Super Hero Shows

Okay, so we know that cop shows were cooler, with the exception of Hawaii Five-0, which had a great theme tune, but was essentially pants. But something else we had in the 70s was live-action superhero shows. Shows like Wonder Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Incredible Hulk and the short-lived SpiderMan series.

Wonder Woman
I may have been a little young to fully appreciate Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, but I remember being extremely confused by the show. Back then, British television (and US television, to be honest) didn't care much about running episodes in order. The problem was that it was really made up of two shows. The first was set during WW2, and Wonder Woman is fighting Nazis. The second is set in the 70s with Wonder Woman fighting terrorists and sinister rock stars and such. She had an invisible plane, which was technically useless, as it didn't make her invisible. So anyone looking up would see this woman in a spangly costume floating at high speed in a sitting position through the sky. Very silly. Very 70s. It does have the best theme tune of them all, though.



The Six Million Dollar Man
Also known as the Bionic Man. Steve Austin was my favorite, and I spent most of my childhood wishing I could get the action figure, with the bionic eye that you could look through and the arm that would open up to reveal his mechanical arm. It was possible to get the action figure for his boss, Oscar Goldman. But who the fuck would want that? IIRC, in the pilot, Steve Austin, once he gains his new powers, would run really fast, meaning they sped up the film of him running. I guess they realized that eventually he would have to run past something moving or people would catch on, because later in the series they switched to his more signature slow-mo running and jumping ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac moves. You just had to imagine that he was really going fast or jumping that high, or bending those bars. When you got the ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac-ac sound effect for his vision, though, it seemed a little silly. Totally jumped the shark when Bigfoot arrived, but I loved it when I was 6. We won't talk about the Bionic Woman, though - they gave her a Bionic Dog, and that was just stupid.



The Incredible Hulk
Sadder and more introspective than any of the other shows, Hulk wandered the wilderlands of central California doing odd jobs and trying not to get angry.




SpiderMan
This show is the strangest. Most people don't remember that there was a live action Spiderman before the Tobey Maguire version, they just remember the cartoon. In the UK, I even got to see the pilot at the theater, played as a movie. I went with a whole bunch of kids for someone's 6th birthday, and it was on a double-bill, believe it or not, with Breaking Away, which we'll get to later. It was your standard this-looks-stupid-now superhero fare, but it really did look like Spiderman was crawling up those skyscrapers. And that's because he was. Back in 2005, on a trip to California, I took a tandem hang-gliding jump. The crazy old guy who drove us up the mountain I was about to jump off was the guy you see in the Spidey suit climbing up the Empire State Building. Seriously, he did that. Fun Spidey Facts: Kim "Facts of Life" Fields' mom was in it.