The Six Million Dollar Man origins
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The Six Million Dollar Man origins
The Six Million Dollar Man began as a novel by Martin Caidin, titled Cyborg, in 1972. The story detailed the catastrophic injuries suffered by Steve Austin (the name would remain the same for the TV version) in a crash of a test airplane and his being rebuilt as a cyborg. Caidin's previous novel was Marooned, which was itself turned into a big budget film in 1969. Caidin had an interesting background - working with the Air Force on an early version of a bionics program.
The original novel had more gritty realism than the TV movie and especially the TV series. Austin, in the novel, was an efficient killing machine as he went on his first assignment. After Warner Brothers passed on an option to create a film based on Cyborg, Universal Studios became interested in turning it into a TV movie. The screenplay was by Henry Simoun (ghostwriter Steven Bochco), with Caidin on board as technical advisor. Lee Majors was cast as Austin; his character acquired two bionic legs, enabling him to run at 60 mph (one episode clocked him at 66 mph as his top speed), a bionic right arm able to lift in the area of 1500 lbs.(or even hundreds of pounds more according to one episode and ignoring such things as leverage) and a bionic eye capable of telescopic sight. The legs and arm could also be very effective battering weapons and Austin could also leap about 30 feet into the air, which he did a lot.
The first TV movie in 1973 was a big hit, but the two subsequent TV films (Wine, Women and War and The Solid Gold Kidnapping) later that year saw the ratings plummet. Caidin hated these latter two TV films, blaming the switch to an inappropriate James Bond-style tone for the low ratings. These were produced by Glen Larson. With the future of the bionic man in limbo, producer Harve Bennett was brought in by Universal. Bennett screened the first TV movie and decided to return to those original elements for the regular series, which began in January of 1974. The rest is bionic history...
The whole concept of Austin's Bionic Man spawned more interest and other efforts on the subject. Besides the obvious - the spin-off The Bionic Woman (1976-78), Marvel Comics, for example, began publishing the adventures of Deathlok in Astonishing Tales #25 (Aug.1974). This character was recently reintroduced on the new TV series Agents of Shield. Austin himself arrived in comic books by Charlton Comics in 1976, as well as a magazine-sized book. It could also be argued that Steve Austin was a heavy influence on future film properties such as The Terminator (1984) and Robocop (1987). Though Austin's TV series ended in 1978, Austin and the Bionic Woman returned in a TV movie reunion in 1987, followed by more TV films in 1989 and 1994.
Bionic Trivia: Caidin's first choice to play Austin, before Majors, was actor Monte Markham, who would later play The Seven Million Dollar Man. Bennett's involvement was very similar to his later involvement with the Star Trek franchise, when he was brought in to figure out what the 2nd Star Trek film would be (it turned out to be The Wrath of Khan in 1982).
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Base of Galactic Science Fiction :: SCIENCE FICTION in TELEVISION :: Bronze Age of TV Science Fiction
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