The third and final TV movie starring Lee Majors as the Six Million Dollar Man was called The Solid Gold Kidnapping and aired on Nov 17, 1973.
Like Bond movies and the previous TV movie, this movie begins with Austin on an assignment. He’s in Mexico rescuing a US Ambassador from some revolutionaries in the mountains. After Austin successfully resuces the Ambassador, we meet the sinister group known as “The Company”. It’s an organization similar to Bond’s SPECTRE. They, unfortunately, would make no more appearances outside of this movie. The Company kidnaps international negotiator William Henry Cameron and demands $1 billion for his return. OSI and Oscar team up Steve Austin with Dr Erica Bergner to rescue him. Dr Bergner’s specialty is the brain and she’s developed a procedure to transplant brain cells from one patient to another with the result being that the transplantee gains the transplanter’s memories. So Bergner takes the brain cells from a captured henchman of The Company and transplants them into her brain. She uses this henchman’s memories to help Steve find their headquarters.
Silly? Yes, it is. But they treat it fairly good in that she can’t just pluck whatever information she wants from the new memories. Her brain needs time to adjust and process the new information. She is constantly having random memories that aren’t her own and has to make sense of them before they mean anything. I sort of liked that even if I thought the procedure was a bit hokey.
Overall, however, this final TV movie wasn’t the greatest. I’m surprised that with the upcoming release of the first episode of the series, that these last two movies still hadn’t really nailed the “look and feel” of the series yet. They really aren’t my favorites. I’m also surprised that neither of these two TV movies adapted the second book in Caidin’s Cyborg series. Well, I am and am not surprised because that second book is not very good. It would have had to have been re-written. But the third book, High Crystal, was excellent, however it wasn’t released until the following year in 1974. But Caidin should have had most of the story, they could have used that. Interestingly, the early Mexico scenes of The Solid Gold Kidnapping do actually echo the setting of that third Cyborg book.
But I honestly can’t recommend these movies to anyone but hardcore bionic fans. We still don’t get any of the signature bionic sounds, so watching Steve do these feats with no audio cue is still a little weird.
Cavalcade of Awesome 