A friend of mine recently told me their favorite TV show from childhood was Starsky and Hutch, and I remembered mine being (for early elementary school) The Six Million Dollar Man. I remember my favorite thing about it, besides the bionics and the ridiculous plotlines, with robot/bionic commie Bigfoot (Sasquatch), etc., was the fact that every episode basically began with Oscar Goldman giving Steve Austin a mission, which The Six Million Dollar Man would try to weasel his way out of, only to be shamed into accepting said mission by Oscar Goldman, usually with guilt-trips about how they saved his life, etc., with the bionics, they had spent a lot of tax-payer dollars on him (apparently six million of them, which was a lot back in the 1970s!), and they needed him to do something for them in return, etc. (He should have just questioned his manhood: that usually works on most guys! “Oh, even with six-million-dollars-worth of bionics, you’re still too much of a pussy to do this mission? I thought so! I tried to tell them not to waste their money, but did they listen to me? Oh, no! ‘Give me the bionics’, I said, ‘I’ll kick some ass for you, but this Steve Austin guy is just a pansy!’ That’s what I told them! Now do you want to prove me right, you panty-waist? I can’t wait to say ‘I told you so’ to strategic command: I’ll get a promotion, and they’ll all get fired! Then I’ll be in charge!” <That’s how they should have done it! But it was that general idea of shaming him into it that got him to do all the missions, usually, if memory serves.)
But there was a big problem with this scenario! This show always showed Steve Austin lifting huge boulders, trucks, etc., over his head and then throwing them at people or things, etc., and this is not likely to have happened. You see, he only had one bionic arm (!). So how does he lift great weights with super-human strength with both arms if he’s only got one bionic arm? Why didn’t they give him two bionic arms? (Or would that have cost too much? They were so much more responsible with deficit spending back then. Had it been W or Obama, he would have had twenty bionic arms, or they would have charged the taxpayers for twenty arms and only gotten one!)
But that wouldn’t even have solved this issue, because while he’s always lifting enormous weights over his head, he’s got just a normal, everyday torso under his bionic arm (!!). So wouldn’t it have squished under such intense pressures? Wouldn’t it have crushed his spine and smushed all his internal organs, which would have spurted out both sides of his torso in a rain of scarlet gore as the arms fell down to the tops of his bionic legs? I mean, that’s what really would have happened, right? At the very least he would have gotten lumbar disc injuries, etc., and it still wouldn’t have worked in the end.
So why not give him a stainless steel spine and two bionic arms, plus a bionic liver (so he could defeat commie agents in vodka-drinking contests!)? Wouldn’t that have been better? And not only must we live with the shame of the government screwing up Steve Austin’s design after wasting so much tax-payer money, and then covering it all up with a fictional television show to make it look like their design was a success after all, but this very TV show clearly demonstrated how the Ruskies kicked our butts in the bionic department! They made a fully bionic Bigfoot creature, which is more advanced than our bionic man! And to add insult to injury, they had the brainwave to make it a Bigfoot, so it would go unseen, and denied by the Amercian government even though it is real (!). Plus, since all the crackpots and tinfoil-hat loonies would be chasing after its every move, nobody would believe it even existed, and it could infiltrate everything with ease while having its existence continually denied as a hoax at every turn! Now that’s brilliant espionage!
Well, the Soviets always did beat us with the spying angle, didn’t they? (At least, it seems that way. But our spy stuff is still secret, I’ll bet, so it’s hard to tell for sure.) We’d develop it, and then they’d have it too, shortly afterwards, thanks to Communist moles. And that’s even how they got bionics, I heard, to make Sasquatch with! (Maybe Steve Austin was a double-agent to get revenge for his ruptured torso, plus all the shaming he got from Oscar Goldman?)
This is The Six Million Dollar Man, if you don’t know what I’m talking about:
