The Six Million Dollar Man - Seasons 1-5!

Before there was a TV hero there was the 1972 novel Cyborg by Martin Caidin which told the tragic story of Steve Austin who after a terrible crash is given by Doctor Rudy Wells, two new legs, a steel plate in his noggin, gimmicks in his eyes and fingers among other things. He becomes a super-agent under the control Oscar Goldman who is an agent of the Office of Strategic Operations (O.S.O.). Sounds pretty familiar doesn't it. That was adapted to television. Before the series we get three pilot movies, which was unusual. Apparently, the powers that be were not convinced of the potential of the show. They were wrong of course. 

The Pilots

The three movies were The Moon and the Desert in March of 1973 and later the year Wine, Women, and War and finally The Solid Gold Kidnapping. The first was the story of the first novel pretty much with alterations such as the bionic arm for extreme strength. Lee Majors was cast as Steve Austin and was made into a star. Richard Anderson became Oscar Goldman and for a time Allan Oppenheimer played Rudy Wells. I was struck by Darren McGavin's role in the first movie where he is a much more cold-blooded Oscar-type character. I hated the theme songs for the last two movies which seemed to evoke some kind of blaxploitation film feel. It's clear that Austin is supposed to be a super-spy sent on exotic missions and battling Bond-Lite villains. 

Season One (1973-1974)

The first season of The Six Million Dollar Man kicked off in January of 1974 and gave us two episodes with punch. The first evoking The Andromeda Strain (using actual footage from that film) and the second featuring a large cast stranded on a remote island with murderers aboard. William Smith was largely wasted in the that one. And then it seems the budget was spent because the next many episodes felt lighter in tone and felt like more traditional TV fare. Jimmy Sangster wrote a silly one about a Soviet nuclear facility. We get John Saxon as a robot in an episode and frankly he seemed largely wasted. Farrah Fawcett shows up in one written by D.C. Fontana as the first woman astronaut and it's not bad at all. Other faces from adventure and science fiction shows appear such as William Shatner as a man whose brain is affected by strange energy, Greg Morris as a downed spy-plane pilot, and George Takei as a mountain-climbing expert. Gary Lockwood as an assassin with a secret was pretty good, but Gary Collins as a Russian was laughable, and Ron Soble playing an Asian warlord was regrettable. The shows had variety with Steve whipping across the globe, but alas the countryside always looked like California. Once I found my footing with the show and realized what it wanted to be, I found it diverting at the very least. It's easy to see why this was a hit. Richard Anderson as Oscar was bit hit and miss for me, as I wish he'd been a more ruthless at times. Lee Majors is stylish and his calm, cool presentation gives the show a solid anchor. 

Season Two (1974-1975)

By this time the series was a hit and one can see that more money was being put into the productions and being used rather well. A highlight of the season is the introduction of "The Seven Million Dollar Man" played by Monte Markum to great effect. It explores how the bionics affect the psyche and how perhaps Steve Austin is more special than we knew. Steve must also face up to some ghosts as the vehicle he was piloting when he crashed is rebuilt and needs a pilot. Some of the quality of these episodes is suspect as the pressures of weekly television show seem to produce cracks. Much is made of Austin's charm toward women and frankly he's quite the womanizer in classic Bond fashion, though maybe not quite so callous. It's frustrating when the writers seem to forget that Steve Austin is a celebrity in this world and have stories in which no one seems to know him. In one he has amnesia (a tiresome cliche) and it's a particularly weak effort. Farrah Fawcett shows up again, this time as a reporter who uncovers Steve's secret and blackmails Oscar in order to get ahead. The whisk her off to Baja and she seems strangely unsuspicious when Oscar starts digging a bit hole. (The story claims it archeology.) She and Steve romance a bit. The big news in the second season is the introduction of Jamie Sommers who would become the "Bionic Woman" and would go on to be a spin-off of the highly successful show. 

Season 3 (1975-1976)

Things start off pretty strong with a two-part episode that brings Jamie Sommers back to life and also explains why she must be separated from her intended husband Steve Austin. Of course this is a set-up for spin-off show The Bionic Woman. Then Steve saves the Liberty Bell as a shout-out to the upcoming bicentennial of the United States. Steve Austin is presented a likeable guy and so I guess it's not an enormous surprise he has lots of friends. And we see them now as his college roommate turns out to Sonny Bono (doing a Tony Orlando imitation) and his high school football pal is Larry Csonka who gets kidnapped by Dick Butkis and Carl Weathers among others. I rather liked the episodes in which Steve is a lumberjack, a stevedore, and a cop. And he starts finally to use some disguises. He's a famous astronaut, yet he goes undercover. It didn't make sense. But you roll with it. 

