So picture this. It is the late 1970s and you
are living in Brazil. Right. And you're living
under a very strict military dictatorship. And
the government has just announced this massive
change to how power is distributed. So Instead
of citizens electing their own senators and governors,
the president is simply going to appoint people
directly to those positions. Bypassing democracy
entirely. Exactly. They are just installing their
own chosen officials. And, you know, the public
is furious, obviously, but outright protest is
incredibly dangerous. So they need a code word.
They need a metaphor to describe this artificial
government installed power. So what do they end
up calling these unelected politicians? Well,
they actually look to an American sci -fi television
show, a show about a guy in a red tracksuit running
in slow motion, and they start calling them bionicos,
bionics. Yeah, it really is such a striking piece
of history. You know, it's this piece of light
American entertainment that somehow provided
the exact political vocabulary a whole nation
needed to protest a dictatorship. It's wild.
And that is exactly what our deep dive is tackling
today. We've got a massive stack of sources here,
mostly centered around this comprehensive Wikipedia
article that details the lore. the production
and just the massive cultural legacy of the six
million dollar man. Oh, absolutely. So our mission
for you today is to look past the pure nostalgia.
Like we all know the catchphrase, you know, gentlemen,
we can rebuild him. And we all remember the slow
motion running. But we are going to unpack how
this show literally wrote the playbook for on
screen superheroes, how it laid down these incredibly
strict rules for grounded science fiction that
Hollywood still uses today and how it acts. caused
global political ripple effects. Yeah, because
when you really get into the machinery of this
series, you start to realize it wasn't just,
you know, a retro TV show of the week. Right.
It was almost this cultural processing plant.
It was the 1970s trying to figure out where humanity
ends and where rapid technological advancement
really begins. Exactly. And, you know, the character
of Steve Austin, who was played by Lee Majors,
he's burned into our collective memory as this
highly moral, very down -to -earth heroic guy.
Oh, definitely. But if you actually look at the
source material, the origin of this character
is incredibly dark. I mean, the television show
is based on a 1972 bestselling novel by Martin
Caden called Cyborg. And the Steve Austin in
those pages is not the guy you want saving your
cat from a tree. No, not at all. I mean, in the
original novels, Austin is effectively a weaponized
human being. Yeah. And he operates exactly like
one. He's much darker. And frankly, he is a cold
blooded killer. The government spent millions
turning him into a machine. And in the books,
he just leans entirely into that mechanical ruthlessness.
And there is this perfect comparison in the sources
to illustrate this. There's a TV episode called
Love Song for Tanya. Right. I know the one. Yeah.
And later on, a writer named Mike John actually
wrote a novelization adapting that specific television
episode. But he kept the gritty, lethal tone
of Caden's original books. So. Tell me how the
book version of Austin handles an enemy agent
compared to the television broadcast we all saw.
Oh, it is just night and day. So in the book
version of Love Song for Tanya, Austin confronts
an enemy agent and literally shoots him dead
using a bionic poison dart gun. Wow. Yeah, a
dart gun that is built directly into his hand.
It's an assassination. But on the television
broadcast, facing the exact same scenario, Austin
simply overpowers the guy and captures him. No
hidden poison darts, nobody dies. It's such a
massive shift and the journey from You know,
Poison Dart Assassin to Family Friendly Hero
was pretty bumpy road for the production, too.
The very first TV pilot movie in 1973, it tried
to thread the needle by making him a civilian
astronaut with a really distinct James Bond flavor.
Yeah, it was slick. Very slick. Spy focused,
he wore a tuxedo. But then producer Harv Bennett
takes over the regular weekly series and he strips
all of that gloss away. He makes Steve Austin
an Air Force colonel, just a regular guy. Well,
Bennett... fundamentally understood that if you
were going to put a cyborg in living rooms every
single week, the audience needs to trust him.
Right. And Lee Majors completely bought into
that vision. Majors actually has this great quote
where he explains that Austin hates the whole
idea of spying. Really? Yeah, he finds the espionage
game repugnant and degrading. Majors played him
as the most reluctant spy imaginable. See, this
is where I struggle a bit with the adaptation
process. It's kind of like taking the Terminator.
You know, a machine built solely for infiltration
and assassination, and deciding, well, let's
make him a high school guidance counselor who
just wants to help people. That's a funny way
to put it, yeah. But usually when you take a
gritty, violent anti -hero and you sand off all
the sharp edges for a mass audience, you ruin
the character. You make them boring. So why did
completely neutering Steve Austin's lethal edge
actually make the show a massive hit? Well, I
mean, it really comes down to the immense power
disparity. Think about the physical realities
of the character. He has the strength of a bulldozer.
He can run at highway speeds. If you have a character
who possesses that level of devastating superhuman
force and he is a willing, cold -blooded killer,
you haven't created a hero. You've created a
monster. He becomes terrifying. A villain. Basically.
Right. Exactly. But by making Austin highly moral
and deeply reluctant to use violence, he isn't
just a walking weapon anymore. He is a vulnerable
human being who is actively grappling with the
trauma of being treated like a piece of government
hardware. Because he didn't choose this. Exactly.
He didn't ask to be rebuilt. The government made
the choice for him. His reluctance is what gives
the machine a soul. It gives you, the viewer,
a reason to root for the man inside the metal.
That makes perfect sense. The humanity grounds
the fantasy, and that philosophy of grounding
the fantasy bled directly into the actual bionics
themselves. Oh, absolutely. Let's talk about
the hardware, starting with the title of the
show. The Six Million Dollar Man. Now today,
six million dollars might buy you a nice penthouse,
but it certainly isn't funding. No, we definitely
have to factor in 1970s economics here. If we
adjust that $6 million for inflation from 1973
to 2026, it equates to roughly $44 million. The
$44 million, man. I mean, it loses a little bit
of the poetic rhythm, but it certainly sounds
like a more realistic defense contract. Yeah,
it does. But the show's commitment to realism
started way before they installed the $44 million
worth of parts. It started with the very first
frame of the opening. credits. Right, the crash.
The horrific crash that mangles Steve Austin's
body isn't some Hollywood special effect using
a plastic model on a string. It is real classified
military footage. It's the crash of the M2F2
lifting body aircraft. This happened on May 10th,
1967. And for those of us who aren't aerospace
historians, what exactly is a lifting body aircraft?
Because looking at the footage, it doesn't even
look like an airplane. No, it really doesn't.
That's because it essentially has no wings. A
lifting body aircraft looks like a flying bathtub
or, you know, a heavy aerodynamic teardrop. Wow.
The military was testing how spacecraft could
re -enter the atmosphere and land like airplanes
without traditional wings. And because they lack
wings, they drop out of the sky incredibly fast,
kind of like controlled bricks. And the test
pilot in that footage was a man named Bruce Peterson.
He hit the ground at about 260 miles per hour,
and the aircraft tumbled violently six times
across the desert floor. It is deeply unsettling
footage to watch. It really is. Peterson actually
survived, though he tragically lost an eye to
an infection caused by the crash later on. But
the producers looked at this near -fatal, horrific,
real -world aviation disaster and decided Yeah,
that's our superhero's origin story. Well, imagine
you're turning on your television in 1973, right?
Right. The evening news is filled with very real,
very visceral footage of the Vietnam War and
the Cold War arms race. Very true. The audience
was highly attuned to the harsh realities of
military service. By using the actual M2F2 crash
footage, the show immediately anchors itself
in that stark reality. It tells you the danger
isn't cartoonish. The consequences of this life
are brutal. Therefore the technology used to
put this man back together needs to feel equally
grounded. Which brings us perfectly to the rules.
The producer, Kenneth Johnson, set incredibly
strict boundaries on what Steve Austin could
actually do. He really did. Let's look at the
specs. He has a bionic left eye with a 20 .2
to 1 zoom lens and infrared capabilities. He
has bionic legs that let him run at 60 miles
per hour. There's actually a gauge in the episode,
The Palmeer Escort, that clocks him at exactly
67 miles per hour. And he has a bionic right
arm. But Johnson famously instituted a rule for
the writer's room. He said, they can jump up
two stories, but not three. They can jump down
three stories, but not four. He was just fiercely
protective of the show's physical logic. But
hold on. I need to push back on this a little
bit. You are building a massive television superhero.
The whole appeal is the fantasy of ultimate power.
Why neuter your own hero? What do you mean? Well,
because the bionics have massive liabilities
too. Extreme cold disables the mechanical parts.
In space, cosmic radiation causes them to severely
malfunction. Even his bionic eye is vulnerable
-like. If he's hit with an ultrasonic attack,
the eye causes massive dizziness and blindness.
If the government just spent $44 million rebuilding
me, I'd be pretty upset if I couldn't go outside
in a blizzard, you know? Why put such rigid caps
on his abilities? Because unlimited power destroys
narrative tension. If a character can do absolutely
anything, if he can effortlessly leap over a
10 -story building instead of struggling to clear
a two -story wall, or if he's completely immune
to the environment, then there are zero stakes.
You are just watching a god punch his way through
paper obstacles. Ah, the Superman problem. If
he's invincible, the writers have to invent kryptonite
every single week just to make the fight fair.
Exactly. Kenneth Johnson's two -story -is -not
-three rule is a master class in how you write
compelling science fiction. By defining exactly
what the bionics cannot do, it makes what they
can do feel earned. Right. When Austin succeeds,
he isn't just relying on his expensive hardware.
