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I was having a discussion with Jason the other night while he brushed his teeth and got ready for bed.  He noted that the North and South Poles of Earth have actual magnetic properties.  I mentioned that the Earth’s magnetic field is generated by its molten core, and that it’s existence is probably what keeps our atmosphere from being ripped away by solar winds.  In fact, some experts believe that when the core of Mars cooled, its magnetic field disappeared, causing a loss of atmosphere in just this way.

As I tucked him into bed, Jason said, “Solar winds would blow our house away easily, then.”  I asked, “You think so?” and he answered, “Yes, because scientists estimate the weight of the atmosphere is 5,630 trillion tons, so if solar winds blew that away, they’d blow our house like a quadrillion miles into the Universe”

“You’re probably right,” I conceded, and said goodnight.  And that’s why I’m giving up trying to impress my 7-year-old with science trivia.

Wow, even for a guy who runs in slow motion, this has been a long time coming.

For about as long as we’ve had DVDs and the internet, I’ve been haunting the “TV Shows on DVD” website, hoping to see news that The Six Million Dollar Man would soon be available for home viewing.  Alas, for all those years the rights were entangled in a hopeless muddle over who owned what.  Some studio or other bought the rights to Martin Caidin’s original “Cyborg” novel and with it characters Steve Austin, Oscar Goldman and Rudy Wells, and certain other key concepts, the aim being to do a big-screen remake…which never materialized.   The Bionic Woman faced similar issues, but since Jaime Sommers was created for TV (and not by Caidin), they were able to use her name and the show title to do NBC’s ill-fated (and frankly awful) remake in 2008, though it meant changing the whole definition of “bionic” to do it (”Bionic” now meaning “as much like Jennifer Garner in ‘Alias’ as legally possible.)

So anyway today I’m doing one of my periodic checks of old bookmarks, trying to weed out the ones I don’t need, and what do I find at tvshowsondvd but a headline saying that yes, SMDM (and the Bionic Woman, but who cares?) are being prepped for DVD, those thorny legal issues having been finally resolved (probably due to a studio collapse…finally something to thank the recession for!).

With any luck, by Christmas or sometime early next year, I’ll be able to share this show with my boys so they can finally see what their old man’s been prattling on about.  (And let’s face it, we’ve got a narrow window, here; if they get much past 7 years old, it probably won’t impress them much.)  If I can spot them out in the backyard even once, staging a battle in slow-mo and going “Chh-chh-chh-chh-chhhh…” it will have been worth the wait.

And what the heck, if Grace feels left out, I can always bring home The Bionic Woman.

Scott recently told Mommy he’d like to change his name to Big Boy.  “Big Boy William Morefield?” she asked, trying it out.  “No,” he explained, “I need a new middle name, too.”

And that would be?

“How.”

“HOW?, so Big Boy HOW Morefield?”

“No, I’m also changing my last name.  To ‘Glorious’.”

At least we don’t have to worry about self-esteem issues with that kid.

April’s here and with it comes terrific weather.  Today we’ve got clear skies and temps in the 70s, with 80s expected tomorrow and Saturday.  Flowers are blooming, leaves are budding and birds are singing.  Nice to break out of the winter doldrums at last.

I was upset this week to learn of the death of Robert Culp, one of my favorite TV actors.  I probably first encountered him on “Columbo,” being one of a handful of actors whose strong performances kept him coming back again and again to match wits with Peter Falk as a series of brilliant — but ultimately overconfident — killers.

It wasn’t until “The Greatest American Hero,” however, that I became a fan, thanks to Culp’s terrific turn as FBI agent Bill Maxwell, the crusty, Conservative, Commie-hating  crimebuster who took schoolteacher Ralph Hinkley under his wing and tried to turn him into his own secret weapon against the underworld.  With his cocky swagger and biting sarcasm, Maxwell seemed to reflect Culp’s own persona to a degree, and he quickly evolved into one of those supporting characters who ends up stealing the show.  Later I made it a point to seek out “I Spy,” the show he’ll probably be best remembered for thanks to its cultural significance in the context of race relations (okay, and for being a good show).

