The Six Million Dollar Man and the Gestalt of the Gerald Ford Years

I haven’t seen so much as a clip of the Six Million Dollar Man since the program actually aired in the 1970s. For all intents and purposes, Steve Austin has been living exclusively inside my head for the last 35 years. But the memory is a sharp one. I was a TV child and the Six Million Dollar Man was officially my favorite program during the 7 to 9 age bracket, when whatever your earholes and eyeballs glom onto gets etched into the wet cement of your brain pan and hardens into the long-term memory that stays with you forever.

“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.”

These words, set to the beat of Viking war drums, form part of the show’s intro, which still plays randomly from time to time in the surround-sound of my cranial jukebox. For 35 years I’ve been carrying this secret around with me, and I need to get it out in the open.

Turns out there are full episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man available for viewing on the Internet now. So, after a four-decade separation, I finally squared the circle and queued up one of my favorite episodes, “The Secret of Bigfoot (Part I).”

 

“Bigfoot” begins with the dramatic whirr of a chopper’s blades. Within moments it all comes rushing back to me, not just the Gerald Ford-era banter of Steve Austin and Oscar Goldman as they fly over the “San Madrian” Fault, but the whole gestalt of 1975-76 itself, of what a strange time it was to be alive and living in L.A.

Like the subconscious of the Manchurian Candidate being activated whenever the queen of diamonds is played, the moment I hear that chopper taking Steve and Oscar to their rendezvous with Bigfoot, my brain’s sleeper cells are switched on and I’m right back there in the third quarter of fiscal 1975, this time with the omniscient perspective of a boy from the futuristic year of 2012 AD.

“The Secret of Bigfoot” aired at the very end of the Vietnam era. By this time, choppers are not only synonymous with Southeast Asian jungle combat scenes, but also the harried evacuation of the US Embassy in Saigon that so embodied the unceremonious (some would say humiliating) retreat of a superpower back to where it came from.

And of course, right about then the same thunk-thunk-thunk of the chopper’s blades accompanied the visage of a disgraced President being whisked away from the White House lawn into a hasty exile.

Fall of Saigon, evacuation of US Embassy

Nixon bids his adieu.

By this time, the whirr of the chopper was also synonymous with our own post-apocalyptic urban condition: cops in hot pursuit of violent criminals, g-men engaged in surveillance and crowd control, news crews updating the citizenry on the myriad traffic jams and high-speed chases affecting the roadways.

The Seventies is when the ominous rumble of the chopper became ubiquitous, when the Vietnam War finally came home.

And to think, in the 1950s helicopters burst onto the scene with such utopian fanfare–a helicopter in every garage so dad could beat traffic on his commute. By the 70s, everything about the Fifties seemed impossibly naïve, but that’s a whole other subject.

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In “The Secret of Bigfoot,” Steve Austin and Oscar Goldman are on their way to help a team of researchers set up a state of the art earthquake monitoring system in the remote mountains on the other side of the “San Madrian Fault.”

Earthquakes loomed large in the 70s for some reason. Maybe it was because LA had kicked off the decade by recording the deadliest quake of its history on the morning of Feb. 9, 1971.

In 1965 it was the Watts Riots; in ’67 it was the acid-eating runaways on the Sunset Strip; in ’69 it was Manson; in ’71 the earthquake. And the even years were no picnic either. It all seemed to be part of LA’s descent into savagery and chaos, and by extension the end times of America’s so-called golden age.

A year before “Jaws” made us afraid to go in the water, a movie called “Earthquake” was the summer blockbuster that made everybody afraid that California was about to fall into the sea. The film was said to be based on the real-life 1971 L.A. temblor; it chronicles the struggle for survival of six ordinary people after a major quake destroys most of Los Angeles. Why not believe it? An earthquake was as likely an event as any to usher in the post-apocalyptic future that seemed inevitably headed L.A.’s way.

“The Secret of Bigfoot” episode of Six Million Dollar Man aired a little over a year after “Earthquake” the movie swept the nation, planting the fear of the fault-line into our hearts. So when Steve Austin and Oscar Goldman fly out to help with the seismic monitoring stations, we know the future of all Americans is at stake here.

