My 100th post, so it's going to be a long one - and time for a look back at something which was an enjoyable TV series but due to it's influence on other media became so much more when I was very young...
1973:
The trivia:
- The worlds most isolated tree was in the Sahara Desert, hundreds of miles away from anything. It died when a drunk man driving a truck hit it.
- Future US president Jimmy Carter reported a UFO Sighting in 1973.
- A 10 foot tall emu was spotted walking the streets of New York after escaping from a circus. Five months later a by-law was passed stating all all emu's in New York must be on a leash.
- When legendary band The Who were playing in San Francisco, drummer Keith Moon passed out halfway through a song after taking PCP. Pete Townshend asked if anyone in the audience could play drums and 19-year old Scott Halpin climbed onto the stage and proceeded to play with the band for the rest of the gig.
The memory:
"...we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man..."
With those immortal words (or a version of them) from Oscar Goldman, actor Lee Majors became part-computerised astronaut Steve Austin - and star of ITV's top Saturday tea-time action show. I'm sure everyone over a certain age knows the basic premise, but let's quickly recap. Austin is critically injured in an experimental aircraft crash but is "rebuilt" in a pioneering operation costing - you guessed it - six million dollars. His right arm, both legs and left eye are replaced with "bionic" implants, enabling him to run at 60 mph, see twenty times further than normal and lift enormous weights - although his new limbs are vulnerable to sub-zero temperatures. Austin is soon reluctantly recruited to work as a secret agent for the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI).
After three "made for TV" movies, we then got a proper series. The 99 episodes featured a number of increasingly outlandish science fiction and paranormal concepts - ESP, robot doubles, a fellow astronaut who can communicate with dolphins (played by William Shatner no less), aliens crash-landing on Earth, several appearances by Bigfoot, a rogue mechanical Venus probe, and an invisible alien island! Plus there were of course the various other bionic enhanced characters peppered throughout the five seasons, most famously Jaime Sommers, the Bionic Woman.
The show became hugely popular and by around 1975 was visible everywhere. In the UK, schoolboys across the country took Steve Austin to their hearts and there were many playground scenarios where one or more children acted out bionic feats of strength (usually in slow-motion with appropriate doing-oing-oing" sound effects).
The thing is, as good as the programme was, what I really remember from that period are the toys and comic books.
The Six Million Dollar Man figure rivalled "Action Man" (the UK version of GI Joe) for popularity. Supposedly these were my younger brothers toys, but we both played with them equally and there were at least a couple of birthday and Christmas lists where we asked for the various play sets and add-ons.
Steve Austin himself was kitted out in a nifty bright red tracksuit. His left eye was a kind of telescope which your could peer through from the back of his head (in reality I seem to recall it just made everything look odd). Beneath the tracksuit top the bionic arm was covered in a kind of rubber "skin", which you could roll back to reveal the circuitry underneath. The arm also came off and could be replaced with different "critical assignment arms" which had gadgets such as a laser, a karate chop / gun combination and an underwater mask and air supply.
Pride of place in our household through was given to the "Bionic Transport and Repair Station". When closed it sort of resembled a Saturn V rocket with Steve's head peering out through the plastic window. But opened up and disassembled, it became a medical and scientific station for our hero to rest, recuperate and to be examined by the microscope, X-ray unit and computer - all connected by black tubes. Various stickers and glow in the dark dials created a place of electronic wizardry.
It's amazing that something so simple gave us so much joy. My brother and I spent hours devising missions for the Bionic Man, upgrading his weaponry in the Repair Station and then sending him off into the stratosphere in the rocket.
There were apparently several other playsets, such as a "Mission Vehicle" (which looks like a modern day 'Dustbuster' handheld vacuum cleaner) or an OSI Headquarters room to put your Oscar Goldman action figure in, plus more accessories - Critical Mission legs to go with those arms, a back pack crystal radio that really worked, a "porta-communicator" so you could make the Austin figure talk with your own voice - there was even an inflatable Mission Control Centre. Sadly I never had any of these and can only remember seeing the crystal radio set in the shops.
No hero is complete without villains to fight and Steve Austin had several. There were action figures of Bigfoot (who strangely could project a square piece of plastic from his chest) and the Venus Space Probe with its rotating turret and missile launchers. I don't think those even made it to the UK and we were certainly never bought them by our parents. However we *did* get the greatest nemesis of them all...Maskatron.
This evil machine was a powerful robot who could disguise himself as Steve Austin or Oscar Goldman or adopt a bland normal human face to blend in with the population. His silver body was full of electronics and he could add two different weapon arms - a menacing grabber and a super suction arm (so he's essentially a Dalek in human form). The three faces could be stored inside a cavity in his chest. When fighting battles with your Bionic Man toy, if you hit Maskatron just on the right pressure points, his arms, legs and even head would fly off. Hours of fun!
