PODCAST 51 – SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN INTRO
Listen on ROUND THE ARCHIVES episode 51:
Being something of an artist myself, one of the things I most appreciate about watching television is the graphics that make up the title sequences to the shows, and so I thought it might be fun from time to time to do a little bit of deep analysis and dissect one or two of the more notable ones, and give us all the chance to appreciate the amount of effort and skill that goes into building these mini-masterpieces and make them into something memorable, or, at the very least, something familiar, and, perhaps something enticing enough to persuade us to keep watching.
Because there’s a huge leap from “Oh, this looks interesting!” to “I want to stay here and watch this!” which can, over time, transform into “Oh, this is cosy and familiar!” and yet sometimes the same thirty, forty, or fifty minute sequence does this for viewers, using exactly the same techniques that served both on-screen advertising and film trailers for decades.
The Simpsons has now played with those expectations for well over two decades by tampering with the established sequence on an almost weekly basis, and, in recent years, it’s almost become mandatory for some programmes to pretty much dispense with a title sequence altogether and just rattle on with the story and flash up a few captions and credits.
Shows like ELEMENTARY (for example) can still build exquisite sequences, but also offer up truncated versions for episodes where there’s just far too much going on.
However, in these rough and tumble times, it’s good that there is still a place for the good, old-fashioned title sequence that, in the case of certain “High-Concept” shows especially, is there to tell you just what the heck the show is all about.
And when the viewer is being bombarded by hundreds of channels, and thousands of advertising spots, pop-up captions, intrusive voiceovers, shrunken credits, and a whole host of other intrusions into the space the actual programmes get on the screen, building an attention-grabbing sequence that persuades you to stay tuned is one of television’s more subtle and finest arts.
One of the best-loved and perhaps most iconic pieces of film from American television in the 1970s was designed by Jack Cole, and begins with a blank black screen, backed by the throbbing tympanum that opens a theme composed by Oliver Nelson which somehow, at least at first, manages to mimic a heartbeat, which induces the same kind of anticipation as the drumbeats would at the start of Oliver Stone’s JFK nearly twenty years later, and I thought it might be fun to dissemble this minute and a half long piece of television gold from a show that so inspired and shaped a generation of young people like me from 1973 until its cancellation in 1978.
In the bottom left hand corner of the screen, a capital letter T appears in white sans-serif bold capitals, followed by an H and an E to spell out the word “THE” as an electronic trilling not unlike a trimphone is added to the incessant drumbeat, adding an urgent, computer-y hi-tech excitement to the soundtrack.
Mysterious flashing lights punch out of the darkness in the top half of the screen as, in a slightly larger font, the word “SIX” starts to appear letter by letter, accompanied by a heavily distorted voice bursting through as if via an intercom.
For years I’ve been unclear about what was being said here due to that distortion.
“TOSCA TO NASA ONE…?”
“TELL OSCAR TO NASA ONE…?”
But, such is the modern day miracle of the internet, that it’s all out there if you look for it and I’m convincingly informed that the line is:
“IT LOOKS GOOD AT NASA ONE!”
At the same moment, overlaid in a blood red tint, high-contrast footage of a radar screen appears, its scanner line sweeping around and around and around ceaselessly in a clockwise direction, as if driven by the same pounding rhythm, leaving the background images still visible through the shadowed area.
The background changes to a sweeping pan across the orange lights of a mysterious building lit up through a deep dark night as the next word placed on the same line as that SIX is finally spelt out: M I L L I O N and NASA ONE responds:
“ROGER!”
Now I don’t have to explain that this is a standard call sign do I? Nobody’s asking who the heck Roger is as they sit in their armchairs waiting for their programme to continue?
No?
Good.
Funny how certain phrases within our cultures need no explanation.
“B.C.S. ARM SWITCH IS ON…”
Well, I believe them.
And, as that panning shot continues we hear “OKAY VICTOR!” (here, I’m assuming, unlike Roger, someone WAS referring an actual “Victor”) as a third line of text appears D… O… L… L… A… R…
And the VHF radio communications continue over this:
“LIGHTING RODS ARE ARMED…”
Apparently… Though what exactly those might actually be I don’t know.
“SWITCH IS ON…”
“HERE COMES THE THROTTLE…”
“CIRCUIT BREAKERS IN…”
All of which is presumably spectacularly meaningless to the viewers at home, utterly irrelevant to any of the stories that the series will tell, but adds a vital and convincing enough verisimilitude to whatever it is that makes these grown-up science-y things seem almost hyper real, and left plenty of small children quoting these lines as if they knew exactly what was going on.
Incidentally, although it will reappear, the overlaid image of the radar screen vanishes before the same line of text continues and the final three letters of the last word M… A… N… appear to complete the title of the show…
THE
SIX MILLION
DOLLAR MAN
(In case you were still wondering).
A show that filled our evenings during the mid-1970s which was about the spy-fi adventures of a cybernetic human with incredible strength and speed built into his robotic solid state circuitry, a show that gripped us so much as schoolchildren that there had to be regular warnings for us not to try jumping off roofs whenever we went outside to play in super-dramatic slow motion, usually accompanied by the iconic DE-DE-DE-DE-DE-DE sound that tended to accompany this counter-intuitive yet surprisingly effective display of high speed.
After that line about the circuit breakers, the screen momentarily fills in totally black again as the experimental sleek silver delta-winged jet aircraft that our hero is test flying is released from the brackets attaching it to its support aircraft and this silver marvel, a technological glimpse of the exciting world of space exploration in those giddy days of the late 1960s and the early part of the 1970s, falls vertically away from us and we catch a glimpse of it in its full sunlight-catching glory, and, at the top of the picture, we momentarily see the ground so vertigo-inducingly very far, far below as we hear:
“WE HAVE SEPARATION…” accompanied by the Doppler roar of engines raising in pitch and almost drowning out that drum beat for a second.
This is, incidentally, all genuine film footage taken from the ill-fated flight of the M2-F2 lifting body which hit the ground doing about 250 mph on May the 10th 1967 with a certain Bruce Paterson at the controls. He, incidentally, survived the crash, and – as far as we know - never had to be rebuilt (despite eventually losing an eye due to the crash), but the footage certainly adds a dramatic real-world veracity to the stories being told.
With more than half of the screen still being filled with the downward pointing sight of that remarkable aircraft, the pulsing soundtrack clearly informs us that:
We do indeed have separation.
“INBOARD AND OUTBOARDS…”
And there is a hard cut to the face of our star, in extreme close-up, framed by a frame-filling space helmet of silver and white, and the deep, rich blackness of the inside of that helmet.
More lights and readouts and numbers are reflected in the glass of his helmet’s visor, but his face is nevertheless clearly visible, as is his name, carved out in capital letters of the same white starkness of that bold font that made up the title of the show.
Starring
LEE
MAJORS
The word “Starring” is the only use of Upper and lowercase text so far, and remains in the slightly smaller font size and screen position that the capital “THE” had in the main title.
LEE MAJORS. One of the iconic TV stars of the 1970s, once a co-star in the Western cowboy adventure and/or soap opera series THE BIG VALLEY, and later also famously successful all over again playing the lead in the Hollywood Stuntman-themed series THE FALL GUY. Genuinely, he was as big a name in 1970s TV as Burt Reynolds was in 1970s movies. A superstar! Articles in magazines were written, gossip was gossiped, celebrity weddings were wedded.
He was married, for a while, to another 1970s icon FARRAH FAWCETT and, whilst you may not appreciate this now, dear listener, he had probably one of the most recognisable faces on the planet.
This guy was HUGE, although he always looks particularly short whenever they stand him next to his co-star, Richard Anderson.
The continuation of that line “…ARE ON…” hides the jump cut, and at this point the random three-digit numbers start appearing, overlaid in red over the bottom right hand corner of the screen, and appearing to be made out of those valve-based number displays that computers were still using before LEDs came in, despite what the 1950s INDIANA JONES film might suggest. Think of the countdown timer in GOLDFINGER and you’ll have more idea of the sort of thing I mean.
