Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 5:42 pm
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The TV "Six Million Dollar Man" series began with a trio of made-for-TV movies. I was so young then that I have no memories of these pilots, or of the series' first season. Now I've run across a DVD set of them. So, after all these years, here is what I've found:
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Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 5:58 pm
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The Six Million Dollar Man (Pilot Movie)
It begins with a long sequence showing Steve Austin's fateful flight and crash in the HL-10 lifting body aircraft. Interspersed with scenes of the HL-10 being prepped and taking off are scenes of a group of bigwigs discussing the top-secret "Office of Special Operations." The OSO's Oliver Spencer, played by Darren McGavin, wants six million dollars to invest in creating a cyborg superman who can handle the OSO's most very special operations. When asked where he plans to find somebody who will submit to being converted into a cyborg, Spencer cheerfully observes that "accidents happen all the time." Sure enough, Steve crashes. Spencer now has a subject with just the right skills, just the right set of injuries, AND who already knows and trusts Dr. Rudy Wells, the only man who can make it happen. It couldn't have worked out better for Spencer if he'd tried--and he surely couldn't have, given the fortuitous nature of Steve's accident and survival.
The middle sequence details Steve's receipt of his bionic replacements. It's clear that it takes him some time to learn to use his bionic limbs. He has to deal with some serious psychological issues too, not surprisingly. Early on he even tries to kill himself by lashing out with his sole remaining limb to try to wreck his own life support equipment. He is helped through this by a kind and lovely nurse--who, once this work is done, is promptly dropped and will never be seen again in the series.
In the third section the movie, which up to now has been rather like a commonplace TV medical drama with science fictional elements, shifts gears into an action-adventure story when Steve is sent on his inaugural mission to rescue a hostage from terrorists in the Arabian desert. He does bring back A hostage, but not THE hostage he was sent for. It turns out that the main hostage has already been murdered. Spencer has risked his six-million-dollar investment on a dangerous fool's errand anyway to see whether Steve really has what it takes to survive in a dangerous business. Spencer is an almost cartoonishly unsympathetic character--but Darren McGavin, warming up for his later role as Kolchak the Night Stalker, invests him with a certain odd charm that makes him much more watchable than he really deserves to be as written.
As for Steve, he decides, despite having to work for such a nasty boss, that he's ready to go ahead with his life.
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Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 6:24 pm
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The pilot movie is very loosely based on Martin Caidin's novel Cyborg, which I read many years ago. In Cyborg Caidin tried to take a more realistic approach to Steve bionic limbs. His eye is only a handy built-in mini spy camera. His arm is mainly good for beating people's heads in with, plus it has a built-in dart gun (Well, Caidin's original version wasn't always more realistic). And his legs, though tireless and fast, can't propel Steve at anything like the TV show's 60 miles per hour (Caidin understood that the balance and aerodynamics of the human body's upright, bipedal gait could never permit anything like speeds that high, no matter how fast one could move one's legs). The novel's bionics also realistically had much less kinesthetic sensation than natural limbs would have, whereas in the movie Steve's limbs feel much like normal, to himself and to anybody who touches him.
Other differences I can recall--in Cyborg Steve crashes the fictional M2-F5 lifting body, not the HL-10; he has more of a cocksure test pilot's personality; he is accompanied by an Israeli agent who serves as a love interest on his first mission; and the mission is different in other details. The abortive suicide attempt is in the original novel, however.
We don't see Steve use his cyborg powers all that much. Late in the middle sequence he and his nurse friend happen across a car accident scene, and Steve gets to be a hero by using his new artificial arm to snatch a trapped child out of the wrecked car before it blows up. He doesn't appear nearly as strong as he will later be. Maybe Rudy had his bionics de-tuned early on, until he had learned to control them thoroughly? It would have made sense. Later, in the desert, Steve breaks a couple of manacles, but otherwise mostly runs around like a conventional action hero. There are no slow-motion effects to differentiate his bionic running from a normal human run, and there are no "bionic" sound effects of the sort that would later become familiar.
There's a continuity error early on, when an unshaven Steve arrives at the airfield for the HL-10's flight and switches to being cleanly shaven in a close-up BEFORE he has a chance to shave. Not sure how that happened, but you can't blame them for not wanting to have Lee Majors look like anything less than his handsome best in his close-ups.
