Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of The Bionic Woman

Lindsay Wagner and Lee Majors on The Six Million Dollar Man [Photo Credit: ABC Photo Archives-Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty]

Last May, I wrote a piece about the 50th Anniversary of the TV version of Wonder Woman.

This time around, it’s the 50th Anniversary of another 1970’s television icon:

The Bionic Woman.

The sci-fi series was created by Kenneth Johnson based on the 1972 novel Cyborg by Martin Caidin. The series starred former model and actress Lindsay Wagner, whose credits, at the time, included shows like Adam-12, Marcus Welby, MD and The Rockford Files as well as the box office movie The Paper Chase, as Jaime Sommers.

The character of Jaime Sommers was actually introduced in the other 1970’s sci-fi TV series The Six Million Dollar Man, which starred Lee Majors as Colonel Steve Austin, a former astronaut who was seriously injured in a NASA test flight crash. Austin only survived that horrible accident by being “rebuilt” with bionic implants that gave him superhuman strength, speed and vision.

Professional tennis player Jaime Sommers was the childhood sweetheart of Austin’s and when she was critically injured during a skydiving accident, she too was “rebuilt” with bionic implants in her right ear, her right arm and both of her legs, allowing her to jump great distances and run at speeds exceeding 60 miles per hour.

Just like Steve Austin who ended up employed as a secret agent by the fictional U.S. government office known as the Office of Scientific Intelligence (or OSI for short), Jaime was assigned to work as an occasional agent of the OSI while working as a teacher of middle and high school students in her “regular life.”

The Bionic Woman debuted on ABC on January 14, 1976 and its first season included 14 episodes. The show returned for a second season on ABC, which consisted of 22 episodes. The show then moved over to NBC for its third and final season, which also had 22 episodes. The final episode of The Bionic Woman aired on May 13, 1978. It should be noted that Wagner won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Dramatic Role in 1977, making her the first actor or actress to win for a science fiction series.

The series was very popular worldwide earning solid ratings in the United States and was especially popular in the United Kingdom, where it became the only sci-fi show to achieve the number 1 position in the ratings during the 20th century.

Nine years after the show went off the air, on May 17, 1987, a reunion movie entitled The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman aired on NBC, finding both Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner back in their original roles.

Two years later, on April 30, 1989, another NBC reunion movie entitled Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman aired on NBC with Majors and Wagner, once again, back as Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers. It should be noted that a young new actress was introduced in this made-for-TV movie whose character ended up being “rebuilt” with bionics. That young actress was none other than Sandra Bullock, a full five years before her big break in the box office blockbuster movie Speed.

You can see the promo for this movie, featuring a then completely unknown Sandra Bullock, below:

One final reunion movie remained for NBC, airing on November 29, 1994, entitled Bionic Ever After? which found both Jaime Sommers and Steve Austin suffering from a virus that made their bionics start to fail. It was also in this movie that the couple – Steve and Jaime – who had first become engaged 20 years earlier – finally got married.

In an interview with the folks at People (you can read the full article here) Wagner shared that she “was deeply involved in the storylines of her character, working closely with the show’s creator to ensure her character had depth and interesting storylines.”

If you are a fan of the show, you might want to check out Bionic 50, which is a “virtual event” offering never-before-released signed photos and signed printed copies of the show’s final episode script, “On The Run.”

This special site will also feature one-on-one video chats between Wagner and fans. There are four dates coming up for these special chats on February 14, February 15, February 21 and February 22.

Lindsay Wagner and Lee Majors at Central Carolina Comic Con [Photo Courtesy of mslindsaywagner at Instagram]

And, just last month, Wagner and Majors were reunited at the Central Carolina Comic Con at the South Carolina State Fairgrounds in Columbia, South Carolina.

Here is the original opening title sequence for The Bionic Woman: