Now appearing on Peacock
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It looks great. Better than my dvds. They must have pulled them from the Blu-Rays
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I could watch for Colonel Austin’s wardrobe alone
Ok, but can you explain why portraying someone running in slow motion implies that they are running at 60mph?
Was it the first show to use that gimmick to show speed that way.
It’s just clever enough to fool 7 year olds. And I am testament that it worked.
So far as I can recall I haven’t seen the show since the 1970s, have you? I’m wondering how accurately we can piece together the opening from memory.
“Faber 1, Faber 1, she’s breaking up, she’s br----”
"Steve Austin, astronaut [?], a man barely alive. We can rebuild him, we have the technology. We can make him better than he was before. Better, faster, stronger… "
I think I’m missing a bit in the middle, and there was more, but I’m struggling now.
Cause when they crank the camera to show him faster it looks silly as hell.
Last episode I watched had Steve pushing Greg Morris in a wheelbarrow as fast as he could. It was a done as a long shot camera take and it looked like a Benny Hill skit.
Almost perfect, from my own memory:
Harve Bennett (Yes. The producer.) Steve Austin. Astronaut. A man barely alive.”
Oscar Goldman: “Gentlemen. We can rebuild him. We have the technology.We can make him better than he was. Better. Stronger. Faster.”
Buiuh bumm bummm bummmmm
They always used the slow-motion stuff when Steve Austin was doing something fast or mighty. My friends and I would swing some pole at someone else in slow-mo while voicing the “do-do-do-dooot” sound.
And when it was clear Steve was looking at something afar, that same sound effect would play, we’d get a close-up on his eye and then the bionic vision view.
I seem to recall there were two distinct sound effects - the doo-doo-doo for bionic vision, and wasn’t there a more clangy sound for feats of strength?
Wasn’t the voice over introduction a bit different for each episode?
He’s running so fast that they have to slow it down so you can see what he’s doing.
Initially (because I watched when it first came out) they sped him up doing things like running but it looked bad. Very bad. Comically bad. The slo-mo thing looked so much better.
Sometimes I think it would be nice to remake the show now, but then I realise that
- bionics are no longer science fiction
- super speed and super strength is just superhero stuff, and we’ve seen it all before
- they tried to remake The Bionic Woman already and really muffed it
- I don’t think there’s an audience for it
My quote from memory:
“Steve Austin, a man barely alive. We can rebuild him. We can make him better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster. We have the technology to make the World’s first bionic man.”
There’s also a different tone to the whole thing with prosthetics. 6MDM went to big efforts (due to low special effects budget) to emphasize how realistic the guy’s artificial bits looked and how secret everything had to be.
Now? Every day I go to work in summer you see at least a couple customers going through the store in shorts without a care in the world that everyone can see one (or both) of their legs are not original equipment, sometimes in wild colors or 3D printed “fairings”. One guy with a cochlear implant shaves his heard around it and got a mandala tattoo around the hookups, nope, not hiding that real-life bionic ear at all… there isn’t any social pressure to hide these things any more. My theory is that when they didn’t work well there was a focus on the cosmetic to try to make them at least look like the parts they replaced (although too often looking like dead replaced parts…) but now that they are actually functional there’s a a bit of showing off to be done. Also, media like Star Wars where you have people walking around with replacement parts have sort of changed the way these things are regarded, too.
So… when I see re-runs of 6MDM these days and it’s a “shhhh! Don’t tell anyone!” it is so weird and dated. But still fun in a retro way. But that’s the thing - it’s retro. It’s been done. People watch it when they want something old and familiar. When they watch something new they want something that hasn’t been done before.
In the one episode I remember, some evildoers convinced Steve that he had traveled years into the future. (The deception mostly involved isolating him and displaying a couple of fake calendars!)
Yes you’re right. As others have noted, the foley guys had quite a few sound effects
I don’t think it was a budget issue. It was part of the plot that he looked like an ordinary guy, but could do extraordinary things. It follows the original novel, where his body parts looked entirely natural.
True (and I actually have the original novel). But throughout the series there was an emphasis on not just “he looks ordinary but doesn’t extraordinary things” but also that everything was secret. Don’t want anyone to know he’s got fake limbs!
But also, the effects budget was limited compared to today’s TV shows, and what was possible at all was limited by technology. Nowadays we could actually hire an amputee who could run as fast as a non-amputee, look cool in slo-mo, and no one would care that he’s on blades instead of feet.
But he was also a secret government agent. They spent six million dollars making him super-strong and fast, you don’t spend that kind of money and then just blab to the Rooskies about how great he is!
I dunno - make the Rooskies think ALL of our super-secret agents are like that and scare the pants off them?
Next thing you know we’re in a literal (prosthetic) arms race…