When rolls into Morgantown, Georgia to break up a moonshine ring, the familiar hillbilly gags and tropes fairly drip off the screen. I'm a hillbilly by birth and raising, so I'm sensitive to these portrayals. Making fun of country hicks gets a free pass in a country which is quite tender about most things. (MAGA hasn't helped the situation any.) This season also has the epic first encounter with Bigfoot played by Andre the Giant. Bigfoot was major fad in the 70's and they grab a piece of that pie. Farrah Fawcett shows up again, this time as yet another old flame of Steve's. She a degenerate gamble helping him rescue a stolen statue. So, the show was running the gamut, from crime drama, to foreign intrigue, to full-blown sci-fi epic.  

Season 4 (1976-1977)

Steve kicks off the longest season of the show's run sporting a pretty cheesy mustache. It doesn't really work for him as it did for Clark Gable. The return of Bigfoot is a headline in a story which moves from this show over to The Bionic Woman. Bigfoot is still controlled by aliens, but this time it's a splinter group stealing stuff to make themselves invincible. Farrah Fawcett returns for the fourth time in the series, this time playing the pilot she portrayed in the first season. There is an epic crossover with The Bionic Woman in which Oscar Goldman is kidnapped. This is a pretty good story with nice twists and opportunities for everyone to showcase their stuff. We get a Bionic Boy when a youngster is given implants which allow him to walk and even more. This was a two-hour episode, one of two in the season. The weird thing about this one was where it was filmed in Kane, Utah and from what I can tell used townspeople as actors, with expected results. 

Steve gets involved with quite a bit of espionage in these stories, going undercover as a contestant in a glider competition, an oil rigger, a boxer, a flying Thunderbird, and even Santa to help bring the Christmas spirit in the most modern Dickens manner. He fights super chimps and relentless probes to Venus gone haywire. Spies try to use carnival rides to bring down experimental aircraft in one truly baffling episode. (Sidebar on that one -- the remains of a long dead cowboy were discovered in a wax figure during the shoot.) One episode title "The Ultimate Imposter" has very little Steve and is in fact an attempt to spin-off a new series about a guy who gets his smarts from computers in order to do espionage. (The show never launched and if it had been the creators of Joe 90 could well have sued.)

Season Five (1977-1978)

The final season of The Six Million Dollar Man kicks off with jolt as its partner show The Bionic Woman shifted to NBC making crossovers untenable. (To the credit of someone though Oscar and Rudy appeared in both shows.) Lee Majors was a bona fide star and in this season his role gets a James Bond juicing when he seems to get a new romance very episode. The season kicks off with two two-part stories, the first dealing with a woman who can control sharks so that a nuclear sub can be stolen and the second about the complications of getting a rocket into orbit to rescue a damaged satellite. In both Steve runs to the rescue in more than a few nicks of time. A yarn about a tornado threatening a community was pretty lame despite having a multitude of moving parts. Then it's the roller derby as Steve infiltrates a team which is planning a heist in a federal building. Then we are treated to a sci-fi blockbuster in the grand tradition of Radar Men from the Moon. The Moon is shifted when nuclear bombs are used to drill for some important ore and results in tragically terrible weather on Earth. It takes Steve two episodes to put down the cold-blooded mad scientist behind the scheme. 

Then he takes an experimental bomb on a road trip in an RV followed by a yarn about a technology that will blind radar. Steve wing walks in an episode that features some outstanding arial stunts. A strange one features Steve thinking he's in the future of 1984, which is revealed to be a con to get some fuel formula. The Death Probe returns looking more bad ass than the first time with a neat black paint job and a distinct Dalek feel. It gets super wacky when Steve and Rudy find an island brimming with aliens hiding from mankind but now mutated into powerful and violent creatures by the radiation from a satellite. There's a nifty art heist story with some great twists and turns followed by a bizarre one in which Steve seems to be haunted by himself. We get a terrific two-parter that hints at the future when Steve must contend with computer hackers and worse still. The Bradbury Building is used in this one and is as always lovely to look at. The season and the show close out with story that pits Steve against a lovely Soviet agent to recover some stolen smart bombs and a rolling launcher. 

One final note on these darn good shows is that I was impressed. They hold up better than I expected, and I was pleased by Steve Austin's belt buckle. Though he's a "superhero", he doesn't have a costumed. But he does have a belt buckle resembling two wings which he wears in every episode. Nice subtle touch I missed out on totally back in the day. 

Tomorrow, we check out Season Six. It's a comic book. 

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