Steve Austin is Coming to DVD!

4 Comments

1. Actually, you’d be surprised how impressive it is, even for the over-sevens, especially in that first couple of seasons. It is such great fun.

   I don’t think I’m capable of separating nostalgia and boyhood hero-worship from this thing, but all I can say is that my whole family (mother included) used to sit down every week in the 70s to watch Steve Austin do his stuff…… and, here Downunder, every other family did pretty much the same. He was the good guy that TV was waiting for. Was everyone sick to death of cynicism and self-important anti-heroes? As Steve would say: “You betcha!”

   This is why the new breed of “I am clever, and I am desperate to prove it to you by talking shit” cynics just will not, and cannot ever, “get” The Six Million Dollar Man. This is one of the shows that brings them out of the woodwork because they see the high regard we have for it, and are utterly bewildered to the point of madness.

   Partly it’s because you had to “be there”. And partly it’s because they’re so thick.

   I don’t think Grace will feel entirely left out. Young as she is, I doubt Lee’s charms will be entirely lost on her. He was quite the hunk. The cynics I have mentioned, who will run this show down (at 60mph, I imagine), will never believe a heterosexual man with chest hair could have sex appeal…….. but, then, these same geniuses can’t understand why Lynda Carter in the Wonder Woman TV pilot was such a knockout to our generation either; after all, she didn’t have narrow hips, blonde hair, and huge fake boobs.

   I know you’ve had to be patient, David…….. but this show on DVD will be worth the wait.

2. I envy you, Aldous, having these shows available for years now in Region 4. But on the up side, they’re supposedly being “restored,” with extras, so maybe we’ll be rewarded for the delay.

   It’s rumored Time-Life will get SMDM, and if so they may do what they did with “Get Smart” and sell the entire series as a whopping (and wallet-busting) box set. Much as I love Agent 86, only Steve could get me to shell out that kind of cash.

3. I will admit, I haven’t seen the “Six Million Dollar Man” TV series, and I am curious about it, since I’ve read a few of Martin Caidin’s aviation novels, including “Cyborg.”

   The only thing I know about Steve Austin is through pop culture, where I heard there was an episode, supposedly, where Steve Austin fought Bigfoot. I’m sure that tidbit of knowledge is taken entirely out of context, of course, and that the majority of episodes are straight adventure stories with espionage elements that don’t indulge in ridiculousness and embarrassing camp. Right, guys?

   Right?

   One thing I do have experience with, however, is one of the hardest parts of entering adulthood is coming to terms with the fact that many things you liked as a kid were terrible. There are some interesting parallels to fans of the original Battlestar Galactica, actually. Though the revamped BSG later on replaced Star Trek as the darling of TV science fiction fans the world over, there was a lot of resistance to that series from the hardcore fans of “classic” BSG.

   What has to be remembered is that BSG was not a pop culture phenomenon like Star Trek was. BSG was the darling of a group of fans, who usually were fans of it as children and had strong ideas on what made that show work. For that reason, there was a lot of resistance to a revamped Galactica that tried to fix some of the “flaws” of the original series. Because they were fans of the series from when they were very young, anyone critiquing the original Galactica is like attacking Mommy or Santa Claus.

   This is why the new breed of “I am clever, and I am desperate to prove it to you by talking shit” cynics just will not, and cannot ever, “get” The Six Million Dollar Man. This is one of the shows that brings them out of the woodwork because they see the high regard we have for it, and are utterly bewildered to the point of madness.

   …does Steve Austin running in slow motion really provoke this kind of reaction from anybody? I know Punk rockers always love to go after Frank Capra and Steven Spielberg to get “cred” for being cynical about Hollywood as a business, but SMDM is so far off the pop culture radar that I have trouble believing that ever happened.

   If you can find one person anywhere in the entire history of the world that bashed Steve Austin’s slo-mo robot antics that was motivated by cynicism and bafflement at his popularity among men searching for a Daddy figure fans of classic adventure stories, I will retract this statement.

   I was always under the impression that shows of this type, along with Knight Rider and the A-Team, provoke three reactions:

   1) “Wow, I remember that!”
   2) “Uh, I kinda remember that.”
   3) “What is that?”

   You either like this stuff or don’t care.

   I must confess, there are some shows whose popularity is baffling to the point that I view it as something of a personal insult. I had my mind blown when I saw how well “Mama’s Family” did on DVD.

   By the way – to turn the knife in even further…wasn’t the highest rated TV series of the 1970s “All in the Family,” a sitcom that openly talked about the conflicts and divisions in American society, with a central character that, far from a heroic leading man, was instead presented as a buffoonish caricature?

