The Six Million Dollar Man

First hitting the airwaves as a made-for-TV movie in 1973, The Six Million Dollar Man became a weekly hour-long series that aired from 1974 to 1978 on the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) network. The show starred Lee Majors as Colonel Steve Austin, an astronaut who suffered serious injuries from the crash of an experimental craft and was rebuilt into a bionic man by the government. Austin was given bionic legs, a bionic arm, and bionic eye. His new parts gave him super strength, super speed, and super vision. He worked for the OSI, the Office of Strategic Investigation. His superior was Oscar Goldman, played by Richard Anderson, and his doctor/scientist was Rudy Wells, played by Allan Oppenheimer and later by Martin E. Brooks.

During the regular series, Austin faced a variety of foes, including spies, a rogue bionic man, Bigfoot (a robot created by aliens), and the fembots (robots made in the image of women Austin and his fiancée, Jamie Sommers, the Bionic Woman, knew). During most of the episodes, Austin worked as a secret agent. When the character achieved super hero status among young television viewers, the show's producers imitated comic book hero plots with spinoffs and a "bionic family." Sommers "died" only to be brought back the next season. Eventually there emerged The Bionic Women television series, involving a bionic boy and Sommers's bionic dog, a German shepherd named Max. The two shows shared a supporting cast and Austin and Sommers crossed over onto each others' shows.

The show lasted longer than several other super spy shows (The Invisible Man, The Gemini Man) that appeared around the same time. Both shows were in the top ten rated shows, with The Six Million Dollar Man even enjoying the spot as the number one rated show in America. It enjoyed a healthy run in syndication at home and abroad as well, appearing on cable television into the late 1990s. Austin and Sommers also appeared in several movie specials that aired in the late 1980s and early 1990s. (These movies also introduced another bionic man—Austin's son—and a bionic girl.)

Based on the novel Cyborg (standing for cybernetic organism), by Martin Caidin, the television series made the terms bionics and cybernetics familiar to the general American population, especially America's youth. Caidin served as technical advisor to the show.

The television shows generated other forms of popular culture. Novels, especially young adult novels, were based on episodes and characters from the series. Steve Austin starred in his own comic book series produced by Charlton Comics. There was a Six Million Dollar Man action figure and lunch box. Dusty Springfield recorded a pop single titled after the show. Parodies also appeared: the Bionic Watermelon debuted on the Captain and Tenille Show ; a children's joke book was titled The Bionic Banana.

The show's opening sequence, showing Austin's crash, gave several phrases to American slang. "He's breaking up! He's breaking up!" and "We can rebuild him; we have the technology. We can make him better than he was before." became expressions among children during play. Pretending to be bionic was easy thanks to the show's low-budget special effects. Every bionic act was usually done in slow motion and was accompanied by a distinctive sound effect, easy to imitate in backyards and school playgrounds.

Besides being a fun thing to say on the playground, the show's opening statement about "making him better than he was before" indicated an American attitude toward technology. After putting a man on the moon, most Americans became extremely proud of technology as a remedy to any problem. The show postulated that technology could even fix a broken person. And of course, scientists involved in the actual field of bionics were attempting to do just that. The show tended to highlight the technology, although The Bionic Woman tended to highlight the person. However, although technology solved the problems, it could also be faulted as the source of power for the villains on the show. Killer robots and Venus probes were Austin's biggest challenges. What cannot be overlooked, though, is the significance of Austin's humanness in allowing him to triumph against his machine foes.

The show also expressed a view of government agencies as entities protecting the population. The OSI was concerned with doing good and mostly benign in its practices. This perception of government agencies contrasts radically with the way government is portrayed in the 1990s hit science fiction show The X-Files.

—P. Andrew Miller

Further Reading:

Cohen, Joel. The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman. New York, Scholastic Book Services, 1976.

Philips, Mark, and Frank Garcia. Science Fiction Television Series. Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland, 1996.