Bionic Nostalgia - Bigfoot

Much like the Bionic Woman episodes of "The Six Million Dollar Man," I don't think I had seen "The Secret of Bigfoot" since it originally aired back in 1976.  This two-part episode, at the height of Steve Austin's bionic popularity, hit on so many power spikes of pop culture at the time, making it classic 1970s television. 

For all of you fans of "Ancient Aliens" or the real Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell who don't know, that whole cycle of strange phenomena began back in the 1970s.  From Erich Von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods? to the movie documentary The Mysterious Monsters, it was all hot at that time.  The commercial for the latter, which featured a Bigfoot's arm crashing through a window to grab its victim was pulled from television by parents' groups for scaring young children. 



That one struck a chord close to home for me, living so close to the Pine Barrens.  We didn't believe in the Jersey Devil, but we also weren't stupid enough to go in the woods at night, or sit on the couch with a window behind it.  Bigfoot was hot, aliens were hot, and so were earthquakes after the big disaster film.  A pop culture fuse had been lit and the folks behind "The Six Million Dollar Man" were going to get on board. 

"The Secret of Bigfoot" two-parter had it all - two geologists investigating the San Andreas fault, an ancient alien base, and Bigfoot, played by Andre the Giant himself.  It could only get better as Steve went to save the couple, and came face to face with Bigfoot, or as the badly stereotyped Native Americans called it, Sasquatch.  Only the stereotypes that date these episodes mar it.  Watching it again on Esquire recently, I found my childhood again. 

We were a little under a year away from the wave of jiggle shows of which Lee Majors' wife Farrah Fawcett was a big part of, and I hadn't discovered girls yet, so watching Steve Austin trade blows with the Sasquatch was a dream come true.  There is a good and lengthy fight with voiceover narrative by the aliens watching, until Steve pulls off Bigfoot's arm. 

The aliens have been there in the mountain for generations, guarded by the robotic Sasquatch.  Filmed in weird soft focus, they dress in leisure jumpsuits and a young Stephanie Powers is very interested in what makes Steve tick.  Bigfoot, while having some very cool facial make-up has an even worse wardrobe problem as he looks as if he's wearing pilly wool dreadlocked brown pajamas.  Sasquatch makes friends with Steve, maybe just to get fashion tips.  Throw in a massive Cailfornian earthquake and a nuclear bomb, and you've got a nail-biter.

In the original two-parter we get a few cameos of Jaime Sommers, a reminder of how closely linked the two series were.  As with anything so popular in pop culture, the Sasquatch kept coming back, but not always played by Andre the Giant. Ted Cassidy filled in a few times, and not as satisfactorily in my expert opinion.

The last time we see the creature, it's in the season five episode titled appropriately and simply enough, "Bigfoot V."  There's been a Bigfoot sighting and everyone is after him - anthropologists, hunters, opportunists, Rudy Wells, and Steve Austin and the OSI.  Other than some silly talk about the difference between space Bigfoots and Earth Bigfoots, this is pretty pedestrian stuff for the show, which had become mostly for the kids by this time. 

Of course, the show had such an effect on our culture that when many people think of Bigfoot, they see in their minds Andre the Giant rather than the ape-like beast from the famous Patterson-Gimlin film, and that's saying something.

The Towns That Dreaded Sundown

Producer/director/actor Charles B. Pierce, perhaps best known for making Bigfoot famous in The Legend of Boggy Creek, took another 'true story' and mined it for this Sam Zarkoff American International movie that serves as the blueprint for the traditional slasher film. Written by Earl E. Smith, in 1976's The Town That Dreaded Sundown, we learn the tale of the Phantom Killer who terrorized young couples on lovers lanes in Texarkana in 1946.

The movie begins documentary style establishing the period, including narration by Vern Stierman who also did the job more than ably for Boggy Creek. His frequent voiceovers keep the film solidly in docudrama mode, which for the most part works.

Unlike the slasher flicks that would follow, this one views things from law enforcement as opposed to the kids. Veteran character actors Andrew Prine and Ben Johnson take point in the investigation with great chemistry, along with Bierce himself providing much needed comic relief as their sidekick. Also look for Dawn Wells, Mary Ann from "Gilligan's Island," late in the film.

The film looks very good, and the period is set well. I loved the music, the clothes, the cars, and even the language. Kudos go to Jaime Mendoza-Nava, an underrated composer of 1970s B-movies who deserves more credit than perhaps he's been given. He was good. The film gets all As for atmosphere. And it's not just a great period piece for the 1940s, but also 1970s cinema as well.

