the bionic report

by rod rehn

The Six Million Dollar Man was born with Martin Caidin's 1972 novel Cyborg, which inspired Universal to make three television movies for ABC. Like Caidin's novels, Cyborg took itself quite seriously. In the television show that followed, the protagonist became a comic book superhero to attract younger viewers. As a result, some later episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man were cartoonish. There are times when I could only shake my head at its stupidity.
The premise of the weekly program was that astronaut Steve Austin, after crashing during a test flight of an experimental NASA aircraft, received cybernetic replicas of his left eye, right arm and both legs. His legs allowed him to race automobiles and jump higher or farther than anyone living. His arm and legs could lift incredible weights and bend, break or smash materials impossible for normal people. His bionic eye could not only see farther and with more precision than a human eye. He also could see infrared.
After receiving the bionics, Steve became an agent for the Office of Scientific Intelligence. The OSI had provided the funds to make Steve bionic, and he repaid them by working on secret, always dangerous, missions.
In 1975, in an effort to "humanize" the show and attract a larger female audience, the producers introduced the Bionic Woman. Jaime Sommers, a tennis pro in her late 20s, had been orphaned at the age of 16 when her parents died in an automobile accident. Since the tragedy, Steve's parents had acted as Jaime's guardians. After losing track of each other, Steve and Jaime reunited in their hometown of Ojai, California.
Several months later, Jaime had a near-fatal accident. Steve asked Jaime to skydive with him, but her parachute became tangled and she plummeted to the ground. In desperation, Steve persuades Oscar to approve bionic surgery for Jaime. Jaime recovers, and Steve prepares to marry her. That's when Oscar wants a return on his investment: Jaime must complete an OSI mission. Jaime does so, but a problem develops. Her immune system begins rejecting her bionics. She is rushed into surgery but dies of a massive clot in her brain.
The Bionic Woman episodes were aired near the end of the second season of The Six Million Dollar Man and were not meant to be continued. The contract Universal had made with Lindsay Wagner, who played Jaime, had been fulfilled, and the actress wanted to move on. But the Bionic Woman was so popular with viewers, the producers persuaded her to come back. In the episode entitled The Return of the Bionic Woman, a doctor lowers Jaime's body temperature minutes after she is declared dead, and the clot is removed. Sadly, Jaime loses some of her memory and doesn't remember her romance or life with Steve.
Besides Jaime and the show's sound effects and a few stand-out episodes (good and bad), the thing most people remember about The Six Million Dollar Man is the opening sequence. But if you watch a lot of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, as I do, you'll notice the shows also are distinguished by an abundance of corny moments and lame special effects.
One reason for this is that Universal was infamous in the Seventies and early Eighties for recycling stock footage, scripts, locations, sets, props, effects and actors. The angry robot sounds in at least two Six Million Dollar Man episodes were recycled from the Don Knotts film How to Frame a Figg. Similarly, the submarine footage in just about every episode of both shows came from a 1973 Universal film, Ice Station Zebra. For any episode that called for a nuclear device, Universal invariably drew upon the same footage: a cylinder being loaded into the rear of a large military prop plane. If the episode featured an evacuation, more of this same kind of military footage was used.
It's not like Universal didn't have any cash. They were making a fortune on bionic toys, as was Kenner. But toys are more fun when you're a kid — it's easier to suspend belief. As an adult watching the Bionic Couple, you can't help notice that the writers of both shows rarely respected the rules of common sense. For instance, how could Jaime be an asset as a "secret" agent when she was an up-and-coming tennis star? Steve may have been a famous astronaut, but it's more believable that he could succeed undercover. After all, aside from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, how many astronauts would you recognize on the street? Another thing that bugs me about the shows: Why does everyone who ends up with bionics always lose their right arm in an accident? Steve, Jaime and their son Michael all lost a right arm. What are the odds of that? And can you imagine having one normal leg and one bionic leg? You couldn't do anything right: running (limping), jumping (hopping), kicking (falling).
We laugh, but there was a dark side to the popularity of the shows. Many young boys would try to injure themselves because they wanted to have bionic implants. A 7-year-old in Philadelphia pretended to be blind, for instance, in order to get a bionic eye. He also tried stopping the family car by dragging his foot on the ground. The Philadelphia Inquirer alerted Universal, and Lee Majors wrote the boy to tell him that the stunts on the show were fantasy.