Revisiting The Six-Million Dollar Man...

[Warped9]

On the disappointing side was when Steve is pitted against four attackers simultaneously. This should have been a fun spectacle, but the slow-motion f/x style saps all the energy out of the action. And in the fights Steve comes across as too much of a "play fair" boy scout. These guys are out to seriously get him---in his place I wouldn't pull any punches. When he kicks one guy in the chest you can be sure he should have shattered the breast bone and ribs. In a real straight up fight with the strength we've seen Steve display none of these guys should have walked again anytime soon.

But this isn't gritty realism, it's '70s action-adventure, and that means the violence is kept to a minimum. The heroes don't believe in killing or crippling people and the laws of physics and biomechanics are flexible enough that they can do superpowered fight moves without causing any permanent harm to their opponents. And as someone who grew up with '70s TV heroes as my role models, I wouldn't have it any other way. I have little taste for more modern "heroes" who kill or maim without compunction.

And yet soon after Steve kicks a car over the edge of a cliff where it's a pretty good bet the guys inside are likely to be killed, and they are.


"The Last Of The Fourth Of Julys" **

Steve must prevent the activation of a deadly laser weapon.

The series dips its toe back into Bondian like territory with this so-so story. The lovely Arlene Martel (from Star Trek's "Amok Time") as an undercover Interpol agent.

This just felt paint-by-number and not that interesting. It's also starting to get really noticeable that more blatant and more frequent sound f/x are being used in conjunction with the bionic stunts. I prefer the low-key approach much better as the sound f/x seem to undermine the stunts, in my opinion.

 

[Christopher]

^But it isn't as much fun for kids to pretend to be Steve or Jaime if they can't go "da-da-da-da-da-da-da!" when throwing a bionic punch in slow motion!

 

[Galileo7]

^But it isn't as much fun for kids to pretend to be Steve or Jaime if they can't go "da-da-da-da-da-da-da!" when throwing a bionic punch in slow motion!

Agreed, that is what my friends and I did as boys in the '70s.

 

[RJDiogenes]

On the disappointing side was when Steve is pitted against four attackers simultaneously. This should have been a fun spectacle, but the slow-motion f/x style saps all the energy out of the action. And in the fights Steve comes across as too much of a "play fair" boy scout.

Well, as Christopher said, this was pre-Reagan Era, when heroes were actually heroic. Nowadays people admire "heroes" who function at the same level as the villains.

There's a cute idea in this story in having the criminals being Austrian and trying to "manufacture" a "superman." Some dreams never die.

Is it possible they were some kind of foreign agents? This could explain their knowledge of bionics.

And yet soon after Steve kicks a car over the edge of a cliff where it's a pretty good bet the guys inside are likely to be killed, and they are.

But did he say, "I... have had enough... of you!" Seriously, I'd have to see it again to judge if there was any justification for taking extreme measures, but it could be an inconsistency. It happened.

 

[Warped9]

^^ It's onscreen. It happened. And not for the first time and probably not for the last.

 

[stonester1]

Death Probe and Return Of The Death Probe were favorites of mine.

Including The Rescue Of Athena One and Burning Bright(the one with William Shatner).

Word. The Venus Probe was frakking scary.

 

[Captaindemotion]

A probe for Uranus would be scarier still!

 

[Klaus]

I laughed my head off over one stunt. When thugs are trying to run Steve off the road he just reaches over and tears their steering wheel off. I can just imagine the expression on their faces when they can't steer their car at speed.

I remember that... priceless!

 

[Christopher]

^^ It's onscreen. It happened.

Tons of TV series show things onscreen and then later pretend they never happened. Rudy Wells is bald onscreen in these episodes, but in later seasons he has a full head of hair. Ultimately, since it's fiction, whether something "happened" or not is entirely subject to change. Saying it happened is fiction to begin with, so it's no more fictional to turn around and say it didn't happen. (Cf. JoeZhang's recent thread in this forum "It never happened...", which is all about comic books retconning their own history.)

 

[DWF]

Well Steve did remove on of sasquatch's arms during their first fight in the third season. Still Steve's control over his strength is pretty amazing, you'd think he might've been reckless in the beginning.

 

[Galileo7]

Death Probe and Return Of The Death Probe were favorites of mine.

Including The Rescue Of Athena One and Burning Bright(the one with William Shatner).

Word. The Venus Probe was frakking scary.

Agree, as a boy watching Death Probe and Return Of The Death Probe the Venus Probes were scary.

 

[the G-man]

"The Venus Probe" sounds like product that would have been in the classifieds of a porn magazine circa 1983.

 

[the G-man]

^^ It's [Steve killing those guys] onscreen. It happened.

Tons of TV series show things onscreen and then later pretend they never happened...

IIRC, the original series was intended more as an "adult oriented" (or as adult as TV got back then) action show, but when it became so popular with the children, the network toned down the violence and the womanizing.

Speaking of which, anyone else remember when the TV movies had the "faux Bond" style opening, with vocals by Dusty Springfield?

 

[Warped9]

^^ Yes, those were the two TV films following the original pilot film. And those two films are quite disappointing as followups to the original pilot. The Season 1 episodes are better overall than those two films.