Anyway, Culp’s death comes just a week or so after that of Peter Graves, who I grew up watching on “Mission: Impossible” as the unflappable “born leader” prototype Jim Phelps.  With his prematurely white hair, solid jaw and squinty eyes (not to mention that amazing, authoritative voice), Graves exemplified for me the old-school hero type who seem to have vanished from the cultural scene in recent years; what for lack of a better term I’ll call “The Grown-Up.”

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that movie and TV heroes used to have a certain gravitas to them born of maturity.  They were psychologically stable, morally centered and utterly capable.  As characters, there was usually some mystery to their past, but you could intuit (and were sometimes told) that they had a past in the military (usually the Korean War), that they had worked their way up the ladder as beat cops or foot soldiers, that there were adventures and romances and tragedies in their earlier years that made them into the men they were.  Through force of personality as much as any conferred rank, they were leaders of men, commanding the respect of those under them.  They were grown-ups.

We used to like our heroes to be grown up.  I remember reading about how Jeffrey Hunter landed the role of Christ in the big-budget epic “King of Kings,” only to have certain critics, noting Hunter’s baby face, rename the flic “I Was A Teenage Jesus.”  It was a liability then to look too young, but now of course the reverse is true.  The perfect age in Hollywood now is around 20, it seems, and the longer you can sustain that look, the longer you’re going to work.

Mission: Impossible is a good example.  For the DePalma film in the 90s, Jim Phelps is marginalized (and ultimately, disgracefully, villainized) in favor of his youthful protege Ethan Hunt, played by that perpetual teenager Tom Cruise.  In the early scenes of the film, Hunt’s teammates are wiped out, but not before we see they’re all kids like Cruise (Emilio Estevez was in there and I forget who else), making the Impossible Mission Force look more like the Breakfast Club.

Star Trek is another example.  In the original show, James T. Kirk was already the youngest man to captain a starship at 34 years of age, but in modern terms that would make him a comparative Methuselah, so he’s re-imagined as a boy wonder who earns the center seat in his mid-20s, essentially as a graduation present for making it through the Academy.  In the 60’s, there was that effort to balance the desire for a youthful, handsome leading man with the need to give him some gravitas; Kirk had served in Starfleet for at least eleven years already working up the ranks, and along the way earned an impressive collection of citations and medals.  For today’s crowd, however, all that matters is youth and talent; start citing your past accomplishments and people will eye you suspiciously as they calculate how many years you must have behind you.

Maybe this is just another grumpy old man rant, but I do wonder what kids today find admirable in their fictional heroes.  For me — and I don’t think I was alone — a big part of it was that air of maturity.  Guys like Kirk and Phelps and yes, even Bill Maxwell in his way…guys like Steve McGarrett and Steve Austin were men, not boys.  They bore the weight of responsibility, they were confident in their beliefs, they saw their duty and did it.   I always figured that’s what happened when you grew up; you turned into a guy like that.

Now of course I look back on those same performances and think, “He’s younger there than I am now!” …and yet I still think they’re grown up and I’m not.  So it’s not just a question of age.  Personality, then?  Just individual charisma?  Or is that no one is really that grown up, ever, but some guys are better at faking it?

At any rate, it’s disturbing to reach an age where your childhood heroes start dropping like flies, not due to excess and folly like Errol Flynn, or tragic violence like George Reeves, but to the one foe no one can beat; time itself.  It’s kind of depressing to realize all your old heroes are of an age where they’ll be checking out sooner than later.  Just from a narcissistic point of view, it forces you to realize you’re getting on yourself.

I’ve decided to shut down my “Pop Culture Hero Worship” site, since I haven’t managed to update it since last summer and the odds are it won’t get a lot more attention this year.  I did have fun with a few entries, though, so I’m moving them here for safekeeping.  First up is my review of “Cyborg,” the TV movie that introduced the world to the Six Million Dollar Man:

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In the spring of 1973, ABC television aired a made-for-TV adaptation of Martin Caidin’s novel, “Cyborg,” introducing Steve Austin to millions of viewers and launching a 70s pop culture phenomenon.

The film opens with ex-astronaut Austin suiting up to pilot an experimental aircraft at a desert testing ground, while hundreds of miles away in Washington, DC, OSO director Oliver Spencer holds a secret meeting to propose the creation of a top-secret superweapon…a cyborg, part man and part machine.  The estimated cost? Roughly six million dollars.

