The Screening Room

This was 1987 baby! Sunny Crockett was doing things with pastels that are still illegal in some southern states and Phillip Michael Thomas was singlehandedly keeping the curl activator industry afloat.* Saturday morning was virtually the only place to find super-heroes and people were wearing Z. Cavaricci pants (ask your parents).

Sandra Bullock—Immortal?

1987 was also the year this gem hit television screens across America. Gone were the days of simple repetitive keyboard tones looped together in rapid succession to create that "bionic sound." There had been advancements, now bionics included a whooshing sound combined with slightly blurred time-lapsed images of our heroes. It was the Iron Age of special effects and Universal Television was pulling out all the stops.

To set the tone, Lee Majors participates in this film with his real-life son. His son—we'll call him Lee Minors—does not play his son in the movie though. Lee Minors ends up playing some sort of government guy whose primary role is exposition. Some other guy gets to play Steve Austin Jr.—we’ll call him Steve San Antonio. And let me tell you this guy's hair is mind-blowing. It should have received SAG membership for its performance. Feathered and lethal doesn't begin to describe it. The hair is high. The hair is thick. It’s the Janga of coiffures.

Anywhose, back to Ms. Bullock, paraplegic at the beginning of the movie. Frustrated, angry, and wanting to walk again, Sandy persuades Jamie Summers to enlist Oscar Goldman to convince Rudy Wells... Rudy Wells (whom I suspect was found living quietly in Argentina prior to his recruitment) and his team down in the lab went all out. They made Ms. Bullock faster than Jamie and stronger than Steve. The best part is that just below the surface of this bionicon, a rather intricate plot was woven because low and behold there is another bionic dude out there that no one knew about and to top it off he’s a traitor! You want to see Oscar Goldman go full Tinker-Tailor? This is his time to shine.

Goldman and Minors put together a plan. Minors was seen being blown up by Majors, Jaimie, Oscar, and the audience… blown up. The explosion took away the use of his legs and now he is the paraplegic and demanding the Rudy Special. Meanwhile Sandy is out there ruining all sorts of running shoes with her new abilities.

You see, the Cold War is in full swing and the biggest concern is "the Russians" stealing secrets and how to stay ahead of them. It was an overused theme reflecting the angst of the audience; I mean it literally kept the Bond franchise going for a decade or more.

The ethical questions abounded. Should we ('Murica) be turning out super-soldiers because we can? Do we share this tech with our allies? Is there a mole within the OSI (yeah the Venture Brothers straight up stole that)? And who gets this ridiculously expensive treatment? To answer that question, Sandy got it, and wow is she fast, possibly Barry Allen fast.

You may be wondering where all of this is leading. Here’s how everything gets wrapped up. Sandy goes under cover in the Unity games as a sprinter. This was before testing of athletes. It turns out that Minors was never paralyzed at all. He was just in that wheelchair as a distraction. Oscar gets kidnapped by who he thought was the Russians but it turns out it was the Russians in cahoots with the Director of the CIA who had whipped up their own bionic dude on the sly. Both sides wanted to the cold war to continue —job security.

All of the bad guys get killed, Goldman shot one and strangled the second, Sandy and Minors cooled the bionic guy by dropping him off the roof of a twelve story parking structure. Also, this whole time Majors has wanted to propose to Jamie but keeps getting interrupted so she saves him the trouble and asks him at the end.

Based on the cutting edge special effects in this movie I feel safe to say that Ms. Bullock was fast enough to reach light-speed, tap into the speed-force, achieve Doc Brown’s goal and go back in time. I assume she still does this on a regular basis in order to remain looking twenty-something.

Also, there was no mention of bionic Big Foot.

*One year later the entire Jerry-curl industrial complex was destroyed by the film Coming to America.