4. The only thing I know about Steve Austin is through pop culture, where I heard there was an episode, supposedly, where Steve Austin fought Bigfoot. I’m sure that tidbit of knowledge is taken entirely out of context, of course, and that the majority of episodes are straight adventure stories with espionage elements that don’t indulge in ridiculousness and embarrassing camp. Right, guys?

   The show started as a telefilm, which adapted the novel fairly faithfully, then two more telefilms that struggled to find a tone, honestly. Basically they tried to make Austin into a jetsetting James Bond type delivering bon mots as he polishes off baddies, and bedding smokin’ hot Euro-babes, and shoehorned in the superhero stuff almost as an afterthought.

   When the series proper began, there was more home-grown espionage, some “undercover cop”-style stuff and sci-fi lite, occasionally with a dark tone, the best examples being “Population: Zero,” which starts off kind of like “Andromeda Strain” and ends up with Steve killing all the bad guys, and “Day of the Robot,” wherein his best friend is replaced with a robot he has to destroy; and as silly as that sounds when I type it now, it was and remains genuinely creepy and suspenseful.

   It didn’t take long, though, for ABC to recognize the real money was in the juvenile demographic, so from the 3rd season on we had more outlandish adventures and unlikely feats and the tacking on of bionic girlfriends, teenagers, dogs (!) and yes, a bionic Bigfoot in a process that eerily mirrored what we got in the Superman and Batman comics of the 50s and 60s.

   I don’t think the show was ever intentionally “camp.” Even at its craziest, it was played pretty straight, but arguably that just means it had all the “silly” of camp with none of the “witty.”

   What has to be remembered is that BSG was not a pop culture phenomenon like Star Trek was. BSG was the darling of a group of fans, who usually were fans of it as children and had strong ideas on what made that show work. For that reason, there was a lot of resistance to a revamped Galactica that tried to fix some of the “flaws” of the original series.

   I remember that, and I remember Richard Hatch trying to stir the pot online as the self-appointed standard-bearer of “real” BSG’s ideals.

   I have to say, though, that SMDM may be one show that could really benefit from a BSG-type makeover. Amputations, loss of humanity, covert ops bosses who press the hero into service with a “you owe us now” brand of emotional blackmail…all those angles added real bite to the original concept but faded away all too quickly. A modern, BSG-like take could milk them a lot further, and maybe add some timely references to today’s surgery-obsessed American culture, morally iffy jobs in the War on Terror, etc. So long as Austin himself is a stand-up guy, I’d kind of like to see some of those darker elements arranged around him (as indeed they were in the first film, way back in ’73).

   It’s actually kind of amazing how quickly things turned around. When I first heard the concept for the show, I thought it sounded like a horror film, and in the first movie, Steve agrees; he thinks he’s been made into a Frankenstein monster. When he wakes to find his limbs gone, he tries to kill himself, and after his first heroic feat, a woman and her kid are repulsed by the sight of his damaged bionic arm. Yet by the end of season 2, bionics have already made the transition to being cool and desirable, and Steve is asking his boss to give bionic enhancements to his girlfriend — a tennis player with no particular value to the government — after another nasty accident…and the boss says, “okay”(!). Newspaper accounts of the time had numerous real-life kids trying to injure themselves badly enough to get bionic limbs.

   By the way – to turn the knife in even further…wasn’t the highest rated TV series of the 1970s “All in the Family,” a sitcom that openly talked about the conflicts and divisions in American society, with a central character that, far from a heroic leading man, was instead presented as a buffoonish caricature?

   Yes, and I enjoyed that show for being funny and having the guts to really deal with issues instead of dancing around them or wrapping up “messages” in a big pink bow like so many sit-coms of the day (“Tonight, a very special episode of ‘Diff’rent Strokes'”).

   The irony is that nearly 40 years later, America no longer has the courage to deal with issues in a similarly frank and straightforward manner, and network TV doesn’t have writers talented enough to do it and make people laugh…preach at them yes, make them laugh, no. Political Correctness has killed all of that. It’s funny to me that at a time when this country was literally a powder keg with a lit fuse, “All in the Family” dealt with issues in a direct way, and today…when we’ve supposedly “come so far”…we’re afraid to even say certain words or acknowledge certain realities. And no, I’m not talking about words related to bodily functions or intimate acts…you can say anything you want in that regard. Big whoop. Apparently all we’ve earned ourselves is the right to talk like 13-year-olds in the locker room, if that’s progress. We can’t talk about anything that matters.

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