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And of course, as the title postulates, this helicopter ride across the “San Madrian” is all leading up to Steve and Oscar’s imminent encounter with Bigfoot himself.

Bigfoot was another counterculture hero of the Seventies: a loner who wore his hair long and went underground, living off the land and staying one step ahead of the law. During those difficult Gerald Ford years of Mourning in America, Bigfoot was the anti-Nixon.

Steve and Oscar in the helicopter, surveying the San Madrian Faultline, unaware that they will soon encounter Bigfoot.

The Six Million Dollar Man was more than just the stylized choreography of a bionic action hero, more than just homo-erotic stump porn. The Six Million Dollar Man offered helicopters, earthquakes, and Bigfoot–the gestalt of American culture writ small for children to digest. That’s why we loved that show so much, it didn’t condescend; it spoke to us as people, not pupils.

The show was dark, with little time for cuteness or humor. It delved deeply into the paranormal, playing out against a stark backdrop of good versus evil. It was the closest thing we had to the X-Files in the 70s. Before Mulder and Scully there was Steve and Oscar, whose on-screen chemistry fell somewhere between that of Mulder & Scully and the two cops from Adam-12. The love between the two men was real; I can see that now.

I didn’t get more than a few minutes into the episode. I didn’t have to.  Everything I needed to see happened right there in the first sequence.

The End of the 80s As We Know It

Yeah, I hated high school, but so did a lot of people. What’s unique about me is that I also hated college. Not too many hate both, only a special few.

America and the artistic community love to root for the kid who can’t fit in at high school, but puts it all together at college. That’s the kind of story we like. Similarly, we can empathize with the kid who had it easy all through high school, but then has a hard time at college.

But to hate high school and then to hate college, that really means you hate something about yourself, or should.

Hey doc, do you have a couch I can lay back on?…Some ink blots I can stare at?….Thank you, that’s much better….

You know, all this talk takes me right back there, senior year of college, 1987-88. That was the year REM released “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”

I really thought REM would be megastars after that. But it didn’t happen until nearly four years later with the shiny happy people album.

Way back in 1987, when “It’s the End of the World” surfaced, MTV-nation was already signaling a new preference for a more sensitive, introspective brand of music, a shift away from soulless 80s neon towards what would become the “alternative” sound of the 90s.

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It was the end of the 80s as we knew it, and that felt fine. The new taste in music was already manifest with the 1987 breakout success of 10,000 Maniacs, and would continue in 1988 with Tracy Chapman, and 1989 with the Indigo Girls.

With the sudden fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and a raging Reagan hangover, “The End of the World As We Know It” seemed especially prescient, signaling that it was now okay for bands like They Might Be Giants to have mainstream success and for the 90s to begin in earnest.

And then there was that video.

I’m told that “End of the World” was one of REM’s first professionally produced music vids, but that the band still refused to lip-synch on camera as convention demanded. Instead, they opted for the kid with the skateboard tooling around inside the trashed house.

The kid with the skateboard

In the 90s, it was all about the kid with the skateboard: We fell in love again with slackers, heshers, and grungesters of all kinds; we looked to them for the answers after 80s culture crashed and burned.

Truth is, I’ve always been kind of disappointed with that kid on the skateboard. I expected that kid to do big things in the 90s. It seemed like all the stars were all lined up for him to cross a diamond with a pearl and turn it on the world, but instead he punted on third down.

He skated and moped and moved to Seattle, where he spent the rest of the decade staring down at his shoes and lining up the buttonholes of his lumberjack shirt until the Stiffler generation stepped in and took over.

The Before and After of Molly Webber: A Very Brady Makeover

Remember the Brady Bunch episode “My Fair Opponent,” in which Marcia takes pity on a plain girl in her class named Molly Webber, and ends up making Molly so popular that she winds up beating out Marcia herself for the honor of hosting Banquet Night and being escorted by an astronaut?

Well, forget about it now. The plot isn’t important here. What’s important is what passes for a plain Jane in 1972 and what passes for a “knockout,” in the words of Peter Brady.

Look at the before shots of Molly Webber on the left. She’s shy, sulky, shoe-gazing and librarian-haired. She wears foreign exchange student glasses and a Little House on the Prairie dress.

(image courtesy of verybradyblog.blogspot.com)

In short, she’s absolutely gorgeous.

Now look at her on the right. Those are the after shots. That’s what happens when you leave a 14-year old in charge of your makeover in 1972, even if that 14-year old is Marcia Brady.

You get bad makeup; you get clothing that is both dowdy and tacky,  and accentuates the barely budding curves of femininity in all the wrong ways (the girl equivalent of the ninth-grade starter moustache.)

Hairwise, they gave her “The Jan,” with those prominent curling-iron batwings that fall at eye level and serve to draw your attention in toward the powder-blue eye shadow and heavily applied rouge.

That episode was made 40 years ago!

Today we know better. Today we appreciate the old Molly Webber.

Nerds rule!

Vietnam Steps Into the Regal Beagle

Confession:  Three’s Company has never been must see TV for me. Unless I’m gawking at one of Mr. Furley’s denim ensembles, I rarely pay the show the attention that it deserves. But that all changed one recent Saturday while chasing my morning coffee with an episode called “Jack the Giant Killer,” enthralled by every minute of it.

From the get-go this is a compelling tale whose central scenes remain as clear to me today as they were when it first aired on Apr. 14, 1977. What I mostly remember is the sudden and unrelenting brutalism of the episode’s guest villain, a large, imposing yachtsman named Jeff, towards gentle Jack Tripper.

Before Jack even enters the scene, the surly seaman establishes his character by boastfully implicating himself as a date-rapist and attempted murderer (he threw a woman overboard because she wouldn’t put out). Even my housemate, who overheard the dialogue while working on her computer across the room, said “ewww” and turned around to see who exactly was uttering these crass lines.

When Jack steps in to protect Chrissy from surly Jeff and his groping paws, things go from bad to worse. If there’s one thing Jeff likes better than molesting women, it’s antagonizing less imposing men.

Considering the New Zoo Revue-like feel of a typical Three’s Company script, Jeff’s unbridled aggressiveness at the Regal Beagle is all the more disturbing. Even 35 years later I wince with sympathetic fear for Jack Tripper each time the bully enters the scene.

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The episode’s middle-eight takes place in Jack, Chrissy, and Janet’s apartment, where Jack chews the scenery, agonizing through various poses of self-loathing and self-pity, acting out his newfound emasculation in full-throated anguish for his two Playboy Bunny-esque housemates, who futilely try to mop up what’s left of his bludgeoned ego.

“Jack the Giant Killer” resolves in straightforward sitcom fashion. Jack returns with the girls to the Regal Beagle and loads up on liquid courage to confront Jeff, who enters the Beagle and heads straight for the bar. Janet sees him first and goes over to whisper something in his ear before Jack can do anything.

Before we have a chance to know what Janet says, Jack steps up and gives the bullying buccaneer a verbal keelhauling followed by eight long seconds of limp-wristed judo moves and high-pealed screeching. Jeff, who has been so confrontational throughout the show, now backs away apologetically after Jack berates him for being such an awful human being.

Surprised he didn’t get slugged, Jack asks Janet, “What did you say to him?”

“I told him you had a plate in your head from rescuing your entire platoon in Vietnam,” she chirped.

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Wha-wha-whaa??? I almost spit up my sanka when Janet said that. It’s the way she blurted the words so casually, flippantly even, that made me do a double take.

Vietnam was a taboo subject in mainstream Hollywood in the Seventies. You just didn’t hear it mentioned on the big or little screen until 1978, when a sudden spate of studio films about that war and its vets emerged (Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now), and the “Vietnam in Hollywood” era was launched. Nam acquired instant TV gravitas during this time. Mentioning a wounded vet’s combat experience was a subject reserved for Emmy-winning dramas, not farce.

In later years, you might expect the “watch out, he’s a psycho-Vietnam vet” gag to be played in an edgy Fox sitcom, but it seems way too dark (not to mention complicated) for the pratfall-based plotlines of Three’s Company.

So what’s going on here?

Either Three’s Company has addressed the condition of the Vietnam vet a full year before Coming Home and the Deer Hunter famously broke down that barrier, or the writers for the show where the kisses are hers and hers and his needed a way to wrap the scene fast and came up with the plate-in-the-head-from-Nam line as if it were just an innocuous  ‘you wouldn’t hit a guy with glasses, would you?’ gag.

I vote for the latter. The allusion to Jack taking shrapnel to the cranium to save his platoon was made in that simpler time, before the abovementioned films sensitized us towards the condition of the Vietnam vet. It’s still unclear whether Jeff the bully was supposed to have feared Jack as a lethal combat fighter or pitied him as a disabled war hero, but we’ll chalk that ambiguity up to mediocre writing.

This isn’t the only scene that is jarring to the modern psyche. There is also the episode’s very first shot, where Jeff establishes himself as a would-be date-rapist who throws women overboard when they spurn his advances.

“Jack the Giant Killer” is just the fourth Three’s Company episode ever produced, but it didn’t air until the fifth week of a six-week initial season. It was as if they knew this one had problems and were willfully holding it back as long as possible.

Either way, it’s an interesting pop culture footnote and a humble reminder that even something as empty-caloried and nougat-filled as Three’s Company can be mined for valuable nuggets of historical information.

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You Know You Grew Up in the Seventies If….

You think the Golden Rule is:

 

If it’s yellow let it mellow.

 

 

 

Neil Armstrong’s First Obituary

Considering it happened in the era of rotary phones and “dumb” cars that didn’t have power anything, the success of the 1969 moon landing is all the more remarkable. The only failure of the event was Neil Armstrong’s flubbed speech. It’s hard to screw up a one sentence statement, but he probably had other things on his mind at the time.

“One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” is how it should have read. Leaving out that “a” really messes up the context. As a kid, this statement, enshrined and immortalized throughout our culture, always confused me. It was meant to be self-evidently profound and pithy, but it didn’t even make sense!
In the 70s, the moon landings were just about the only success America had going for it, so perhaps no one, neither us school children nor the adults teaching us, wanted to call attention to the flaw in the statement.

Anyway, this is not Armstrong’s first obituary.

Nixon had this William Safire-crafted speech ready to go, just in case…

IN THE EVENT OF MOON DISASTER:

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.

These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.

These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.

They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.

In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man.

In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.

Others will follow and surely find their way home. Man’s search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.

For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.

PRIOR TO THE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT: The president should telephone each of the widows-to-be.

AFTER THE PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT, at the point when NASA ends communications with the men: A clergyman should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to “the deepest of the deep,” concluding with the Lord’s Prayer.

Movie review: The Van (1977)

 * * *

Year of Release: 1977

Length: 92 min.

Rating: R

Genre: Teensploitation, custom vans/vansploitation

Starring: Stuart Getz

You know Stuart Getz from his Brady Bunch appearance as Charley, the affable red-haired loser Marcia breaks a date with (“something suddenly came up”) when the captain of the football team asks her out the same night.  In the end, Charley gets the date with Marcia because, after she is nailed in the face by a football in the most graphically violent Brady Bunch footage of all time, the football captain gets one look at Marcia’s swollen nose and cancels their date on the spot, explaining that “something suddenly came up.” Unlike the jock, Charley is into all of Marcia, not just her nose. With her lesson learned and WASPy nose suddenly back to normal, Marcia lets Charley take her to the dance instead of the jock.

Brady Bunch episode #90 ends on a high note for Charley–he gets the sympathy date with Marcia and somehow breaks the jock’s nose. But you know how the real life episode ends:  For the rest of high school, Charley begs Marcia for dates and she always rejects him, while eventually getting violated regularly for a semester by the very same jock who dumped her when she was temporarily ugly.

Well, “The Van” picks up after Stuart Getz’ character graduates high school. He’s no longer Charley. In this one he’s Bobby, but he’s still the same red-haired loser who can’t get laid. He’s hoping that buying a custom van with his college savings will change all that.

Getz has next to no leading-man presence, for which he compensates by smiling way too much throughout his close-ups. You could almost hear the Swifty Lazar pep talk his agent gave him: “Kid, your smile is the best thing you got; no one can take that away from you. Just flash those Chiclets and make ’em forget you’re not Johnnie Whittaker. Let the van be the star of this show, baby. This picture’s going straight to drive-in!”

The acting is extremely minimalist in this low-budget comedy, and so is the script. Most of the money went into paying the actresses to do nude scenes–as required by the teensploitation genre. Another requirement is the frank portrayal of post-high school virginity, a role Stuart Getz excels in.

