Just starting the second Farrah episode now. It's hilarious that they cast her in a completely different role than her first appearance, and made no reference to the two characters looking alike. Of course, it's nothing unusual for SMDM to use the same actor for different roles, but this is Farrah we're talking about!
Speaking of actors in different roles. The Bionic Book contains a fascinating tidbit. After Season 4, Lee Majors almost quit the series in a salary dispute. It got to the point where new actors were considered to replace him. One was Gil Gerard, who went on to play Buck Rogers. I could see that - I always thought he reminded me of Lee Majors. Another was, of all people, Bruce Jenner (this when he was trying to get a post-Olympics acting career going, and years before he started keeping up with the Kardashians). I don't think he would have worked out. The athletics would have been covered, but he wasn't much of an actor.
The third choice, rejected by Universal on the grounds that he wasn't "physical enough": Harrison Ford.
Now wouldn't THAT have been a mind-blower! (Remember this was the spring-summer of 1977, so Star Wars would have JUST come out, and hadn't yet become a huge deal. Can you imagine Harrison Ford playing Steve Austin in-between shooting A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back?
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On a different topic, I have to make a remark about the significance, to me personally, of having SMDM on DVD (or home video in general). As I mentioned before, I've been waiting a long time for this. Not because SMDM was the "best show ever", but because it's an important link back to my childhood. It's a show I've always enjoyed, and I enjoy it on its own merits (and, watching it now through 41-year-old eyes I'm actually spotting merits I didn't even know it had - ditto The Bionic Woman).
But its release also, in a sense, has put me into the "let it go" mindset. I'll explain what I mean.
Physical media is disappearing. Short-sighted consumers with no interest in saving anything other than money are driving the market towards temporary downloads and away from ownership of (to quote Blank Reg in Max Headroom) "non-volatile permanent media". E-books instead of real books; streaming downloads rather than discs (which is weird since my understanding is most American Internet users are still on dial-up which makes streaming impractical). A news report here in Alberta today on the "imminent death" of DVD and Blu-ray has one analyst says we're going backwards to the early VHS era of the 1980s where no one actually owned VHS versions of movies - they just rented them for a day or two. Downloads are the same - you might be able to keep them longer, but sooner or later you'll delete them to make room for more stuff on your Hard Drive, or won't be able to play them any longer because a new codec comes out. The "cloud" makes no difference because there is no such thing as "long term" or "permanent" on the Internet. Don't believe me? Try looking for posts made to the TrekBBS in 2004 or thereabouts.
It's been a sore spot for me for a few years now, to the point where I get depressed when I see shrinking CD sections, DVD/Blu-rays being pushed to the back corner, bookstores closing, independent record stores closing. All because consumers want the latest shiny thing and in a bizarre anti-consumerism trend don't actually want property (I say bizarre because they're still willing to shell out tons of money for things they don't actually own, or at best can own only temporarily. That 99 cents per iTunes track or $3.99 per Kindle book might look like a bargain, but you're not buying actual property. You're buying a license for a bunch of zeros and ones). Certainly the collectables market in the future will probably have a discernible cut-off point.
But when the SMDM set came out, I found myself thinking, "I don't need any more now." The show I've wanted most to see on DVD/home video has arrived. We won't see Batman released on permanent media, so it's lost as far as I'm concerned and is no longer relevant to my interests.
So in some sense, maybe this is what I needed to let the past go, and join the masses in being only interested in the latest shiny thing and let history go hang itself. Well, after I've reacquainted myself with Bigfoot and Death Probe, of course! (Not to mention seasons 2 and 3 of Bionic Woman, the last 2 Harry Potter films, and a half dozen classic Doctor Whos I'm waiting to come out over the next year, anyway!)
Alex
