school sweetheart, Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner), transformed into a bionic woman because of a convenient (for narrative purposes if not Jaime) skydiving accident. Every week, Steve and Jaime performed astounding physical feats to save their country and sometimes even the world from terrorists, criminals, spies, saboteurs, robots, aliens and rogue space probes. They crashed through stone walls, threw fence posts hundreds of metres, ran at highway speeds, screwed on lug nuts with their bare fingers and tossed bad guys around like paper dolls.

This was pretty heady stuff for the children of the 1970s, who were naturally excited by the idea of being faster and stronger than humanly possible. (Kids didn’t seem to mind that horrific accidents were a prerequisite for bionic augmentation.) Back in grade school, I used to amaze friends with my ability to arch one eyebrow to express surprise or skepticism. Nearly everyone assumed I was emulating Star Trek’s Mr. Spock, but in fact I was aping Lee Majors, the six million dollar man himself. Like Spock, Major’s Colonel Steve Austin cocked a mean eyebrow.

The Six Million Dollar Man was one of a select number of genre shows broadcast way up north when I was living in Leaf Rapids, Manitoba. (The others were Star Trek, H.R. Pufnstuf, and Space: 1999.) Our television only received three channels, one of them French, so choices were limited. Fortunately CBC was pretty genre-friendly in those days, giving my friends and I ample fodder for the imagination. As often as we played cops and robbers, Fantastic Four or Star Trek, we pretended to be bionic boys and girls. I may not have possessed bionic strength or speed, but my eyebrow action was pretty convincing, at least on the playground. A cousin had the famous Kenner Steve Austin action figure, complete with plastic engine block (to demonstrate Steve’s amazing strength) and see-through “bionic” eye. A friend had the less popular Oscar Goldman figure; Oscar was the head of the Office of Scientific Intelligence, the organization that employed Steve and Jaime. Oscar had one accessory, the infamous exploding briefcase, which didn’t really explode at all; if you opened it in a certain (read: wrong) way, you’d see a sticker lining the briefcase exterior that made it look like Oscar’s stuff had been blown up. Open it another way, and you’d see a different sticker depicting the contents as intact. Cool!

Revisiting the series has been a joy. Before now, I’d never seen the three original telemovies that opened the series: “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “Wine, Women and War” and “Solid Gold Kidnapping.” The eponymous first telemovie is the best of the three, and as with many pilots, there are a number of significant differences in texture and tone from the series proper. While Steve Austin is known as a military colonel in the series, here he’s portrayed as a civilian astronaut, the last man to visit the moon. He’s a bit of an anti-authoritarian figure, laid back, maybe a little snide. After his plane crash, he’s lost, vulnerable, even suicidal. This episode is far darker and more mature than the series that followed, treating the accident with the horror it deserves; when Steve wakes up minus three limbs and an eye, it’s hard to watch a formerly proud and independent man struggle to adjust to his new reality. Austin is horrified at first when Dr. Rudy Wells presents his new arm in a display box, not wanting to be transformed into a freak or a monster. The limits of the new limbs are treated realistically; while the fake skin has sensors, when Steve asks if he’ll really have a sense of touch like he did before, the question is answered with a heavy dose of evasion and embarrassment. He’s not the same man he used to be, and while he may indeed be faster and stronger, he’s not necessarily better.

Oscar Goldman doesn’t appear in this film; instead, Steve’s boss is the Machiavellian Oliver Spencer (Darren McGavin), head of the Office of Strategic Operations (OSO), a far more sinister-sounding organization than Goldman’s OSI. Oliver shows no sympathy for Steve’s plight; to him, Steve is a convenient test bed for bionics technology. “A robot would have been better,” he says at one point when describing the OSO’s need for a new kind of secret agent, “But given the current stage of technology, a cyborg will have to do.”

Spencer isn’t shy about letting Steve know that the government expects to be paid back for its six million dollar investment.

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” Steve says, almost mournfully. Spencer says that depends on Steve’s skill, and promptly sends him off on a dangerous, literally impossible mission (the target Steve is sent to rescue is already dead before Steve even begins) merely to see if Austin can return intact: “Please, please, Wells, don’t be sentimental. I can always have another cyborg built if this one fails. But if he should survive, which appears to be doubtful, then I know that I have my man.”

Strange opening for the second and third Six Million Dollar Man telemovies.

Of course Austin does survive. After two more telemovies, which oddly enough try to transform Austin into a James Bond-like figure complete with tuxedo, supervillains and exotic, willing women, the series proper begins. Early episodes explore Steve’s continuing ambivalence about his situation. Whenever he’s forced to use his bionics in front of witnesses, he explains the situation with discomfort: “I had an accident…they gave me some new parts,” or words to that effect, always with a degree of uncertainty and perhaps even shame.

The first season features a number of notable guest stars, including George Takei, John Saxon, Greg Morris, Farrah Fawcett (as astronaut Kelly Woods – no relation) and, in a bizarre, over-the-top performance, William Shatner. Shatner plays an astronaut who returns from a space mission with strange new perceptions and powers, abilities that eventually drive him insane. Shatner’s scenery-chewing is a thing of wonder, and I’m honestly uncertain as to whether it should be judged as transcendental genius or the nadir of his career.

There are some interesting technical glitches in the first season; one line of Majors’ dialogue seems to be read offscreen by a production assistant, as if they forgot to loop in Majors’ line during ADR. It’s quite jarring to see Austin’s lips moving with the sounds of someone else’s voice. Expensive stunt footage is reused frequently, sometimes in back-to-back episodes. And there are some very strange sudden zoom effects, as if to hide special effects rigging. But these oddities only add to the show’s charm. 

Even as a product of the cold war, the bionic shows are curiously apolitical. Steve has several sympathetically-portrayed cosmonaut friends, and works with the Soviets on more than one occasion, presumably thanks to détente. The OSI seems to have no overt political agenda other than to protect military secrets, rescue hostages, conduct scientific experiments and complete other miscellaneous do-gooder tasks. They fight terrorists, deranged people and common criminals more often than ideological enemies. Then as now (see The West Wing and 24 for more recent examples), when our heroes do tangle with other nation-states, the enemy countries are generally thinly-disguised fictional analogues.

The first season’s special features reveal that series producer Harve Bennett – formerly of The Mod Squad, later to revive the Star Trek motion picture series – intoned the famous “Steve Austin…a man barely alive” voiceover for the opening credit sequence. Bennett has some fascinating stories about the show’s production, including Lee Majors’ enthusiasm at performing his own stunts, the challenges of small budgets and tight deadlines, the huge ratings success of the show and its distaff spinoff, and even the tale of the real pilot injured in the stock crash footage used to depict Austin’s accident.

The Six Million Dollar Man: The Complete Series is a pricey package, available for purchase only online at Time Life, but with over 100 adventures and a plethora of special features – not to mention the very handsome packaging, complete with lenticular art and sound effects – it’s worth every penny for fans of science fiction, nostalgia, or 70s kitsch.