Stuntman and later stunt coordinator Bud Davis played the masked killer known as the Phantom. Except for the ridiculous trombone scene, he is actually pretty frightening. And his white bag mask conjures imagery of the Ku Klux Klan, which is scary enough, but notably it made me wonder what the movie was really about when I saw the video box before I ever saw it.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown was reimagined in 2014 by Ryan Murphy, the brains behind "Glee" and "Nip/Tuck," and his sometime collaborator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a big muckety-muck at Archie Comics, and whose credits also include The Stand comics for Marvel, HBO's "Big Love," and the 2013 remake of Carrie. It might seem like an odd fit, but it kinda works.

This is notably not a remake as much as it's a sequel, one in which the original movie is a movie based on the real events. Yeah, I know, it's a whole new level of meta. There are many

parallels, and the narration is a nice touch. With "Nip/Tuck" so many years ago, and more than a few seasons of "Glee" since then, it's easy to forget that Ryan Murphy has a very deft hand with suspense and horror.

Watching these two flicks back to back was an intense but entertaining evening of television, two generations of creators giving their take on a supposedly true story. They're both worth a look, more so for horror fans. And don't forget, it might have happened decades ago, but they never did catch the Phantom...

Bionic Nostalgia - The Bionic Woman

Esquire (formerly G4TV, which I wish they'd bring back) has been showing old reruns of "The Six Million Dollar Man," a show I loved as a kid, along with most of my generation probably. Recently I got a chance to see the two two-part episodes "The Bionic Woman" and "The Return of the Bionic Woman," the precursors and eventual backdoor pilot to the spin-off series with Lindsey Wagner - "The Bionic Woman." I don't think I've seen these since they aired in 1975.

Toward the end of the second season of "The Six Million Dollar Man," as it was enjoying amazing popularity, the showrunners decided to do something different, and not only give some much needed background on astronaut Steve Austin, but also introduce a new character that eventually would prove more popular than the bionic man himself, Jamie Sommers. We got to visit Steve's hometown and meet his parents as he was getting tired of the spy game and needed a break. While there, the other famous citizen of Ojai was also in town, tennis pro Jaime Sommers, played by Lindsay Wagner.

The two had enjoyed a relationship in their younger years, which they rekindled rather quickly within the space of one one-hour episode. So hot was this rekindling that Steve popped the question and the two were engaged. Then, when Jaime was nearly killed in a skydiving accident, Steve, who knows that bionics can save her, begs Oscar Goldman and Rudy Wells to do what they do so well. Soon, Jaime recovers with a bionic arm, two bionic legs, and a bionic ear - price tag classified.

Tragedy strikes when Jaime's body begins to reject the bionics, and she dies. This eleven year old remembers shedding a tear then. It was one of the saddest moments of the series so far, and for kids all over America when the bionic woman died. And to cap it off, the second episode even ended with Lee Majors singing the mournful "Sweet Jaime" song. The showrunners had created a monster, one that would not die - ratings were through the roof.

When "The Six Million Dollar Man" came back for its third season, it was with a much-anticipated two-parter called "The Return of the Bionic Woman." Jaime wasn't dead, but did die on the table the year before, but was saved by an 'experimental biochemical cryosurgery.' Neither Oscar nor Rudy told Steve until he came across her himself, but sadly she had no memory of what went before, no memory of a relationship with Steve. Talk about heartbreaking. Remembering her life before causes Jaime pain, so Steve stays away, letting her move on, so she won't be in pain. Wow.

From there, "The Bionic Woman" television series spins off on its own, running two seasons on ABC and a third on NBC, becoming a unique item in TV history - one of two shows on two different networks to share the same cast as Oscar and Rudy appeared on both. Often on "The Six Million Dollar Man," Oscar was shown as Steve's buddy, but at this point, even as a child I realized he really wasn't. This was a business arrangement. Oscar was Steve and Jaime's boss, but he was friend to neither. Friends don't keep secrets like that.

Jaime abandoned the tennis pro career and settled in Ojai as a teacher. One of her kids was even Oliver from "The Brady Bunch!" From this home base she went on missions for the OSI. She would fight the Fembots, female robots from the mad scientist who sicced John Saxon on Steve Austin in his first season. And at NBC, she would gain a canine comrade in Max the Bionic Dog. One of her most dangerous missions was against a sentient doomsday machine whose inspiration was obviously Hal from 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Occasionally Steve and Jaime would cross paths with comic book-like crossover events, where part one would be on one show and part two on the other - making syndication very difficult. One such occasion dealt with the return of Bigfoot and another when Oscar had been kidnapped. Although both series were canceled in 1978, "The Bionic Woman" had proved more popular than the series she spun off from.

Three reunion movies aired years after the shows ended, as always with series in mind, but nothing ever came of it. A few years back in 2007 Kenneth Johnson tried to reboot "The Bionic Woman" for NBC with a grittier, darker version. It lasted eight episodes. More to come.

