Well, I've basically chug-a-lugged the 18 episodes featured in the long-awaited Season 1 DVD release of the original Bionic Woman over the past week and I have to say one of my biggest concerns proved to be unfounded.
That concern was that "the memory cheats" and I'd find a show I loved when I was 7 or 8 years old, and had last seen anything of when I was in my early 20s, to be unwatchable in my early 40s.
Thankfully, I think BW stands the test of time very well. Forget the general sloppiness of the time: yes, you can see the stunt double's face more often than you might these days - though not as much as you'd expect. One episode shows Lindsay Wagner herself executing a very well done jump that involved her jumping down one storey and handing with only her knees bending slightly (read The Bionic Book by Herbie Pilato and you'll find out that trick is very hard to do). And both she and her stunt double could school people in how to run gracefully.
And yes, especially watching episodes back to back you start to recognize recycled footage, and even props. Or where they tried to crop a shot after the fact and the result was graininess personified.
Ignore all that. It was 1976. Deal.
What impressed me was the stuff I never noticed back when I was 7 and which makes the show really stand out in 2010. I'm going into some spoiler territory but 34 years later I assume the statute of limitations has expired.
First off was the realization that Jaime Sommers has serious mental and emotional problems. This isn't just 34-years-later speculation -- it's actually addressed directly in a throwaway line in one of the episodes: "Jaime's Mother", in which a friend of Jaime's remarks about her emotional problems - and it's not related to her "back from the dead" issues either. And you realize that, yes, she's got problems. By rights Oscar shouldn't be sending her out on any missions - she's neurotic, perpetually nervous, and at least in these early episodes she goes just plain weird whenever Steve Austin is mentioned in passing.
At the same time, she's also a smart-ass and this comes across many times when she really doesn't seem to be taking the missions seriously. This could be seen as a fault of the acting, until you get to "The Jailing of Jaime" and watch as her attitude bites her in the ass big time. The title of the episode sums up the results.
It doesn't drive the show by any means, but it really does add layers to the storytelling and characters that really stand up well in 2010 -- even without the presence of ongoing story arcs (though, really, if you count the original Six Million Dollar Man episodes, plus add in the first 3-4 episodes of the main series, it's a bit of a fallacy that BW had no arcing). And in my opinion, on more than a few occasions it actually comes into "electrifying" territory because you honestly don't know what she's going to do next. Sometimes that's clumsiness - she's also a very clumsy bionic woman, often breaking tables or losing her students' prize baseball by hitting it too hard with a bat - and sometimes it's honest unpredictability, such as when she suddenly decides to lock herself and a villain in a vault with an explosive in order to get some information from him -- only to discover she may not be powerful enough to open the door from the inside!
I noticed other things as well. Like the fact Oscar Goldman is utterly in love with Jaime and probably would have been fired today if he said and did some of the things he did back in 1976. Again, this isn't 34-year-later quarterbacking - Richard Anderson himself confirmed this in The Bionic Book and recent interviews, that he played the part as if Oscar were in love with Jaime, but in a tragic, unrequited way because he knew she was Steve's. I never caught onto any of this when I was 7. At 41, it makes a real difference.
Lindsay Wagner is fascinating to watch in these episodes. Aside from introducing the layers I just spoke about, you also see her gaining confidence in the action scenes, plus you can also trace her own behind-the-scenes dramas (after filming about 5 or 6 episodes she was nearly killed in a car crash, and while she recovered she was left with a scar on her upper lip that become quite noticeable in some episodes). There's also the bonus of hearing her perform one of the only versions of "Feelings" that doesn't make me break out in laughter or want to climb the walls. Unfortunately you do have to endure something like four or five runthroughs of Lee Majors' warbling "Sweet Jaime" which is effective the first time you hear it, but becomes annoying when it's used again and again. Even so, listen to the lyrics and you find they actually are a lot darker than you might remember.
Perfect season? Hardly. Some of the episodes fall kind of flat, such as one where she has to babysit a lion (no, seriously). And the schoolteacher angle gets old fairly quickly (though we get a great outing with Donald O'Connor before it wears out its welcome). But there are some "crowning moments of awesome" (to steal a phrase from the TV Tropes website) that reminded me why I became a bionic fan. In one episode Jaime outruns a race-car going 100 MPH (so much for 60). There's a cool ghost story-style episode near the end. And the inevitable beauty pageant episode is actually better than I remembered, and not just because we get to see Lindsay in a swimsuit (for one thing, my 7 year old brain never caught the line where Jaime moans that she wishes she had her old legs back because she liked how they looked better than her bionic ones).
And, of course, that brings me to the inevitable sexist statement - Lindsay Wagner was and remains just plain hot (the scar actually added to her appeal in a weird way, and despite being in her 60s now, she looks great in the recent interview). That's not enough to recommend the show by itself, but certainly there's a lot more as I've illustrated here.
What's great is the best episodes of BW are still to come on DVD: the woman vs. computer masterpiece Doomsday is Tomorrow, plus the episode for which Wagner won a Best Actress Emmy (imagine that), as well as the Kill Oscar trilogy (a 3-parter was unheard of in the 70s), and a fact I never knew until recently - because I don't remember ever seeing it- is that unlike SMDM which just petered out, and indeed most shows of the era, BW actually had a bona fide, the end, finale episode (and one heavily influenced by the Prisoner, too). So there's still stuff to look forward to.
Meanwhile, next up for me is the SMDM box set. I already know the original TV movie has held up very well over time, so Bigfoot and Death Probes notwithstanding I hope the old show holds up half as well as the first season of BW.
Alex
PS Officially Universal hasn't announced when or if Seasons 2 and 3 of BW will be coming out, but the scuttlebutt I've heard is early 2011 for both. We'll see.
