Yes, yes I am of the Steve Austin generation. I can track back most of my fanboy-itude to seeing Star Wars in late 1977, but my sincere belief is that The Six Million Dollar Man paved the ground for my embracing Sci-Fi.
Yeah, sure, Star Trek was around. I know I had watched it, played with the toys (ahhh, Mego dolls), but it really didn't strike me hard until after Lucas' movie really opened up the outer space thing for me. Steve Austin, however, was a HUGE thing for me as a kid, the dolls, the View Master reels, running about in slow motion making that "dadadadadadadada" sound.
HUGE.
I rarely, if ever saw it in re-runs. A station in Colorado played it early in the afternoons (when I was still in class) during High School, and I think the Sci-Fi Channel ran it for a while. Never seemed to be on for very long however.
The show's been kept off DVD for many years because of some sort of legal entanglement. I bought a set of bootleg DVDs at SDCC in 2008. They were pretty damn poor, VHS recordings of some syndicated run of the show. It looked AWFUL, but I ate it up.
The show was, in fact vastly more cheesy than my childhood memories indicated, and Steve Austin was a Male Chauvinist Pig to the point of, at times, feeling almost misogynistic, but...I don't care. This is a show of my childhood, perhaps THE show, and I love it.
I still dream of a serious, spy-thriller styled, motion picture. I think this is the great untapped franchise you cold make something extremely exciting and fun from. It's gotten too close as a comedic, "aren't 70's fashions hilarious" bastardization. Do it straight, it'd be awesome.
Happy weekend, folks.
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