The early sequence also contains lots of great shots of the HL-10 on the ground, and stock footage of it in the air. They must have gotten some remarkable cooperation to be able to use the real article like that! Some of the flight footage is actually of the HL-10's sister lifting body, the M2-F2. The dialog and treatment of the crash are very different from the heavily melodramatic condensed version ("I can't hold her! She's breaking up!") that would later become the standard weekly series opening.
But it still shows the real-life M2-F2 crash seen in the weekly opening. Indeed, we see the whole clip of the crash footage, not just the couple of seconds seen in the weekly credits sequence. When you know that this was a real crash with a real pilot inside, it's throat-catchingly horrifying to watch. Test pilot Bruce Peterson lost sight in one eye and needed some two years of surgeries and rehab to regain use of his shattered (but not lost) limbs. His real-life ordeal helped to inspire Caidin, who already had an interest in bionics, to write Cyborg. And Peterson had to spend the 1970s with the indignity of knowing that the very worst day of his life was being replayed on prime-time TV on a weekly basis....
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Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 9:23 pm
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Thank you for doing this, Daphne. I'd forgotten the TV movies as well -my overall impression of this show is coloured by nostalgia and very cloudy when it comes to details. I just remember loving this show and The Bionic Woman a great deal. The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman and the Planet of the Apes TV series were a huge influence on me in my formative years.
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Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 9:36 pm
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Simon wrote:
Thank you for doing this, Daphne. I'd forgotten the TV movies as well -my overall impression of this show is coloured by nostalgia and very cloudy when it comes to details. I just remember loving this show and The Bionic Woman a great deal. The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman and the Planet of the Apes TV series were a huge influence on me in my formative years.
I'm a shocking development, +1 to this post for me.
Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Wed Sep 29, 2021 10:00 pm
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I certainly liked the show, but even at 12 years old, I knew a lot of that wouldn't work without bionic shoulders and backbones and, well, probably a whole metal reinforced skeleton.
I dunno if internal flywheels might stabilize a person running that fast. I mean, it's not like the entire leg is jammed packed with muscles, so there's probably room for something like that.
I forget how it was powered. Probably nuclear, but I suspect that's not too realistic, either - or particularly healthy.
As for the stories, well, I'm sorry to say I don't recall most of them or if they were particularly good.
Fun idea, though. Entertaining for kids, certainly.
Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2021 3:08 pm
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The Six Million Dollar Man: Wine, Women, and War
Having dealt with Steve Austin's traumatic origin, the producers decided in the second movie to try to make a kind of poor man's James Bond epic. The efforts to invoke a Bond adventure are so blatant it's ridiculous. Steve gets an adventure-filled introduction in (TV budget) opulent surroundings, as in most Bond movies; tries hard to act like a ladies' man; and utters faux Bond one-liners that are as groan-inducing as the real thing. The villain is a Bond-villain wannabe with ambitions of kidnapping nuclear missile-armed submarines, and a secret base that..
...blows up at the climax! Now who could have seen that coming?
Besides borrowing from Bond, they borrow from "The Man From Uncle," with a Soviet agent played by David McCallum. I couldn't help feeling sorry for him here. He's too good of an actor to have to play such a goofily-written glorified bit part.
The cast has had a bit of a shake up since the first movie. Rudy Wells has metamorphosed from actor Martin Balsam into Alan "Skeletor" Oppenheimer. And Darren McGavin's Spencer has been replaced by Richard Anderson as the now-familiar Oscar Goldman. It wasn't just a case of Steve getting a new boss, either--the brief flashback to Steve's origins in this movie retcons Oscar into Spencer's place as the man responsible for selecting Steve and funding his transformation. Oscar here is marginally more sympathetic than Spencer was. Fans of the series know that he gets better as the series progresses.
Steve's powers seem to have been amped up a bit since his first outing. Now we see him racing through the water like a torpedo, punching through solid walls, and knocking a golf ball a fantastic distance. The weird sound the ball makes as it flies along is the first attempt at a "bionic" sound effect. We don't hear any more of them, though.
All and all, it's clear that Steve had some more evolving to undergo before becoming the character that we know and love. And it's a good thing they didn't stop here, either. As it is, this episode could best be called "so bad it's good."
One last effort at aping James Bond that I should mention here--Steve gets an opening theme song that's very obviously trying imitate contemporary Bond themes. It was the work of Glen Larson, the musically-talented TV producer who would later do a fair job of imitating the great John Williams in his score for the original "Battlestar Galactica." Here Larson tries to channel Bond theme composer John Barry--and falls absolutely flat on his face. The best that can be said for the opening theme for this TV movie is that we don't have to listen to very much of it. It's disturbing to think that there is probably an extended-play version of it out there somewhere, and that some misguided completist fanboy may have uploaded it to the internet. I'm afraid to look....
