Blonde Beauty Icon The Bionic Woman1970's TV was a good decade for female action heros....
Lindsay Wagner as The Bionic Woman was definitely the most respected. While other popular shows like
Charlie's Angels and
Wonder Woman were considered seXXXed up "Jiggle TV", Lindsay Wagner actually won an Emmy for Best Actress for her work on the show. Spun off from the popular
Six Million Dollar Man series in 1976, the show featured Jaime Sommers, a former tennis pro, school teacher and childhood sweetheart of Col. Steve Austin (The Bionic Man). When she's nearly killed in a skydiving accident, Steve convinces his boss at the Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI) to replace her damaged body parts with Bionic implants and recruit her as an operative. Jaime is rebuilt with two Bionic legs, capable of propelling her at speeds exceeding 60 mph, her right arm is replaced by a lifelike prosthetic capable of bending steel or throwing objects great distances, and the inner mechanism of her right ear is replaced by a Bionic device that gives her the ability to hear a mile away. Both shows used an unacceptable and excessive amount of slow-motion, for heightened dramatic effect of the action sequences. It looks totally hokey now....but it was VERY high tech at the time! Jaime fought a plethora of villans; terrorists, aliens, Bigfoot, evil twins, sentient computers, men in turtlenecks. Her main enemy on the series were the Fembots, powerful female androids who she fought on several occasions. The Fembots were later lampooned in the
Austin Powers film series...to much comedic effect. The show lasted 3 seasons before it was canceled in 1978. Who wants to put on a track suit and run in slow-mo with me?
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