Everyone else reading this, you should check out Mr. Jahn's other novels, especially the Bill Donovan mysteries, which are great fun.

Thanks for those nice words about Steve Austin, Martin Caidin, and me. Those novelizations were my first published fiction, they launched my career, and 50 books later I still have a fond spot in my heart for them. Too bad when Universal asked me to choose between writing the books on "The Bionic Woman" or on "Switch" (a con-man series starring Eddie Albert and Robert Wagner), I chose the latter. I guess wrong that "Switch" would last, and I also was afraid that trying to keep track of male AND female bionic body parts would put me back in therapy.

Anyway, thanks!

Let me know if you trip over "Armada," a SF novel I published in 1980. Somebody is trying to develop it as a movie.

Mike Jahn

http://www.myspace.com/michael_jahn

It also should have been mentioned (by me first time around, too) that ABC cancelled WOMAN, but NBC picked it up, resulting in Richard Anderson playing Oscar Goldman regularly on two different networks simultaneously. BTW, are you certain that Darren McGavin's character in the SIX MIL TV-movie was Oliver Spencer, and not Oscar Goldman? I thought he was (you admit that Martin Balsam plays Dr. Rudy Wells, the same character that first Alan Oppenheimer and then Martin E. Brooks did in the series), and he certainly was O.G. in Caidin's novel where it all started.

Lindsay Wagner played both parts and she really did the hell of a job, especially in part two when Lisa is starting to unravel. It is one of my favorite 'evil twin' iterations ever. I occasionally wonder if Joss Whedon and the Buffy crew were influenced by it when they did their Buffy/Faith switch in the fourth season and Faith starts to think being Buffy is worth it in the second part of THAT episode.

The nerdy reason was in trying to restrict it to Kenneth Johnson originals as much as I could.

Ahhhh, that makes sense. I get it now. Good point.

First, SIX MIL, as Lee Majors himself abbreviated it, did not rotate with anything. It was the only recurring thing in what was called THE ABC SUSPENSE MOVIE, which had been developed as CRIME, but censors objected. Several of the features here WERE caper stories, but the retitling opened it up to other things too, such as HEAT WAVE, with Ben Murphy and Bonnie Bedalia as an expectant couple trying to get away from the oppressive titular situation.

Second, I have always felt that the introduction of "The Bionic Woman" was the bookmark for the end of the worthwhile era of SIX MIL. When it would come in syndicated reruns, I generally quit watching. Universal hit a big snag here, by the way. This two-parter was the last work Lindsay Wagner did under her contract with the studio, which was allowed to expire as soon as filming wrapped. As you say, Greg, the episode hit big, and they had to negotiate an entirely new deal with Wagner to bring Jaime back. She was well--paid from the outset. She also won an Emmy for the series, incidentally, putting the lie to the oft--made statement by STARLOG, who REALLY should have known better, that Mariette Hartley's win for the HULK ep. "Married" was the first non--technical Emmy to a SF program (to say nothing of Agnes Moorehead's win for her guest shot on THE WILD WILD WEST in the 60s!). Of course, in 1978, the same magazine published an interview with Veronica Cartwright conducted on the set of the first INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS remake about her experiences as a child actress on LOST IN SPACE, which actually featured HER SISTER ANGELA, NOT VERONICA! I can only hope that Veronica thought it was a funny joke not to tell the reporter that he had the wrong Cartwright, but somebody in the editorial offices should have caught it. They never published anything in their letter column pointing it out, and it is impossible to believe that they didn't receive anything.

Third, it may be even weirder than you think that Marvel put out a MAN FROM ATLANTIS comic. That Marvel/Universal/CBS deal that gave us the late 70s HULK, SPIDER--MAN, CAPTAIN AMERICA and DR. STRANGE TV versions involved at least two other characters who didn't get into production. As Brian Cronin covered in an early URBAN LEGENDS entry, HUMAN TORCH was one. Another was, depending on the source, either the then recently created SPIDER--WOMAN or SUB--MARINER. Reports of the latter claim that it was dropped because already on the air was...wait for it...MAN FROM ATLANTIS!

Finally, as for the new BIONIC WOMAN series, since Kenneth Johnson had a "Created by..." credit on the original (literally on-screen, I mean), I'm certain he has to get some money here.

Love the Kenneth Johnson proposed crossover you suggest, except for the part about Steve Austin being dead. That would be wack.

You know, what's making me nuts is I can't stop thinking about it. I keep toying with the idea and thinking of refinements for it. What if Shalon's people, you know, Stefanie Powers and the Bigfoot bunch -- what if THEIR planet was the one that Faye Grant and the resistance signaled at the end of the first V miniseries? What if the mountain hideaway was actually established as some sort of spy station as part of an ongoing war, a sort of beachhead Earth thing? Maybe BOTH sides need this planet for something or other....

What if the Tenctonese slave ship was on its way to the Visitors' homeworld when it crashed and that was the trigger event that actually brought Diana and the lizard people to this star system to begin with? That would make the Tenctonese refugees more dangerous to the Visitors than anyone else on earth, probably, because they would know more about them...having John's reptile face revealed on national TV, as the resistance did in the second miniseries, would have doubtless lit a fire among the Tenctonese LA refugees -- there would have been panic, rioting, when they realized the benevolent Visitors were actually the SAME slave masters they were escaping from...

...and so on. It's the classic definition of what Peter David called a Useless Story, because you can't ever do anything with it but you can't stop playing around with ideas for it either. I have this whole timeline worked out in my head now of how events would have had to play out on Earth-KJ in order for everything to come together -- THIS was when OSI first started experimenting with bionics, which means THIS has to be when David Banner was working on gamma research with Elaina Marks and Franklin was first putting together his fembot enclave and building his 'son,' which would make THIS when the Tenctonese ship crashed, and about seven years after that would have to be when the Visitors arrived. It's like the Wold Newton game. I can't help myself.

As for Steve being gone, I had two reasons -- one dramatic, one nerdy. The dramatic one was wanting a tragic motivation for Jaime (similar to Mina Harker's in the original LOEG; to properly echo Moore's original, the League should all be damaged goods, seeking redemption) and it seemed reasonable that a military man would have been one of the first wave of casualties. Same thinking was behind leaving out Matt Sykes and Sam Francisco.

The nerdy reason was in trying to restrict it to Kenneth Johnson originals as much as I could. Of course the Hulk screws that, but really Johnson's David Banner is miles away from the comics' Bruce Banner.

Oh well. It's all just daydreaming and goofing off anyway.

Now, at long last, I can prove I didn't imagine that dreadful bit of musical business!

"Oh, come on, Brock...sasquatch doesn't have anything you've never seen before..."

"Sasquatch IS something I've never seen before!!"

...I'll never look at The Six Million Dollar Man the same way again.

It's a pilot for a show that never happned written by the chap who used to write the comic 'Scud: The Disposable Assassin', and it's directed by Ben Stiller, and stars Jack Black as an astronaut who was exposed to rays that cooked his brain, and now he gets smarter when exposed to the sun, and also stars Owen Wilson as his talking bike.
It's a great send up of the old Hulk and Six Million Dollar Man shows, but it was made before any of the stars were famous.
They put it up on YouTube where it became a hit, and now there's a movie being planned.

Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lWgXDOAJ5s

It's all good fun, and the tone is almost perfect. The credit sequence is spot on and hilarious.

If you haven't seen it, I definetly reccomend giving it a look.