America’s love of gadgetry would naturally culminate in the man who becomes a gadget.
In 1972, only a dozen years after the term “cyborg” was coined, Martin Caiden wrote a novel by that name that combined science fiction with secret agent shenanigans.
Like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man and many others, Colonel Steve Austin required a horrific tragedy to aesthetically balance his superhuman status. So Caiden gave us a detailed account of how the mangled form of the astronaut, torn apart in an air crash, became a literal superspy. Caiden followed up with three sequels: Operation Nuke (1973), High Crystal (1974) and Cyborg IV (1975).
In the novel, Col. Austin ends up with tireless legs, a poison dart gun/battering ram for an arm and a sightless camera for an eye. A swiftly produced TV movie starring Lee Majors upped the ante in the direction of Superman.
And just as Superman was born from the social and economic anxieties of the Great Depression, the Six Million Dollar Man reflected a dominant force in postwar America: the technological focus of the military-industrial complex.
Humanoid robots, a rampaging Venus probe, an alien Bigfoot, another super-powered astronaut (played by William Shatner) and a Seven Million Dollar Man (played by Monte Markham) were among the menaces that threatened TV’s stalwart cyborg.
“The Six Million Dollar Man truly found its identity when Austin faced off against super-powered fantasy figures,” wrote John Kenneth Muir in his Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television. “As a spy, Steve was just so-so, but as a superhero he kicked ass.”
In addition to Caiden’s novels, six paperback novelizations were published about the series, and Charlton Comics featured the character in both a nine-issue comic book series and a seven-issue black-and-white magazine.
Like The Man from UNCLE a decade earlier, The Six Million Dollar Man inspired a distaff spin-off — The Bionic Woman (the producers thought it would be vulgar to stick a price tag on a woman).