That concern was that "the memory cheats" and I'd find a show I loved when I was 7 or 8 years old, and had last seen anything of when I was in my early 20s, to be unwatchable in my early 40s.
Thankfully, I think BW stands the test of time very well. Forget the general sloppiness of the time: yes, you can see the stunt double's face more often than you might these days - though not as much as you'd expect. One episode shows Lindsay Wagner herself executing a very well done jump that involved her jumping down one storey and handing with only her knees bending slightly (read The Bionic Book by Herbie Pilato and you'll find out that trick is very hard to do). And both she and her stunt double could school people in how to run gracefully.
And yes, especially watching episodes back to back you start to recognize recycled footage, and even props. Or where they tried to crop a shot after the fact and the result was graininess personified.
Ignore all that. It was 1976. Deal.
What impressed me was the stuff I never noticed back when I was 7 and which makes the show really stand out in 2010. I'm going into some spoiler territory but 34 years later I assume the statute of limitations has expired.
First off was the realization that Jaime Sommers has serious mental and emotional problems. This isn't just 34-years-later speculation -- it's actually addressed directly in a throwaway line in one of the episodes: "Jaime's Mother", in which a friend of Jaime's remarks about her emotional problems - and it's not related to her "back from the dead" issues either. And you realize that, yes, she's got problems. By rights Oscar shouldn't be sending her out on any missions - she's neurotic, perpetually nervous, and at least in these early episodes she goes just plain weird whenever Steve Austin is mentioned in passing.
At the same time, she's also a smart-ass and this comes across many times when she really doesn't seem to be taking the missions seriously. This could be seen as a fault of the acting, until you get to "The Jailing of Jaime" and watch as her attitude bites her in the ass big time. The title of the episode sums up the results.
It doesn't drive the show by any means, but it really does add layers to the storytelling and characters that really stand up well in 2010 -- even without the presence of ongoing story arcs (though, really, if you count the original Six Million Dollar Man episodes, plus add in the first 3-4 episodes of the main series, it's a bit of a fallacy that BW had no arcing). And in my opinion, on more than a few occasions it actually comes into "electrifying" territory because you honestly don't know what she's going to do next. Sometimes that's clumsiness - she's also a very clumsy bionic woman, often breaking tables or losing her students' prize baseball by hitting it too hard with a bat - and sometimes it's honest unpredictability, such as when she suddenly decides to lock herself and a villain in a vault with an explosive in order to get some information from him -- only to discover she may not be powerful enough to open the door from the inside!
I noticed other things as well. Like the fact Oscar Goldman is utterly in love with Jaime and probably would have been fired today if he said and did some of the things he did back in 1976. Again, this isn't 34-year-later quarterbacking - Richard Anderson himself confirmed this in The Bionic Book and recent interviews, that he played the part as if Oscar were in love with Jaime, but in a tragic, unrequited way because he knew she was Steve's. I never caught onto any of this when I was 7. At 41, it makes a real difference.
Lindsay Wagner is fascinating to watch in these episodes. Aside from introducing the layers I just spoke about, you also see her gaining confidence in the action scenes, plus you can also trace her own behind-the-scenes dramas (after filming about 5 or 6 episodes she was nearly killed in a car crash, and while she recovered she was left with a scar on her upper lip that become quite noticeable in some episodes). There's also the bonus of hearing her perform one of the only versions of "Feelings" that doesn't make me break out in laughter or want to climb the walls. Unfortunately you do have to endure something like four or five runthroughs of Lee Majors' warbling "Sweet Jaime" which is effective the first time you hear it, but becomes annoying when it's used again and again. Even so, listen to the lyrics and you find they actually are a lot darker than you might remember.
Perfect season? Hardly. Some of the episodes fall kind of flat, such as one where she has to babysit a lion (no, seriously). And the schoolteacher angle gets old fairly quickly (though we get a great outing with Donald O'Connor before it wears out its welcome). But there are some "crowning moments of awesome" (to steal a phrase from the TV Tropes website) that reminded me why I became a bionic fan. In one episode Jaime outruns a race-car going 100 MPH (so much for 60). There's a cool ghost story-style episode near the end. And the inevitable beauty pageant episode is actually better than I remembered, and not just because we get to see Lindsay in a swimsuit (for one thing, my 7 year old brain never caught the line where Jaime moans that she wishes she had her old legs back because she liked how they looked better than her bionic ones).
And, of course, that brings me to the inevitable sexist statement - Lindsay Wagner was and remains just plain hot (the scar actually added to her appeal in a weird way, and despite being in her 60s now, she looks great in the recent interview). That's not enough to recommend the show by itself, but certainly there's a lot more as I've illustrated here.
What's great is the best episodes of BW are still to come on DVD: the woman vs. computer masterpiece Doomsday is Tomorrow, plus the episode for which Wagner won a Best Actress Emmy (imagine that), as well as the Kill Oscar trilogy (a 3-parter was unheard of in the 70s), and a fact I never knew until recently - because I don't remember ever seeing it- is that unlike SMDM which just petered out, and indeed most shows of the era, BW actually had a bona fide, the end, finale episode (and one heavily influenced by the Prisoner, too). So there's still stuff to look forward to.
Meanwhile, next up for me is the SMDM box set. I already know the original TV movie has held up very well over time, so Bigfoot and Death Probes notwithstanding I hope the old show holds up half as well as the first season of BW.
Alex
PS Officially Universal hasn't announced when or if Seasons 2 and 3 of BW will be coming out, but the scuttlebutt I've heard is early 2011 for both. We'll see.
I always thought it was a bit of a running gag in fandom. Mind you nothing compares to some of the stunts (pun intended) that were pulled during the early years of Doctor Who when they "doubled" William Hartnell with a guy who looked nothing like him, yet was seen fully on screen the whole time!
