Remembering The Six Million Dollar Man

One of the ironies of there being a Fall Guy movie is that we had for so long heard about a movie based on Lee Major's other, more successful, TV series The Six Million Dollar Man being in the works--but as yet to no result.

That show was an adaptation of Martin Caidin's Cyborg novels--initially as a trio of made-for-TV movies, and then a weekly series that ran for 99 additional one-hour episodes over five seasons, while launching a successful spin-off in The Bionic Woman, both of which can be credited with lingering in pop cultural memory to a far greater degree than The Fall Guy did. (I remember how those reruns were a staple of what became the Syfy Channel back in the 1990s and early 2000s, and they still seem to get a fair amount of play on the classic TV-oriented broadcast and streaming channels, while The Bionic Woman got a short-lived remake on NBC starring Michelle Ryan in the lead back in '08.)

Of course, even if it was being talked about in Hollywood offices the idea only became increasingly implausible. The salability of classic TV show-based feature films has only declined since the '90s, for many reasons, while in this case even the title came to seem dated, not least due to inflation, above all in the medical realm. (The Social Security Part B premium was $6.30 back in 1973; it is $174.70 this year, a 28-fold surge over the last half century. And never mind that the New York Times will tell us "Don't worry. Be happy" regarding the skyrocketing of prices.) Given that no one is becoming a Steve Austin-type cyborg on the basis of six million dollars even the title of the show and its associated brand name recognition would have to be dispensed with--which is all that the kind of people who run the studios really care about in the end.