The Six Million Dollar Man (1973)

The Worst Film Ever

the audience applauded

Crappy film

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

I was 7 years old when i first saw "The Moon and the Desert" and i gotta tell you, i was marveling at all those fictional physical capabilities Col. Steve Austin were able to perform. I watch the series to the very last season and very last episode. I'm a fan of pilot episodes and "Made for Television" movies which of course is mainly produced as a test run for the possibilities of a series. My friends and i would play Steve Austin running slowly sown the block and we would add on "Barney" The Seven Million Dollar Man just in case we wanted to have fight scenes. But my greatest joy was on Christmas Day 1976 and what i saw under the Christmas tree was my very own Six Million Dollar man "action figure" with the red jumpsuit and the small magnifying hole in the back of the head Ha Ha I'm watching "The Moon and the Desert" right now on CoziTV 4/30/2014 and i'm somewhat focusing on actress Barbara Anderson solely because i'm noticing how beautiful she is, beautiful lips,eyes and hair Wow! Too bad she walked away from permanent work in Hollywood after 1975 because she may have been an excellent candidate for the role of Jaime Sommers of Bionic Woman fame. Seasons 1,2, & 3 are the best for me wasn;t crazy about Lee Majors growing a moustache. A very Iconic character with a very Iconic actor.

This is the pilot movie for what later became "The Six Million Dollar Man" TV series. In some ways it's quite a bit like the later series, but for the most part I found it quite different and pretty exciting--even when I see it today. I say that because I liked the movie and show when I was a kid--but I had no idea how well either would hold up decades later. Frankly, I am a lot pickier with what I watch now--and I was half expecting to hate it. However, the Martin Caidin story turned out to be pretty engaging.Now you need to understand up front that this film, like many pilots, is not exactly the show. A different guy plays the good doctor (Martin Balsam) and Steve Austin's boss (Darren McGavin) is VERY different--much more amoral and scheming compared to the relatively nice Richard Anderson from the show as 'Oscar Goldman'. I liked McGavin's character and wished they kept him for the show. The big similarity between the movie and show is that Steve Austin was played by the same guy in both--Lee Majors. Overall, this is a very interesting a well made TV movie. Part of it is that it relied less on action and more on characters. Plus, I liked how you did NOT see and hear the weird 'cyborg' effects--Austin just did cool things without the silly accompanying sounds. Worth seeing and clever.

Steve Austin is a rebellious NASA test-pilot who is critically injured in a horrific crash, losing both legs, his right arm and his left eye in the process. His doctor, with the backing of a mysterious government agent, uses experimental prosthetic surgery to give him new limbs and a new eye, which will give him superhuman strength and sight. The surgery is a success, but what does the government have planned for him ? This pilot TV-movie for one of the most successful US TV series of the seventies is a surprisingly low-key but intriguing story, with a great central idea. The rotten intelligence services want a super-agent, capable of incredible feats of strength and agility, who can infiltrate situations by stealth where a team of operatives could not. Their solution - take a man as good as dead and rebuild him as a cyborg; a bionic man with artificial limbs and senses infinitely more powerful than a normal man. Henri Simoun's script, based on a book by Martin Caidin, is really just a three-character play (Anderson, as a bit of totty, is pretty but unnecessary) between the unwilling roboman (Majors), his doctor (the always-reliable Balsam) and a control agent (McGavin), but it explores the Frankenstein theme with surprising subtlety and the relatively few action scenes are handled well. Also good, in the classic seventies style, is the depiction of government as ruthless strategists with limitless resources and no compassion - they see their creation not as a man, but as their product, which is only worth having if it is an asset to their operations. Perhaps a little too sober and ponderous at times, but a great story nonetheless.

The six million dollar man is one of the greatest series ever. I can't understand why it doesn't have a full troupe of fans like other series, because it unarguably deserves it. Its permanence during its 5 seasons proofs this. I remember watching the episodes during my childhood and being fascinated by this man with extraordinary force! I ask myself who can be emotionless enough not to be amazed by a man who can run at the speed of a car, or jump to/from a 5-story building! For those of you who haven't heard, TSMDM is about an astronaut and test pilot who crashes and has some of his lost limbs rebuilt using bionics: he gets kind of iron/electronic legs, a right arm, and a telescopic eye (which makes him capable of seeing with super zoom and also in the infrared portion of the spectrum). All these replacements contribute to make him "better than he was before: better... stronger... faster."Recently, when I realized that TSMDM was being showed again in the Sci-fi channel, I wondered myself if that mystic would still penetrate my mind, after 20 years. I've read many opinions that states that any movie was maybe Ok for its time, but bad or old fashioned nowadays. You can not consider art as if it were a technology: art is just timeless GOOD or BAD, and simply fulfills our expectations at certain moments or not, but are us who changes, not the art itself. The Six Million Dollar Man is the Good type, because besides the hero, it has good, interesting, and -most important- credible arguments (a point where "The Bionic Woman" lacks). I like specially the episodes involving robots, perhaps the toughest enemies that Steve Austin has to confront; the ones involving nuclear weapons are among the classics too; and the multipart episodes with The Bionic Woman are a great novel themselves.The acting is performed by Lee Majors as TSMDM and Richard Anderson as the everlasting Oscar Goldman. Maybe someday one of them enters the IMDB and, why not, they find themselves reading this comment; then the following words are for them: Thank you for stimulating my imagination yesterday and today, thank you for all the fun I feel when watching your adventures, and thank you for adding your little chunk of happiness to my life, contributing to make it better than already is.