The Six Million Dollar Man 1.2 – Survival of the Fittest

I don’t want to watch all of the Bionic shows – we’d be here for years! – but I wanted to show my son some of the classic episodes, and that meant picking up some low-priced sets of the series, and so we might as well look at a few other installments, principally the ones with interesting casts. So about eighteen months ago, I had a careful look over an episode guide – yes, eighteen months ago, I enjoy planning ahead – and picked five of the first thirteen episodes.

But as it was so long ago, I didn’t remember who was in these episodes that made me want to pick them! So in this story, written by Mann Rubin, in which our heroes and some other survivors of a plane crash are being stalked on a Pacific island by villains who want to kill Oscar Goldman, we got to see Laurette Spang, who we’ve seen in a later episode of Isis, along with Christine Belford, who would play Baroness Von Gunther in the first episode of Wonder Woman, as a nurse.

Our son didn’t remember either of them, but what he did recall pleasantly surprised us. Among the cosmetic changes that the show’s new executive producer, Harve Bennett, initiated when he took the show from movie-of-the-month to a weekly series, there’s the iconic “running in slow motion” to indicate super speed. Steve shows off this power when one of the villains coshes Oscar and leaves him unconscious with a huge snake bearing down on him. Steve slow-motion-rushes to save the day, and our son said “Hey! He runs slow like they did in that Bigfoot show!” I’m glad that he remembered that. It bodes well.

The other cast reasons I probably picked this episode out for a watch: James McEachin, whose Universal series Tenafly had just been axed by NBC, plays one of the villains, and Jo Anne Worley, who was spending her post-Laugh-In days appearing as a guest star on everything, is the comic relief character. It’s not a bad story. Our son enjoyed it and was able to follow along, and it has a few pretty good action scenes.