He is forced to use his human ingenuity and his
tactical training to overcome the limitations
of the machine. The boundaries are what make
the character interesting. And we really can't
discuss those bionic powers without talking about
how they were presented visually. I mean, the
legendary slow motion running. Oh, of course.
According to the sources, the public initially
dubbed this kung fu slow motion, but the actual
inspiration came from sports. The producers saw
how NFL films presented football highlights in
slow motion to emphasize the sheer power and
grace of the athletes. It was a brilliantly economical
visual shorthand. I mean, you have a limited
1970s television budget. You can't afford massive
visual effects to show a man running at 60 miles
per hour. No, not at all. So counterintuitively,
you slow the film down. It isolates the movement.
It forces the viewer to focus entirely on the
mechanical effort and the massive power being
exerted. And you pair that slow down visual with
the greatest sound effect in television history,
the dit dit dit dit. Yes. Which, interestingly
enough, wasn't even designed for Steve Austin's
bionics. The sound department originally created
that electronic pulsing noise for a robotic clone
in the fourth episode of season one. I didn't
know that. Yeah, but it worked so well it just
became the permanent auditory signature of the
bionic man. Well, because those physical rules
and that grounded presentation worked so flawlessly,
the universe inevitably had to expand. The concept
was simply too rich to be contained to one character.
Let's enter the bionic woman, Jamie Summers.
Played brilliantly by Lindsay Wagner. They introduce
her in a 1975 two -part episode. She's a professional
tennis player and an old flame of Steve Austin's.
But she suffers a catastrophic skydiving accident
when her parachute fails. So the government steps
in and gives her bionic parts too. But this is
where the show takes a massive risk. The initial
storyline they wrote for her is incredibly dark
for a primetime action show. Very dark. After
the surgery, her body medically rejects the bionic
hardware, and she dies. It is a brutal narrative
choice, but it completely aligns with their grounded,
realistic approach to science fiction. Organ
rejection is a very real, very dangerous medical
complication. Why wouldn't the body reject mechanical
parts? Exactly. But they underestimated their
own success. The character resonated so deeply
with viewers that the network was flooded with
angry letters. They simply couldn't leave her
dead. The fans basically demanded a resurrection.
So the following season, the writers miraculously
reveal that she didn't actually die. She was
saved by an experimental cryogenic procedure.
A classic sci -fi pivot. Right. So she survives.
She gets her own spinoff series, The Bionic Woman.
And suddenly we have an interconnected shared
television universe decades before Marvel made
that the standard Hollywood business model. The
longevity of these characters is staggering.
Even after both series were canceled in 1978,
the audience still wasn't done with them. They
reunited for three highly successful television
movies, The Return of the Six Million Dollar
Man and The Bionic Woman in 1987, then Bionic
Showdown in 1989. which introduced a brand new,
younger Bionic woman played by a largely unknown
actress named Sandra Bullock. Such a great piece
of trivia. Isn't it? And they finally concluded
the saga with Bionic Ever After in 1994, where
Steve and Jamie actually get married. But the
true test of this franchise's cultural weight
is what happened when modern Hollywood tried
to reboot it. The movie adaptation is a textbook
example of development hell. Every decade, someone
tries to revive it, and the pitches perfectly
reflect the shifting tones of Hollywood. Like,
in 1995, Kevin Smith writes a screenplay. It
goes nowhere. Right. By 2004, Jim Carrey pitches
a comedic take on the material. Which tells you
everything you need to know about the early 2000s.
They couldn't take the earnestness of the premise
seriously, so their instinct was to parody it.
I mean, imagine Jim Carrey doing the slow -mo
run. It would have been pure slapstick. But then,
starting around 2014, the pendulum swings back
the other way. Mark Wahlberg gets attached to
star in a dramatic... gritty adaptation and the
title of his project the six billion dollar man
inflation once again It is the perfect metaphor
for how blockbuster franchises have ballooned.
We go from six million to six billion, and Wahlberg
has been white -knuckling this project for a
decade. As recently as August 2024, he was still
giving interviews saying he is hopeful the film
will happen. It's wild. Why is it so impossible
for the biggest studios in the world to get this
character back on screen? Well, because they're
trying to strip mine the nostalgia without understanding
the context that made it work. It is incredibly
difficult to capture lightning in a bottle twice.