 

[Christopher]

IIRC, the original series was intended more as an "adult oriented" (or as adult as TV got back then) action show, but when it became so popular with the children, the network toned down the violence and the womanizing.

Yeah. Even the more adult-oriented, violent shows in '60s and '70s TV were still very sanitized in their depiction of violence. Kicking a car off a cliff for an offscreen death would be acceptable, but having someone's bones audibly break in a hand-to-hand fight would've been going too far for the censors to allow.

For instance, if you look at Mission: Impossible (a show I've gotten rather familiar with lately), it was pretty routine for the villains to die at the end, but usually the protagonists tricked the villains into killing each other offscreen (a standard ending was to have the team walk away and hear a gunshot off-camera as the villain was killed by his own allies/subjects/rival/whoever), and only shot people themselves when it was clearly in self-defense (though there is a rather ghastly exception at the climax of the first-season episode "Shock"). The bad guys shot and stabbed a lot of people, but we rarely saw blood, and when we did (either real blood or more often the fake blood used by the team), it was garishly bright red and didn't look like actual blood at all.

 

[DWF]

IIRC, the original series was intended more as an "adult oriented" (or as adult as TV got back then) action show, but when it became so popular with the children, the network toned down the violence and the womanizing.

Yeah. Even the more adult-oriented, violent shows in '60s and '70s TV were still very sanitized in their depiction of violence. Kicking a car off a cliff for an offscreen death would be acceptable, but having someone's bones audibly break in a hand-to-hand fight would've been going too far for the censors to allow.

For instance, if you look at Mission: Impossible (a show I've gotten rather familiar with lately), it was pretty routine for the villains to die at the end, but usually the protagonists tricked the villains into killing each other offscreen (a standard ending was to have the team walk away and hear a gunshot off-camera as the villain was killed by his own allies/subjects/rival/whoever), and only shot people themselves when it was clearly in self-defense (though there is a rather ghastly exception at the climax of the first-season episode "Shock"). The bad guys shot and stabbed a lot of people, but we rarely saw blood, and when we did (either real blood or more often the fake blood used by the team), it was garishly bright red and didn't look like actual blood at all.

And yet those shows from the '60s were still more violent than the ones from say the '80s. The Wild Wild West was taking off the air over complaints about the violence on the show. Other than the slow motion fights on the bionic shows they were more violence than say Miami Vice and The A-Team or Knight Rider. The X-Files were just as violent as well and interestingly enough all of those were on Friday night at sometime.

 

[Warped9]

"Burning Bright" ****

A fellow astronaut exhibits extraordinary abilities after exposure to an unusual electrical field while in orbit.

William Shatner stars as the affected astronaut whose mental capabilities suddenly exceed human norm. This certainly isn't an action/adventure story. Actually it feels more like an Outer Limits episode and I mean that in a good way. Shatner isn't as good here as he has been before in Star Trek, but he's serviceable for the story.

This story feels like something I've seen before or maybe it's because it's a story that has been done a number of times since this episode first aired. And I suspect the story has been done in science fiction before where a human mutates mentally after exposure to some weird phenomena. It's a nice touch that Shatner's character isn't made out into becoming something evil, but rather being unable to deal with what has happened to him.


"The Coward" ****

Steve must retrieve documents from a downed WW2 aircraft.

This is really a personal story about Steve Austin trying to learn what kind of man his real father really was and how he died. The thing is although the story seems to have a resolution it can still be left to interpretation. Did Carl Austin really die thirty years earlier in the downed aircraft and his copilot exchanged dog tags with him? Or did Carl Austin make up that story just before he dies in his son's presence to spare Steve and his mother's feelings and memory?

We also get two more Star Trek alumni in this episode with George Takei and France Nuyen.

 

[RJDiogenes]

^^ It's onscreen. It happened. And not for the first time and probably not for the last.

Well, if it didn't happen it wouldn't be an inconsistency.

 

[Warped9]

"Run, Steve, Run" ***

A scientist tests Steve Austin to learn his secrets so they can applied to his own research.

This wasn't bad, but it could have been better. It just got bogged down unnecessarily. We get to see the return of Dr. Dolenz, the scientist who created the robot in "Day Of The Robot." And Dolenz is an interesting recurring nemesis since he doesn't come across as inherently evil or harbouring any real animosity towards Steve Austin. Dolenz is more the scientist fixated on his work to create perfected robots and Steve Austin is alternately a means and/or impediment to that end. Henry Jones reprises the role to portray a rather quirky nemesis.


Overall this is still a decent season. There are some disappointments and some inescapable dated aspects to it, but it's aged better than I expected. There's also still something of a fun factor to it. I think it's still a valid idea for a science fiction adventure series and it would be interesting to see this properly updated and see what could be done. Some years ago we had the conceptually similar series Now And Again that could have worked and had some interesting aspects and appeal to it starring Eric Close, Dennis Haybert and Margaret Colin, but they just didn't know what to do with it. Too bad.

 

[Gary Mitchell]

^ I was really starting to like Now And Again and then they left it on a cliffhanger.