The numbers seem meaningless “+922, +993, +512, +256, +000, -384, +000, +640, +255” but probably represent all of those various computer codes that were constantly being bandied about when viewers had been following the moon landing broadcasts during the previous three years.
The same shot continues as Lee reacts, blinks and looks down towards those numbers, and the soundtrack continues with one of those lines that schoolkids seemed to enjoy endlessly quoting – at least in our playground:
“I’M COMING FORWARD WITH THE SIDESTICK…”
Whatever that means.
Still, it IS exciting, though, and, as we cut away from our fearless hero to a red-tinted view of something highly engineered that possibly represents a pilot’s eye view from the cockpit from an eye about to be lost, the soundtrack develops an urgency as engines start to whine, raising in crescendo to a more alarming pitch, and the voices become more urgent as the:
“LOOKS GOOD!”
And the inevitable:
“UH! ROGER!”
Response swiftly changes to a more urgent:
“I’VE GOT A BLOW-OUT IN DAMPER THREE…”
As something terrible looking flares in our eyeline, and alarmingly the view vibrates a little, whilst the cold, inevitability of those three digits change from a swift “+000” to a “+256…”
We cut to a distant view of the stricken aircraft, spinning in a wild trajectory thanks to a much-damaged, muck-covered blue tinted piece of old NASA research film all framed within the round-cornered rectangle of a fake TV screen, as that blood-red radar screen returns – presumably to add some drama whilst disguising just how battered that footage truly was.
The numbers click incessantly, remorselessly, unemotionally, “-511, +761, +961, -961” sometimes hidden by the red of that radar screen whilst the engine whine gets higher and higher and sounds more and more alarming and urgent.
Another cut and the screen is now filled with that old cine film footage, the radar scope vanishing, the reflected cockpit lights returning, as we focus totally with the blue halo surrounding the tiny spinning silver dart plummeting aircraft as it points towards the bottom right of our screens and, presumably, that hard, hard ground that seemed so far, far away mere seconds ago.
Meanwhile a voice calmly intones:
“GET YOUR PITCH TO ZERO…”
…and the numbers keep on switching “-144, -256, -001, +000”
And our hero, with a slight edge of rising panic responds:
“PITCH IS OUT…”
Cutting to the face of our hero, as before, although he is moving about within the frame a little more now, and covered with that returning radar scope effect.
“+000, +752, -001, -136”
“I CAN’T HOLD ALTITUDE…”
And the repetitive whoop of a persistent alarm starts sounding in the background adding to the general air of urgency.
The calm, control room voice offers:
“CORRECTION, ALPHA HOLD IS OFF. TURN SELECTORS. EMERGENCY!”
And the camera cuts from the face of our stricken astronaut, leaving us with nothing but blackness, those reflected control board lights and numbers, and that inexorable radar-scope and the number, always the numbers.
“+000, +752, -001, -136, +508, +128…” Let’s be honest, those little red numbers keep on flashing up in seemingly random sequence in the same part of the screen throughout the rest of this, only vanishing when the final freeze-frame heaves into view.
And cuts, with the radar-scope overlay continuing to the series co-star, looking as concerned as he ought to be in this moment of great peril, with the actor’s name in the same font and layout as our main lead:
Also Starring
RICHARD
ANDERSON
Playing our hero’s boss, one Oscar Goldman, a role he would play in both this series and its spin-off THE BIONIC WOMAN a few years later, and beyond. Uniquely, I believe, perhaps both he and his later co-star Martin E Brooks, would ultimately end up playing the same character in two primetime series on different channels when one of the shows jumped networks towards its end.
As our hero begins to impart his famous not-to-be last words:
“FLIGHT CON, I CAN’T HOLD IT! SHE’S BREAKING UP! SHE’S BREAK…”
We cut back to his face, blurred by the vibrations within the cockpit, and we see a third – again blue-tinted - view from somewhere behind his head as a helmet-wearing figure in some kind of ejector seat smashes his head against the shattering glass of a cockpit, with the blazing brightness of the sky and the brutal inevitability of the approaching ground diagonally splicing the screen.
We cut back to that long lens blue-blurred view of the aircraft, the radar-scope blinks off again, returning almost immediately as we see that view of the back of the pilot’s head, and once again cutting to our hero’s face, still blurred, still struggling with the controls, the whine of those engines almost screaming, and an horrific cockpit’s eye view of the ground approaching at a terrifying rate, and a jump cut to that once real aircraft rolling and tumbling across our screen with the addition of some quite astonishingly effecting smashing and crunching and grinding noises of the sickening, horrific impact.
Somehow it’s both worse and better that we know that this was a genuine failure of a genuine test aircraft, and that the pilot actually walked away from the crash.
And so, the screen fades to white in that “about to meet your maker” way that movies have, but no! Instead it pulls away to reveal the surgical lights of an operating theatre, and a team of surgeons struggling, presumably, to save this young man’s life.
A voice booms from nowhere:
“STEVE AUSTIN. ASTRONAUT…”
And we jump cut to a close up of the head of our hero, whose name we now know, although he’s looking the worse for wear. He is unconscious, in a hospital bed, his head bandaged, and a tube up his nose.
He is, as the voice continues to inform us as the screen cuts away to black from this intrusive moment.
“…A MAN BARELY ALIVE!”
These words might be supposed to be stated by Dr Rudy Wells, the genius cyberneticist responsible for the enhancement of our hero, as played by two long lived actors, first Allan Oppenheimer, and later Martin E Brooks.
We see a close-up of a heart monitor, the bleeps and pings of which are now added to the sound mix, before cutting away as some blue computer screen-like text starts to type its way across a black screen before revealing the word ”CLASSIFIED” in bright red, rather unfriendly capital letters, which flash on and off a few times to remind us of this, and all accompanied by the kind of ticking noises to let you know they’re working hard that, thankfully, computers have got over making nowadays on the grounds that they’d be bloody annoying in an office or home setting, and still more technological bleeps and pings begin to tell us that we are in a world of very hard science indeed.
The text cuts to some state of the art animated graphics, a blue grid on a black background representing a human head, and overlaid with those persistent heartbeat pulses from that heart monitor, which, like those flashing red numbers, now remain persistently over the other images we see.
The head graphic zooms out to full screen, this time staying on screen for long enough for the diagram of a Bionic Eye to appear element by impressive element, unaccompanied on this occasion by yet more computer writing, and we cut to a fast zoom onto an X-Ray plate of a human skull, and we mix to a very impressive artificial eye clutched in the ungloved fingers of an unseen surgeon, which sparkles with a decidedly – and appropriately - artificial looking starburst effect to make it ping and gleam.
We cut to a blue grid representation of an arm, as the diagram of what we are about to learn from the voiceover is a “Bionic” Arm to accompany that presumably also “Bionic” eye, starts to build its way across the screen, and the computer text pops in in a manner that would have been almost unreadable to our own little eyes back in the day to explain just what this thing actually is.
This graphics sequence, with its pops and whistles of a specific rattling sound effect representing “computers” in general which would become increasingly familiar to viewers of American TV Sci-Fi, is also accompanied by a now iconic voiceover, as spoken by Oscar Goldman, a statement almost as famous in its way as the ones introducing THE TWILIGHT ZONE or STAR TREK in the previous decade.
This entire voiceover sequence starts, however, with the kind of everyday sexism that betrays the world as it simply was back then, and its assumption that everyone involved with this hugely expensive, top secret, presumably military, project would obviously be a man:
“GENTLEMEN, WE CAN REBUILD HIM…”
…a line which, again, might be one of few quotes that might be used to identify this specific decade in Western culture, unless you count the next one:
“WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY…”
…which might be even more iconic in retrospect, even with its underlying braggadocio of the mighty United States of America being Top Dog at doing that sort of thing back in those times.
Of course, all of the transistors, insulated wires and valves we get to see contained within the artificial body parts we are about to see do suggest a slight ignorance of the miniaturisation that was going on in Japan and other places around the world at this time, but the props do look impressive, even if we now understand just quite how impractical they might actually have been.