Very true. The original show hit a very specific
cultural sweet spot in the 1970s. You had the
post -Vietnam, post -Watergate cynicism, a deep
distrust of the government and the military industrial
complex. Right. But that was paired simultaneously
with the awe and optimism of the Apollo space
program. Steve Austin was the perfect avatar
for that moment. He represented the power of
the government, but he maintained his own stubborn,
independent moral compass against it. Modern
CGI heavy spectacles struggle to replicate that
level of earnest storytelling because our cultural
anxieties have fundamentally shifted. And speaking
of cultural anxieties, this brings us full circle
to where we started because the expansion of
this franchise wasn't just limited to spinoff
shows, Sandra Bullock cameos and failed Mark
Wahlberg movie pitches. The show bled into international
politics in ways that are genuinely hard to believe.
Oh, the global syndication of the six million
dollar man. arguably its most revealing legacy.
When you export a story this potent... other
cultures use it as a mirror. Which is exactly
how we end up in Brazil during a military dictatorship.
Like we discussed at the top of the dupe dive,
between 1964 and 1985 the Brazilian government
started subverting democracy. They stopped letting
citizens elect mayors and governors in key areas
and the president simply appointed them. And
the Brazilian people watching this American import
on their televisions looked at these installed
politicians and called them bionicos. Think about
what that means for a moment. Pop culture? provided
a shared subversive vocabulary. What is a cyborg
in the context of this show? It is a man who
has been rebuilt and heavily controlled by a
shadowy, well -funded government agency. He possesses
extraordinary power that is entirely artificial.
To the Brazilian public, that became the perfect,
undeniable metaphor for an unelected official.
They used the language of American science fiction
to safely critique government overreach. It's
a profound testament to how deeply the core themes
of the show resonated. But sometimes when Hollywood
exports a massive hit, the cultural translation
requires a much heavier hand. Take Israel, for
example. The network there realized they had
a massive problem with the title. They could
not broadcast a show called The Six Million Dollar
Man. They had to completely retitle it to The
Man Worth Millions. That was an absolute necessity.
You were talking about a post -World War II Jewish
state. The phrase 6 million inextricably evokes
the estimated number of Jewish victims of the
Holocaust. Exactly. The Israeli network wisely
understood that the profound cultural trauma
and weight attached to that specific number would
completely obliterate any attempt to enjoy a
piece of science fiction entertainment. You just
cannot decouple the phrase from the history.
It is a stark reminder that pop culture does
not exist in a vacuum. It crashes into local
reality. And sometimes that collision produces
pure absurdity. Because on the total opposite
end of the spectrum from heavy political metaphors
and historical trauma, you have Indonesia. This
is one of my favorite details. It's so good.
In 1981, a massively popular Indonesian sketch
comedy group called WarCop released a film called
Manusia, $6 .00000. It wasn't a subtle homage.
It was a direct, localized parody of the premise
used for pure slapstick comedy. Which just goes
to show how universally adaptable the core concept
was. The idea of a surgically enhanced, wildly
expensive human being wasn't just an American
fascination. It provided a flexible framework
for the entire globe. Right. Brazil used it for
political resistance, Israel adapted it around
historical grief, and Indonesia used it for sketch
comedy. Everyone found a different way to process
the idea of the cyborg. So we have traveled quite
a distance today. We started with a gritty hyper
violent novel about an assassin shooting poison
darts out of his hand. We sure did. We watched
that evolve into a family friendly television
staple bound by incredibly strict rules about
how high a hero is allowed to jump. And we saw
how those strict rules built a global cultural
touchstone that gave citizens a covert way to
mock a dictatorship. It really proves that the
six million dollar man was far more than just
a man in a tracksuit running in slow motion.
He was a true pioneer in televised science fiction.
And you really don't need to be a fan of 1970s
television to see its impact today. Every single
time you sit in a movie theater and watch a modern
superhero movie spend 20 minutes meticulously
establishing the strict rules and physical limitations
of a character's powers, you are seeing the DNA
of Kenneth Johnson's two stories, not three rule.
Absolutely. Every time you scroll through social
media and see a political meme using a blockbuster
movie to criticize a politician, you are seeing
the exact same cultural as the Brazilian citizens
calling their leaders bionicos. The playbook
was written 50 years ago. You know, the opening
narration of the show proudly declares, we have
the technology to make the world's first bionic
man. In the early 1970s, that was the height
of fantasy. But today, we actually do have that
technology. Yeah. We really do. We rely on life
saving pacemakers to regulate our hearts. We
have neural implants actively connecting human
brains directly to computers. We have incredibly
advanced motorized prosthetics that respond to
muscle impulses. The show treated the idea of
spending millions to rebuild a human body as
a wild science fiction premise. But today we
are constantly rebuilding, augmenting and upgrading
ourselves. So here is a question for you to think
about long after we sign off today. As our world
becomes increasingly integrated with the machinery
we At what point does the technology we rely
on stop being merely a tool and start becoming
a fundamental part of who we are? We can rebuild
him. It turns out they weren't just writing a
catchy opening line for Steve Austin. They were
making a prediction about all of us.