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Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2021 3:12 pm
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Li'l Jay wrote:
Simon wrote:
Thank you for doing this, Daphne. I'd forgotten the TV movies as well -my overall impression of this show is coloured by nostalgia and very cloudy when it comes to details. I just remember loving this show and The Bionic Woman a great deal. The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman and the Planet of the Apes TV series were a huge influence on me in my formative years.
I'm a shocking development, +1 to this post for me.
Hope you enjoy the reviews as they continue. I'm having fun watching the episodes!
_________________ The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.
Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2021 3:17 pm
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Jilerb wrote:
I certainly liked the show, but even at 12 years old, I knew a lot of that wouldn't work without bionic shoulders and backbones and, well, probably a whole metal reinforced skeleton.
I dunno if internal flywheels might stabilize a person running that fast. I mean, it's not like the entire leg is jammed packed with muscles, so there's probably room for something like that.
I forget how it was powered. Probably nuclear, but I suspect that's not too realistic, either - or particularly healthy.
As for the stories, well, I'm sorry to say I don't recall most of them or if they were particularly good.
Fun idea, though. Entertaining for kids, certainly.
Martin Caidin's original novel Cyborg mentions that Steve had to have much of his skeleton rebuilt. In the second pilot movie, Rudy Wells mentions Steve having some kind of gyroscopic stabilizers to help him remain upright at high speeds. It strikes me as the kind of technobabble that writers use to acknowledge that they've at least thought about a technical problem, without actually having a very plausible solution for it.
Steve does have little nuclear power plants in his arm and legs. They appear to be about the size of a box of Tic Tacs. Rudy mentions that Steve's limbs will feel warm to the touch, so that it won't be obvious that they aren't real. When you consider how much heat a nuclear reaction gives off, I bet they'll be warm, all right!
_________________ The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.
Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2021 3:38 pm
Kind Of Close For One Of These Jewels.
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I'd expect him to be more battery powered than have actual nuclear power plants in him. If there's a difference. I mean, he's not generating heat to produce steam to turn turbines.
I don't know a lot about atomic batteries, but I suspect they weigh a lot, are pretty big, and probably require massive shielding to protect a person from deadly radiation.
They wouldn't be rechargeable, but should be replaceable.
Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Thu Sep 30, 2021 6:33 pm
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That meddlin kid wrote:
Li'l Jay wrote:
Simon wrote:
Thank you for doing this, Daphne. I'd forgotten the TV movies as well -my overall impression of this show is coloured by nostalgia and very cloudy when it comes to details. I just remember loving this show and The Bionic Woman a great deal. The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman and the Planet of the Apes TV series were a huge influence on me in my formative years.
I'm a shocking development, +1 to this post for me.
Hope you enjoy the reviews as they continue. I'm having fun watching the episodes!
Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2021 9:30 am
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That meddlin kid wrote:
One last effort at aping James Bond that I should mention here--Steve gets an opening theme song that's very obviously trying imitate contemporary Bond themes. It was the work of Glen Larson, the musically-talented TV producer who would later do a fair job of imitating the great John Williams in his score for the original "Battlestar Galactica." Here Larson tries to channel Bond theme composer John Barry--and falls absolutely flat on his face. The best that can be said for the opening theme for this TV movie is that we don't have to listen to very much of it. It's disturbing to think that there is probably an extended-play version of it out there somewhere, and that some misguided completist fanboy may have uploaded it to the internet. I'm afraid to look....
Fear not...I've looked so you didn't have to. This was sung by Dusty Springfield (of all people). Highly recommended listening.
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Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2021 10:46 am
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I agree with your assessment -- I can barely stand to listen to that song. It has comedic "period" value, but it shatters the spell for me of Steve Austin. Because I discovered him later and never saw that movie until recently. And for me, he was always "serious, cool" and not "Ha ha, he's the man, in bell bottoms." I don't think they were going for a light hearted touch, but that song is profoundly trapped in time and does not translate to today at all.
Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2021 10:48 am
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I do think someone on the creative side spotted that it was off-tone. By the time of the regular show's them, they had course-corrected to a more heroic and instrumental theme song. The tradition opening of the show is tone-perfect.
Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2021 12:07 pm
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The Six Million Dollar Man: The Solid Gold Kidnapping
The third TV movie still has that ghastly bad Glen Larson song, and a scene where Steve tries to act like James Bond by hooking up with a random woman he's met. Otherwise they've pulled back from the imitation James Bond angle. Steve no longer utters would-be Bond one-liners every couple of minutes, and the bad guys are now just kidnappers (Albeit exceptionally ambitious with their ransom demands--they've captured a very valuable diplomat).
Steve now finds himself with a partner in the form of a lovely lady scientist who is working on a rather bizarre and creepy line of research. She has found that she can, by injecting one rat in the head with brain cells from another rat, transfer some of the donor rat's recent memories to the recipient. Not exactly sure how that's supposed to work--it sounds like one of those weird experimental results you sometimes hear about that nobody else can ever replicate. Anyway, she can't wait to try this with a human. And ends up injecting herself with brain cells from a newly-slain (!) bad guy, in an effort to learn what the bad guys have been doing. It sounds like a really good way to give yourself a devastating immune system reaction in your head. Assuming the memory transfer works, it also sounds like a great way to drive yourself crazy by filling your head with a rush of imagery from another's mind. Which is in fact what happens to our Lady Scientist--she starts going hysterical, especially when she begins reliving the donor's death. Probably explains why we haven't heard of anybody using the procedure since.
Steve doesn't pull a whole lot of bionic stunts this time around. He spectacularly kicks through a stone wall early on. Later he bends some metal. Otherwise he just does fairly standard action-hero stuff, like jumping out from in front of onrushing cars, dangling from a helicopter, and leaping from a speeding boat to let it crash into a bad-guy boat. The colliding boats promptly explode in a huge fireball, despite colliding about as far from their respective fuel tanks as they could get. Adding insult to injury, the big explosion looks very fake. It probably looked less egregious on the lower-resolution TV screens of the 1970s. The same could be said of some special effects failures in the previous movie.
The overall feel is lighter and more down-to-earth than in the second TV movie. Steve's character has taken a big step toward being more like he will be in the main series. So has Oscar, who is starting to seem a little more sympathetic.
Until next time remember--if anybody offers to inject somebody else's memories into your head, don't let them do it!
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Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Fri Oct 01, 2021 12:14 pm
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Simon wrote:
There was only one song that was worthy of inclusion in this TV show...we all know what it is...
Yeah...Lee Majors' would-be sideline as a singer. To be fair, he did a LOT better singing the theme song "Unknown Stuntman" for his 1980s "Fall Guy" series.
I might jump an open drawbridge, Or Tarzan from a vine; 'Cause I'm the Unknown Stuntman Who makes Eastwood look so fine.
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Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 9:30 am
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Population: Zero The entire population of a tiny California town is found dead from some mysterious cause.
Here it is--the first regular-season "Six Million Dollar Man" episode! Including the first appearance of the classic opening title sequence, with its martial percussion, harrowing crash sequence, and Oscar Goldman's promise that "We can rebuild him."
The opening scenes look like a take-off on Michael Crichton's then-recent book and movie "The Andromeda Strain" (In fact, it is said to contain stock footage from that movie). Then the episode subverts expectations by having the "dead" townsfolk start coming to. Instead of being slain by some mysterious plague, they've been knocked for a loop by an electromagnetic pulse weapon designed by a renegade OSI scientist turned extortionist. Dr. Bacon (Played with cheerful menace by Don Porter--this series has a lot of villains who give the impression they might be good people to meet--if they weren't, you know, bad guys) warns that if his demands are not met he will turn up the power and make his next demonstration a fatal one.
When Bacon's henchmen capture Steve, his OSI background enables him to finger Steve as that bionic super-agent that Oscar had been wanting to create. He also knows that Rudy Wells' bionic prototypes don't work well in cold conditions, so he has Steve locked in a big cold storage unit. Steve soon acquires a coating of frost that makes him look remarkably like a zombie. But he keeps his cool, so to speak, and ingeniously contrives an escape. Revived by the desert heat, he spots the bad guys' mobile EMP unit as they're about to make that fatal demonstration of power. Steve seizes the nearest weapon to hand--he yanks a metal post with a concrete base out of the ground and begins dashing along with it (I've pulled posts out of the ground before. It takes us mere mortals a lot of persistence to get one worked loose!). He hurls the concrete-tipped post like a javelin. It strikes the truck broadside, and somehow causes it to blow up into a big fireball. It's one of the most memorably spectacular demonstrations of Steve's power ever. So memorable that I actually DO recall it from childhood. I must have been about six at the time. It's the only memory I have of the whole episode. It's just not the sort of sight you can forget.