Of course once Jaime Sommers came on the scene and got her own series as "The Bionic Woman", she also was released as an action figure, complete with "mission purse", realistic hair and a number of miniature accessories. She also got her own villain to fight in the form of the "Fembot" (basically Maskatron in drag). Oddly enough, we never asked for those toys...
Impressively, over its lengthy run between June 1975 and March 1979, the tales of Steve Austin were written and drawn by the same creative team - Angus P. Allen and Martin Asbury. Asbury would also go on to be the artist on the Daily Mirror's decades-spanning SF / fantasy /adventure strip "Garth" (I'm hoping there will be a piece on *that* later this year - the fact that there is no complete collection of the "Garth" tales is a travesty).
In comparison to the TV series the comics featured even more outlandish plotlines, including Lazlo Cernatz, the "Toymaker" who wanted to use his collection of deadly toys to hypnotise the children of the world to do his bidding, mad magician The Great Mandini and a gothic castle encounter with a werewolf. Later on "The Bionic Woman" got her own strip drawn by John M. Burns and John Bolton, but this was more straightforward and faithful to the tone of the television series.
In the US, Charlton Comics produced a 9-issue full colour series in 1978, and more recently Dynamite Entertainment have had some success with various titles featuring the character with some issues written by director Kevin Smith. However in my mind, I'll always prefer the five-year run in "Look-In".
No look at the comics history of "The Six Million Dollar Man" would be complete without mentioning the various homages, humour strips and blatant rip-off's. The first of these is "The 12 1/2p Buytonic Boy" which debuted in the first issue of "Krazy" comic in October 1976. Ordinary Steve Ford crashes his go-kart into a lamp post and buys a special tonic from Professor Nutz for the princely sum of twelve and a half pennies (the half penny still being legal tender until the mid-80s). Gaining special powers of speed, strength and agility, Steve is later hired by the 'Ever-so Secret Service' to defeat the nefarious plans of rival organisation the 'NME'. The strip went through a number of name changes but ran for an amazing ten years across various titles and is still reprinted in "best of" collections to this day.
In 1977 along came what is without a doubt the most successful British comic of all time - 2000 AD. I have expressed my love for this title many times already and it's become one of the rare publications from the 1970s to still be released every single week. It recently reached 2,000 issues and it's 40th birthday and shows no signs of slowing down in it's mix of SF, fantasy and gritty action. Amazingly 2000 AD has had not one, not two, but *four* stories based around the concepts of the Bionic Man. I loved these early comics and have very strong memories of them, so as much as this post is about The Six Million Dollar Man, please excuse the lengthy recaps that follow...
The first character started out as a blatant rip-off of the adventures of Steve Austin but soon became more original. Created by industry icon Pat Mills and appearing in the very first issue (Prog 1), "M.A.C.H. 1" was British Secret Service agent John Probe, who was given augmented speed and strength by a futuristic version of acupuncture - regulated by a computer fused into his skull. This "Man Activated by Compu-puncture Hyperpower" then operated across the world on missions against terrorists, assassins and organised crime - plus investigating hidden Nazi gold, mad tyrants and protecting visiting dignitaries and military scientists. In these early days "M.A.C.H. 1" rivalled "Judge Dredd" as the comics most popular story.
The various tales of John Probe were drawn by a wide range of British and European artists including Enio, Ian Kennedy, Massimo Bellardinelli, John Cooper, Mike Dorey and Jesus Redondo. Initially they were just very violent versions of the kind of thing the Bionic Man covered, but as time went on the strip started to embrace more fantastical elements. Probe encountered Yeti in the Himalayas, an alien spacecraft disguised as a Mayan temple and even journeyed into space to uncover a plot involving astronaut doubles and an attempt to start World War III.
Increasingly Probe became disillusioned with his missions and the machinations of his boss Dennis Sharpe. Things start to come to a head when he discovered that Sharpe and his American counterparts covered up the shooting down of a UFO by the US Air Force and the subsequent retaliation by the aliens. Then in Progs 36 - 39, John met Tanya Maski, a East European woman who had been turned into M.A.C.H. Woman. Teaming up to defeat a lunatic who had turned children into Hyperpowered zombies (shades of the "Toymaker" perhaps...), Probe convinced her to defect to the West, but she died in the final battle to destroy the stolen secrets. It then turned out that Sharpe knew about her all along and Probe vowed to investigate his corrupt practices.
Digging through Sharpe's files John discovered the existence of M.A.C.H. Zero, the first experiment with the Compu-puncture technology. Lacking the controlling computer intelligence, the poor man had been reduced to little more than a child-like beast held in a secure facility. Zero broke out of his prison and he and Probe ended up fighting, but eventually Zero was convinced to turn himself in and Sharpe promised to find a cure for his condition. Of course it's was a double-cross and Zero was seemingly killed in an explosion.
Totally disillusioned with things, Probe disappeared for months until Sharpe's men found him and hauled him before the man in charge. It was revealed that if he didn't get regular top-ups of Compu-puncture, Probe would burn out and die. After being forced to go on another mission, he also realised that he had no memory from before the experiments that gave him his powers and officially he did not exist! Confronting his controller, Probe learned that Sharpe had been manipulating events from the beginning and now intended to roll out his next version of the technology - the fully android M.A.C.H. 2.
