Essential Six Million Dollar Man/Bionic Woman Episodes

[Roshi]

Whut? No love for the Bionic Dog?

 

[EATERoftheDEAD]

Whut? No love for the Bionic Dog?

Apparently not....

 

[EATERoftheDEAD]

So I watched the episodes in air date order. It was just good enough to keep watching but not excellent by any means. It certainly hasn't aged well. If you are a fan of sci-fi and want to see what the genre had to offer before Star Wars came along, it's worth a watch. However, be warned that it's not amazing, just generally entertaining.

Thank you everyone for the suggestions.

 

[EATERoftheDEAD]

Also, BIGFOOT!

 

[Mistral]

One Bionic Woman episode I remember is when she's fighting some kind of automatic defense computer. I don't remember the name, but that one sticks out.

"Doomsday is Tomorrow," a 2-parter by series creator Kenneth Johnson, exercising his tendency toward, err, pastiche by pitting Jaime against a computer that's essentially HAL from 2001. A pretty good one despite that, though, with Jaime trying to convince the computer not to launch a nuclear war. I remember finding it very powerful when I was young, although I don't know what I'd think of it now.

There was no such tendency and in the end it was all a fake out to try and get the world's leaders talking.

Which made it all the better, IIRC.

 

[Silvercrest]

And of course, the ones where they introduce and spin off Jamie Summers.

Just avoid any episodes where Lee Majors sings his "Jamie love song". Truly awful.

Same episode, ugh.

But yes, it was definitely more dramatic and serious, and those aspects worked pretty well. I was actually kind of impressed with Lee Majors's acting for once; he never varied far from that deadpan, but he did a good job conveying an underlying intensity and anguish.

Glad to hear he succeeded at least once. The only episode I've collected is the aforementioned "Bionic Woman" intro, and watching him try to emote there is just painful. In one scene I honestly thought he was going for a deadpan-humor reaction when he was really trying to convey wounded pride. (I think.) He seemed utterly unable to change expression. I'm envisioning that there were a lot of woodpeckers eagerly gathering around the edges of the set.

The pilot movie has its points of interest (especially the really authentic test-flight sequence, which was clearly made with USAF and/or NASA cooperation), but is also rather slow-paced.

I don't know if they used the same footage as the opening credits of the series, but I read that the latter showed real footage of a lifting body crash. Apparently the pilot (miraculously) survived that crash and was not very happy that this traumatic event was rebroadcast weekly on network TV.

Also it's not quite in continuity with the subsequent series: Steve Austin is a civilian test pilot rather than an Air Force colonel as in the series, and the bionics program is initiated by Oliver Spencer (Darren McGavin) rather than Oscar Goldman as in the original book and the series.

In the book I always felt that Oscar was more Jackson McKay's gofer than anything else, but I guess it's still correct to say he initiated the program. He just wasn't the administrator.

^But you got the title wrong.

Sorry about that.

Not to worry! You may be able to get away with it if you convince them that Part 1 was "Doomsday is Tomorrow" and Part 2 was "Tomorrow is Doomsday."

 

[Christopher]

I don't know if they used the same footage as the opening credits of the series, but I read that the latter showed real footage of a lifting body crash. Apparently the pilot (miraculously) survived that crash and was not very happy that this traumatic event was rebroadcast weekly on network TV.

Yes, it was a May 10, 1967 crash of the Northrop M2-F2 piloted by Bruce Peterson. The crash footage in the titles is the same footage from the pilot, since I believe that was the only crash of a test vehicle of that type. Although the pilot intermixes footage of the M2-F2 with the similar Northrop HL-10, and the second-season episode "The Deadly Replay," which revisits the events of the crash, uses the HL-10 throughout (except in flashback scenes of the crash, of course).

 

[Silvercrest]

Good point; I would hope there weren't a lot of crashes to choose from!

 

[david g]

The final episode of The Bionic Woman, "On the Run," is one of the very best of either series, and definitely worth watching.

 

[Shaka Zulu]

Actually I liked the pacing. The accident at the beginning, surgery and recovery in the middle along with Steve's struggle to accept what had happened to him, followed by a mission. I thought that the slow-pacing in the middle gave the viewer time to sympathize with Steve Austins plight. I was riveted by it as a kid when I first saw it and still enjoy it when I see it today. It wasn't quite as silly and unbelievable as the series was IMO.

Too bad that they didn't keep that tone for the rest of the show, it might have made the show not be so dated now.

An amazing new take is this recent comic book called The Bionic Man from Dynamite Comics, which updates the story to the present and even includes Jamie Sommers:

 

[publiusr]

Anything with the Venus probes

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Sorry for thread necromancy........

Death Probe was always one of my favourites for being so cheesy.

Also fembots episodes "Kill Oscar" part 1 to 3