The picture cuts back to the lights burning as that surgical team are working on their work in progress as Oscar continues:
“WE HAVE THE CAPABILITY TO MAKE THE WORLD’S FIRST BIONIC MAN…”
A prop arm is passed between surgeons and across some x-ray plates showing a hand, and we cut to a close up of that very same arm lifting a stack of weights in a gymnasium.
“STEVE AUSTIN WILL BE THAT MAN…”
We return to more artificial computer graphic animations (which do remind me a lot of the sequences made for the BBC television version of THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by the way) to see the diagram of Steve’s artificial legs drawing themselves as Oscar assures us that he will be:
“BETTER THAN HE WAS BEFORE…”
Which is obviously open to some ethical debate… as we cut to a close-up on an electronic lower leg being worked on with a surgical clamp, cutting again to a wider shot showing us his foot and a lot of surgical instruments, and finally to those legs on a treadmill running as Oscar reassuringly continues:
“BETTER, STRONGER, FASTER”
And the theme tune starts to ramp up, and a rising tonal sound adds to the acceleration effect, and the heartbeat graphic overlaid changes to something far different, more hi-tech, and punchier looking, and which, like those ever changing little red numbers, will now hang about right until the final freeze-frame.
The treadmill legs moving impossibly fast cut to a side view of the face of our hero, Steve Austin, on the same treadmill, running in a blue tracksuit, with a computer sitting churning out presumably incredible printouts behind him, and a cut to a close-up of what is presumably a speedometer on the treadmill informs us that his speed is now an incredible 58… No… 59… No… 60 miles per hour.
We cut again to a wide shot of a presumably suitably impressed scientist watching four TV screens displaying Steve Austin doing some road work, now in his red track suit.
And, as we cut to a full screen version of the image that was on the top right screen, we see Steve running in the series trademarked slow-motion way, overlaid with moving trees shot from a moving vehicle and moving in the opposite direction, as the theme music soars ramped up to it’s fullest exhilarating mightiness, and we get a different view, now framed with that same round-cornered rectangle mask that earlier displayed the crashing aircraft, of “Real time Steve” running astonishingly fast in some speeded up film before we cut to that final freeze-frame title card of Steve Austin in his red track suit with the series title and a massive lens flare which remains one of the most familiar images in television history.
Not bad for a silly bit of sci-fi hokum from the 1970s.
That one minute and twenty-five seconds is just about as fabulous a sequence of editing and building excitement and there’s ever been, and is an object lesson in building a title sequence that has rarely – if ever – been matched in the several decades since it first appeared.
Its most famous variant, the one we’ve been examining today, was used from the second series onwards. The first season uses a slightly different voiceover, and that gets tweaked again later in the run, but this version, I believe, is the one most remembered by the generation that first saw it.
The main titles for the spin-off series THE BIONIC WOMAN played by the darling of my school year, the delightful Lindsay Wagner, used pretty much the same “accident, cyber graphics, exciting real world demonstrations of her new abilities” structure as the parent series, albeit filmed in a slightly more ‘romantic’ style to reflect her femininity or some such mid-1970s nonsense, but somehow fail to be anything like as iconic (although the blue grid representations of what was obviously the then still mysterious female form had a lot of my classmates paying very close attention indeed).
The reunion movies several years later failed almost completely to update the titles in any meaningful way and actually managed to be almost as ghastly as the original was wonderful but in a horrifically 1980s way.
Finally, we must give an honourable mention to the sub-James Bond style of the titles used on two of the three pilot movies that were produced before the first series, which use “exciting” scenes from the TV movies accompanied by a song sung by Dusty Springfield which deserves to be heard simply because it’s almost impossible to believe that these could ever have been considered appropriate for the series once you compare them with this most iconic of title sequences.
So there we are, the opening titles to THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN dissembled. I still think they’re superb and well worth a quick look next time you’re browsing the internet. If you do, usually you’ll be exposed to a whole host of other exciting and iconic title sequences from an era when they truly were works of art, and maybe, if you’ve enjoyed this one, I might come back and look at another one some time.
Take care.
Martin A W Holmes, July, 2020.
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