io9: lee majors

The 6 Million Dollar Man Peddles His Bionic Hearing Aid

Meredith Woerner — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:20:00 PST

Good God, we are getting old. Lee Majors is doing Bionic Hearing Aid commercials. Nothing is more depressing than listening to our favorite cyborg talk about "frustrating tiny batteries." [via David Indy]

Fear of a Chocolate Planet

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 23:23:26 PDT

In the lonely days after he'd packed in his bionics from Six Million Dollar Man, Lee Majors starred in a freaky flick called Agency. Released in 1980, after a decade of hallucinatory presidential shenanigans in the United States, the movie is about an evil advertising agency controlled by the U.S. government. Their nefarious plan? To plant subliminal political messages into television commercials for "chocolate planet," a new chocolate drink. Lee Majors is the creative director who starts to figure out that something is very wrong with the chocolate planet account, and in this scene he discovers the subliminal message that is going to be implanted in the ad.

Though ostensibly about this preposterous double-subliminal thing, where ads with subliminal messages to BUY BUY BUY are also filled with yet another layer of subliminal messages to VOTE VOTE VOTE, Agency is mainly a perfect time capsule of late-1970s culture. Everybody wears these insane floor-length fur coats and smokes. In this little bonus scene that I have for you below, from the establishing scenes at the beginning of the movie, we are treated to the "wackiness" that is the ad biz. Look, there's Lee with his fly down talking to a gay! And a kid smoking in the elevator! And a reference to pot! Crazy times, people, crazy times. If you need a dose of strange this weekend, I highly recommend Agency. It's just packed with goodness, including Robert Michum as the evil ad exec and a whole scene with Lee fighting some Hell's Angels. [Agency via IMDB]

Weirdest Method Of Space Travel Ever: An Astronaut-Drawn Coffin

Charlie Jane Anders — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:00:00 PDT

Barney Miller is trapped on a supersonic plane that's zoomed out of the Earth's atmosphere — and the only way back to Earth is inside an airtight coffin, carried to the space shuttle by two astronauts, in this awesome sequence from Starflight: The Plane That Couldn't Land. This is by far the trippiest sequence in the TV movie, which mostly involves Six Million Dollar Man actor Lee Majors trying to pilot the dead space-plane back to Earth, as his oxygen runs out. Good thing he's got his incredibly dorky lucky hat.

Must See: The Six Million Dollar Man

charliejane — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 22:55:13 PDT

Must-see TV shows are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale.

Title: The Six Million Dollar Man
Date: 1973-1978

Vitals: As the opening credits explain: "Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster."

Famous names: Lee Majors, Richard Anderson, Martin E. Brooks, Harve Bennett

Crunchy goodness: 2

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: Lindsay Wagner appeared in a series of episodes of season two as Jaime Sommers, who goes skydiving with Steve and becomes horribly injured. She gets her own bionic limbs and Steve decides to marry her, the only woman who can keep up with him. But then her body rejects her implants and she dies of a blood clot... only to come back to "life" shortly afterwards with no memory of her romance with Steve. Wagner went on to star in her own show, The Bionic Woman.

Change of pace: The show started as a series of TV movies, produced by Battlestar Galactica creator Glen A. Larson, which portrayed Steve as a snarky, reluctant superspy. But the actual series, produced by StarTrek II: Wrath Of Khan producer Bennett, was less James Bond-y and more friendly.

Memorable product tie-in: The classic Steve Austin action figure, wearing his red astronaut jumpsuit and featuring a big hole in the back of his head so you can look through his "bionic eye." The bionic right arm, controlled by a button in his back,could lift objects weighing up to two pounds.

The Six Million Dollar Man: Episode Guide