A “Dashing” Profile of Super(Hero) Star Lee Majors

A “Bionic” Look Back

“The Six Million Dollar Man was one thing. But I wanted to keep my own parts.”

— Lee Majors

The TV superhero series was all but dead before Lee Majors reconstructed the genre as half-man/half-machine Steve Austin with expensive, government-funded superhuman “bionic” parts (right arm, two legs, left eye) as The Six Million Dollar Man. Based on the science fiction novel Cyborg by Martin Caidin, Six Mill (as it was known to those who worked on the show), like David Carradine’s Kung Fu series, began on ABC as a 1973 TV-movie, which spun into monthly ninety-minute installments (produced by Glen A. Larson), then weekly sixty-minute segments (supervised by Harve Bennett, who saved the original Star Trek feature film franchise). Originally airing from March 7, 1973, to March 6, 1978, Six Mill in turn not only inspired a weekly female edition of itself (starring Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Sommers, The Bionic Woman — who cost only five million dollars because her parts were smaller; and costarring Richard Anderson as Oscar Goldman, Steve and Jaime’s boss who appeared on both Man and Woman) but once ABC ignited its cybernetic craze, characters with other superpowers started surfacing on all the networks.