A lot of the actors and actresses look familiar from 70s TV bit parts, but with one notable exception they seem to quickly disappear from show business altogether after The Van. That exception is Danny DeVito, who plays a sleazy, confrontational bookie/car-wash boss in what amounts to the filmic debut of Louie DePalma a full year before Taxi.

DeVito aside, Swifty Lazar was right on. The van is the real star of this picture. The van is a Dodge Tradesman christened the “Straight Arrow.” The van has a waterbed and a mirror on the ceiling. The van eludes cops. The van has a toaster for the morning after.

Charley admiring the Straight Arrow

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There should be a special school of criticism for films based on novelty songs. Take a listen to Sammy Johns’ 1975 breakout AM-radio single, “The Van,” and you get a pretty good idea of how the eponymous movie plays out. Other than using a Dodge instead of a Chevy, the director-producer team of Sam Grossman and Paul Lewis do a praiseworthy job of staying true to Johns’ original vision.

The Van’s dialogue, acting, and cinematography are porno quality and there is a lot of on-site shooting in Agoura Hills and Malibu, including a real van show in a beach parking lot, all of which enhance the film’s value as a late 70s period piece.

The Straight Arrow arrives at the van show.

Charley and his girl enjoy 35¢ beers at the van show.

         

********SPOILER ALERT********

I’m gonna go straight to highlights here, including spoilers:

Bobby gets his custom van, the “Straight Arrow,” drives it home and shows off the waterbed to his mom, who becomes aroused. Dad says it’s obscene, and we’re not sure if he’s referring to the van, his wife’s arousal or both. Bobby sets out to conquer women, but mostly finds himself and the van chauffeuring his friends’ sexcapades and being challenged to street races by alpha-male van drivers who prowl the highways.

Bobby’s string of sexual failure includes the film’s best pick-up line, “You want to go outside and share a joint in the van?” This leads to attempted van rape, whereupon the girl flees and Bobby laughs it off as just another strike-out.

Sammy Johns songs are featured throughout the soundtrack, but it is near the hour mark before the title single, “The Van,” reprises, signaling that Bobby’s custom Dodge is about to work its magic and his luck is about to change. The prude girl Bobby’s been courting throughout the movie finally loosens up after taking some swigs off a wine bottle and meeting the beautiful people at a parking lot van show.

By the time this denouement is reached, Bobby has had other women and plenty of adventure, all thanks to the Straight Arrow. The only thing left at this point is for the van to be sacrificed and Bobby to walk away, which does happen in the movie’s exciting drag race finale. Ideally, the Straight Arrow would have gone up in flames instead of just being rolled into a ditch, but the dealership wanted the van back by Monday.

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The Straight Arrow about to get rolled.

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Watch this film if you enjoy:

• teensploitation, van-tasy
• custom cars
• 1970s location shooting in greater Los Angeles
• movies named after novelty songs

POSTSCRIPT:

The cruel and limited horizons defining the world of Bobby and his cohort make it seem like they’re stuck in the town from Children of the Corn, when in fact they’re in suburban L.A. Viewing movies from this era helps you realize just how empty even privileged teenage life was back then. There was no internet, no smart phones, no cable TV, and about twelve people on the planet had VCRs.

Interestingly, the years 1976-82, the golden era of teensploitation, also mark the low point of high school SAT scores. What period pieces like The Van unintentionally show us is just how bleak the prospects were for pre-1982 geeks and nerds, as compared to now. Until Jobs and Wozniak made geeks chic, they were outcasts with no redeeming role in the adult world besides nutty professors. Teenage nerds of the teensploitation era had little choice but to take their punches and try to emulate their dead-end, slightly cooler peers until the inner-geek was finally snuffed out.

70s eye candy

People patches, ceiling posters, black light zodiac

WARNING: Making out a check and sending it to this address may be hazardous to the time-space continuum.

Evil Twins, Rancheria Style

Dalai Lama

Hunter S. Thompson

Aware of the resemblance, Hunter S. Thompson once described himself as “the Dalai Lama’s evil twin.”

The Dalai Lama is older than HST by 2 years and 12 days.