In the aftermath we see Steve visiting with the revived local folks. It turns out he is acquainted with them, having grown up in another town only a few miles away. He's also a perfect gentleman to this episode's Lady Scientist. We see here that they've decisively abandoned those misguided efforts to turn Steve into a "sophisticated," borderline-sociopathic Bond clone. Instead he has become a sort of perfect grown-up Boy Scout, an all-American small town boy made good, the sort of unambiguous hero who was already starting to get scarce in our media in the 1970s. This is the Steve Austin we know and love.
About that EMP device--concepts for using electromagnetic pulses as weapons to disorient human beings or worse go way back. In recent years there has been serious concern that some unfriendly power may actually be using such technology to target American diplomats abroad (Or maybe it's some bizarre outburst of hysteria?). Look up "Havana Syndrome." This nearly fifty-year-old show could almost have been "ripped from today's headlines."
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Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 10:04 am
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Survival of the Fittest Steve and Oscar hitch a ride on a military charter flight which crashes in a storm.
As if being stranded on a desert island in the Pacific was not enough, the flight happens to have been carrying a team of assassins sent to rub out Oscar. This would be the first of several attempts to get rid of Oscar, who is sometimes treated as if he is even more important to national and global security than the President himself. The assassins are among the survivors. After a helicopter spots them and drops supplies and a message that rescue will arrive the next day, the bad guys know that they will need to get Oscar that night. They wound him, and nearly finish the job the next morning. But he is saved through a bit of emergency field surgery--conducted by Steve and a nervous washed-out med student who happens to be on hand--that must be seen to be believed.
Steve and Oscar show what they're made of when they shut down panic among the passengers, and subsequently help to evacuate the sinking crashed aircraft (Apparently a set on Universal's back lot--this series really got a lot of use out of that studio back lot!). By now we see that Steve and Oscar have developed a very good working relationship. Oscar, for all his ruthless pragmatic streak, is clearly not just a sinister, amoral spymaster. He and Steve are actually getting rather buddy-buddy--at least when Steve isn't offering unsolicited advice/criticism, or disobeying orders for the greater good. Oscar has already learned that when Steve has one of his better-to-ask-for-forgiveness-than-permission moments he needs to be ready to forgive.
The other passengers have some interesting moments. There's that poor, nerve-shot, would-be med student, who needs some serious bucking up. There's a lovely young women's naval auxiliary who pitches in to make herself useful, and tries to encourage the poor nerve-shot guy. There's a surprise member of the hit squad lying in wait. And there is a loud, goofy woman who seems to have wandered in from a completely different show. "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In," to be precise--it's the unmistakable JoAnne Worley, playing a ditzy lady who has somehow boarded the wrong flight at the worst possible time.
The Pacific desert island looks like a desert indeed--it's mostly covered with scrub vegetation, quite unlike the lush stuff found on a stereotypical Pacific island (That doesn't stop Steve from somehow finding some tropical fruit off-screen). Presumably they shot this somewhere on the California coast. Conceivably it could be Catalina Island--which is, after all a Pacific island. Wherever it is, you can hear Australian kookaburra birds there. The kookaburra's distinct cry had been used on jungle movie soundtracks for about 40 years at that point. This must have been one of the last uses of that particular silly Hollywood stock sound effect.
I've noticed that in every movie and episode so far they've had a black character or two in bit roles. Nowadays this would be regarded as tokenism. At the time it was probably an effort to be mildly progressive. In this episode the token black character plays a rather important role--as the villain! James McEachin plays a phony Army officer who is firmly in charge of the hit team. They come across across as rather amateurish. There's an embarrassing moment when the boss accidentally shoots one of his own men (To be fair, it was in the dark, in a confusing situation. These things happen). James McEachin, by the way, started out as a genuine soldier, with a distinguished combat record in the Korean War. He later served as a kind of military goodwill ambassador. Not just your average journeyman actor!
_________________ The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls who, when he found an especially costly one, sold everything he had to buy it.
Post subject: The Six Million Dollar Man--First Season
Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 2:04 pm
Kind Of Close For One Of These Jewels.
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I might recall that, if Steve cuts his finger open to expose electrical wires so the med guy can use them to cauterize Oscar's wounds and stop the bleeding. But if that's not the one, I recall him doing that elsewhere.
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