Bionic Nostalgia - The Six Million Dollar Man

Esquire TV (formerly the much missed G4 channel) has been showing old reruns of "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Bionic Woman," shows that while I haven't seen since the 1970s, were huge parts of my childhood, like Evel Knievel, Planet of the Apes, or SSP Racers.

Begun as three made for TV movies of the week, "The Six Million Dollar Man" was very loosely based on the book Cyborg by Martin Caidin. The book and its three sequels were much more serious, adult, and more science fiction-oriented. Much had been changed, but when I read the book sometime in the mid-seventies as a pre-teen I still enjoyed it. The telemovies were wildly successful leading almost immediately into the TV series, which ran for five years, with one spin-off, "The Bionic Woman," and at least three other attempted spin-offs. There were toys, lunchboxes, and all the other paraphernalia one might expect a phenomenon.

The premise was pretty simple. Lee Majors played Colonel Steve Austin, an astronaut and test pilot who was involved in a body crushing accident that left him without the use of an eye, an arm and both legs. Secret government organization OSI offered to rebuild him, "make him better than he was before," with bionics. Now, it's real and is something that happens (although sans super strength and telescopic vision), but then this kind of technology was pure science fiction. In exchange for saving his life, Steve agrees to go on missions for the ominous Office of Scientific Intelligence. It was average spy fare for the most part, and invariably you waited through the boring stuff to see Austin kick some butt at the end, just like "Kung Fu."

Looking back, I remember Kenneth Johnson's ("Incredible Hulk," "V," "Alien Nation") name on the series, but I had forgotten that Glen A. Larsen ("Battlestar Galactica") and Harve Bennett (responsible for the best of the "Star Trek" films Wrath of Khan) were involved as well. The show had a very small cast, usually only Majors, Richard Anderson as Oscar Goldman, sometimes Dr. Rudy Wells (played by various actors), and dozens of nameless bad guys who Austin would throw around during fight scenes. Yep, keep it simple.

In hindsight, it is only just okay television, with only the big event episodes standing out. When Steve faced the Robot, played by John Saxon, made by the scientist who would later create the Fembots who pestered the Bionic Woman, was one big event. Or when it was discovered there was another bionic man, a Seven Million Dollar Man, who turned out to be not just a jerk, but later a criminal. Or, at the height of 1970s Bigfoot and Alien fever, the appearance of Sasquatch, played by wrestler Andre the Giant, and later Ted Cassidy. There was even a renegade Venus Probe that fought our hero more than once.

The Robot (weirdly called Maskatron), Sasquatch, and the Venus Probe from above all got action figures in the playsets, it should be noted. Both the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman had action figures from Kenner. There also had the Fembots, Oscar Goldman, vehicles, and lots of mission or fashion outfits. Like Evel Knievel, these were toys that kids of a certain age had to have. I never did though. Evel was my jam.

The episodes I've seen on Esquire are, as I said, only ordinary, but full of nostalgia. I remember "The Six Million Dollar Man" fondly though, despite the season Majors sported a bad mustache. It was the first thing I watched on my first TV, a tiny black and white set, and watching the show that Sunday night was just the best. Simple things are good. More to come.

This Week's All Things Fun! New Comics Vidcast

The All Things Fun! New Comics Vidcast is shot live every week at All Things Fun! - the area's best comics and gaming store, located in West Berlin, NJ.

Co-hosts Ed (X-Men) Evans, Allison (Two Marvel Girl) Eckel and Glenn (Bazongas) Walker discuss the new comics out this week in wicked high definition video, and also available on the YouTube. See it here!

Discussion featured in this week's Special Dinner and Bazongas Episode includes: Green Lantern New Guardians #12, Batman Inc. #3, All-Star Western #12, Firestorm #12, The Flash #12, Voodoo #12, Before Watchmen Dr. Manhattan #1, Amazing Spider-Man #692, Invincible Iron Man #523, Punisher comics, Cap and Namor vs. Nazis, Archie marries Wolverine, Brilliant #4, Star Trek #12, Bionic Man #12, Archie #636, America's Got Powers #3, Ed's trades, and Doctor Who accessories.


This week our special kids segment returns, featuring Thomas giving us the ten year old's perspective. The discussion included: Adventure Time #7, Marvel Universe Ultimate Spider-Man #5, Super Dinosaur #13, the Batman Brave and the Bold trade, the TARDIS lunchbox, and other fun stuff.


Be sure to check out the brand spankin' new All Things Fun! website, and the All Things Fun! Blogs, by Allison and Glenn, and ATF! on YouTube (don't forget to subscribe to the channel while you're there!).

And be back here every Wednesday (or Tuesdays at midnight) to watch the new broadcast, and thereafter throughout the week!

Remember, kids, you can't copyright evil.