The final adventure was told in flashback at an inquiry. As first direct contact was made with the a race of benevolent aliens, Sharpe became power-mad and attempted to wipe them all out to steal their technology - a kind of militarised version of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". Probe elected to save the alien ambassador (nick-named "Fred") at the cost of his own life and died in a hail of bullets as Fred's rescuers escaped in peace to the stars. Thankfully Sharpe is caught in the cross-fire and the inquiry concludes that he had gone rogue and that Probe had died a hero. The case-file on M.A.C.H. 1 was closed and we never learned who John Probe really was or how he was conscripted in the first place. It's an abrupt end to an exciting but ultimately sad tale.
At the time I was quite upset by the death of M.A.C.H. 1. Sure we had seen various cowboys eaten by rampaging dinosaurs and Dredd killing perps committing a crime, but this was the first time a genuine hero had died.
The story is not quite over though as in Prog 65 M.A.C.H. Zero returned in his own series, having survived the explosion and been left wandering aimlessly ever since. A tragic yet innocent anti-hero more in the mold of Frankenstein's monster, Zero had a number of fairly unremarkable adventures against unscrupulous entertainers and the like, but also befriended a tribe of sewer-dwelling down-and-outs before deciding to embark on his own quest to find his lost son Tommy. However when he became mixed up in an attempt to steal an experimental battle suit, Zero is almost recaptured by the authorities. Nothing was heard from him for quite a while and meanwhile in Prog 95 another new series started which had a sideways connection to "The Six Million Dollar Man".
Written by Chris Stevens with art by Carlos Pino and lasting just five episodes, "Angel" was the story of Scorpion F-20 pilot Harry Angel who was involved in a near fatal crash and found his aircraft's computer bonded to the nerves in his right arm and shoulder. The artificial intelligence believed that the man *was* the plane and it gave Harry a host of abilities including enhanced reflexes, muscle control and an almost superhuman ability to sense danger. Sound familiar? All sorts of exciting adventures ensued. Actually they didn't. It's a wholly unremarkable fill-in story and I only mention it here because the plot bears some similarities to "Cyborg IV" by Martin Caidin. The original "Cyborg" novel was of course the first tale of Steve Austin and the direct inspiration for the TV series.
M.A.C.H. Zero returned for one last adventure in Progs 162 - 165. Dying from the effect of the Hyperpower experiments, he had one final chance to rescue his son Tommy from an abusive foster-father before dying on Dartmoor after a battle with the army. With that final appearance it seemed that the Compu-puncture project was dead - and that was true until the spring of 1997...
Having won a landslide victory in the British General Election, Tony Blair realised that to make Britain great again he must perform the ultimate sacrifice and change forever. A sequence of Compu-puncture operations transform the Prime Minister and connect him to a computer intelligence known as Doctor Spin - turning him into the first man to have Bio-Enhancement Link-Up via Artificial Intelligence Relays - he had became B.L.A.I.R. 1!
Yes it's a crude satire strip. Originally appearing as a one-off humourous update to M.A.C.H. 1 in the future-looking "3000 AD" supplement that accompanied the comics 20th birthday, it returned as a short series a few months later. As you can imagine it was somewhat controversial and attracted a lot of attention from the tabloid press. It was scripted by veteran Alan Grant and featured excellent fully painted artwork from rising star Simon Davis - and to be honest that's probably the best thing about it. It was a bit of a low point for 2000 AD. Thankfully B.L.A.I.R. 1 was killed off by 'reader demand' just sixty-odd issues later in June 1998, having endured just four short adventures. Rumours of a Donald Trump starring reboot are just fake news...
There are many other examples of the influence "The Six Million Dollar Man" has had on popular culture, but these are the ones that meant the most to me. Time for a another battle with Maskatron I think...
Honourable mentions:
- The Three Musketeers - How can you not love this film? Not only is it a worthy adaptation of the classic swashbuckling tale by Alexander Dumas, just look at that cast - Michael York. Oliver Reed. Frank Finlay. Richard Chamberlain. Charlton Heston. Faye Dunaway. Christopher Lee. Raquel Welch. Roy Kinnear. Just fabulous. No other version (except the sequel of course) has even come close.
- Pipkins - The fondly remembered children's TV show featuring animal puppets with regional accents. My memories are of sometimes coming home for lunch from my village school and watching this while I ate my sandwiches. Nowadays it seems fashionable to only talk about how moth-eaten, scary and deformed looking Hartley Hare, Pig and Topov the monkey were, but at the time I just loved the stories and the characters. This is from an era where kids shows could actually teach you things.
- Star Trek - The Animated Series - Yes it *is* canon and it's worthwhile for a whole host of reasons but particularly for alien crew members Arex and M'ress.
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