“Will you ask for volunteers?” someone asks.  “No….” says Spencer casually. “Accidents happen all the time.  We’ll just start with scrap.”

Spencer gets his human scrap pile when Austin’s aircraft suffers a catastrophic crash, leaving him mutilated and near death, a triple amputee with extensive internal injuries.  Judging Austin a suitable candidate for his project, Spencer directs the brilliant surgeon Dr Rudy Wells to make good on his theories of “bionics,” replacing human parts with mechanical duplicates capable of doing anything the originals could, and more.

Austin has a hard time accepting his fate, at first repulsed by the sight of his new limbs, but in time he adapts to his bionics and the amazing power they give him. Then the other shoe falls as Spencer asks Steve to make good on his debt by taking on a special covert mission for the OSO.

Steve reluctantly agrees and parachutes into an Arabian desert on a mission to rescue a kidnapped Israeli dignitary.  He soon finds out what Spencer knew all along; the man he’s been sent to rescue is already dead.  With Austin now in the hands of Arab terrorists, Spencer — back in Washington — confesses his duplicity to Rudy Wells: This has all been a test to determine Austin’s resourcefulness and will to survive. “If he fails, I can always build another cyborg. But if he survives — which appears to be doubtful — then I know I have my man.”

Steve does survive, of course, escaping his captors and blowing up half the terrorist camp on his way out.  Back in the States, Dr Wells induces a sleep state in Steve to speed his recovery from injuries, and Spencer asks if it’s possible to just keep him asleep until he’s needed again, a suggestion Rudy finds abhorrent.

“Cyborg” was a ratings hit when it aired, earning a Hugo Award nomination and spawning two sequel TV movies and a hit weekly series that ran for five years.  As a medical/sci-fi drama it remains an entertaining bit of television.  For fans, it offers some fascinating twists on the Six Million Dollar Man story as we’d come to know it.

For one thing, Oscar Goldman is nowhere in sight, replaced here by OSO chief Oliver Spencer, a hard-hearted, ruthless man on the surface but — as played by the late great Darren McGavin — one we sense is more complex than he first seems.  Spencer hits Steve with what we might today call “tough love,” refusing to show him any pity or tiptoe around his feelings, and forcing him to accept his new life as a cyborg  and put his abilities to use in a cause.

Someone — possibly McGavin himself — elected to have Spencer walk with a limp and carry a cane.  No reference is made to what led to this infirmity, but it adds a subtle subtext to Spencer’s plot to build a bionic man, and perhaps to his gruff demeanor.  “You’re more of a robot than I am,” Steve says bitterly.  “You should have been me.”  Without missing a bit, Spencer agrees: “Yes, that would have been simpler,” earning a surprised look from Steve.  Harsh as he is, Spencer emerges as a fascinating character who never fails to make sparks with Austin in their scenes together. Arrogant and tactless, he’s like a spiritual forefather of Hugh Laurie’s “House” character.  It would’ve been fun to see Spencer hang around, rather than step aside for the comparatively bland Oscar Goldman, but then if McGavin had stayed on we’d never have gotten “The Night Stalker.”

Still not quite the self-confident, square-jawed hero who will launch a thousand toys, Steve Austin in this film is a complex character.  We first see him sauntering casually onto the tarmac of an airfield, nearly late for a test flight.  His mind is on his days as an astronaut, and we sense his life is starting to drift off target.  After the crash, he attempts suicide on finding himself a triple amputee.  Later, even though his bionic limbs look identical to the originals, he still considers himself a freak, and when he rips open his bionic arm while rescuing a child from a mangled car, the child’s mother reinforces his fears, asking in revulsion, “What are you?”  These themes of alienation and self-loathing will continue to some degree in the next telefilm, but quickly fade as the series gets under way and Steve — and his audience — comes to see his bionic enhancements as a net gain, and even a blessing.

For some reason, the film deviates from the novel by making Austin a “civilian member” of the space program, rather than an Air Force Colonel.  Maybe this is to rationalize Spencer’s scheme at the end of the film, where he sets up an elaborate test of Steve’s patriotism and combat readiness.  Presumably if he were an Air Force officer, those traits would be a given.  Maybe it’s a reflection of the Vietnam War, still in progress when the film aired; it’s possible someone thought a story about a military man made into a super fighting machine wouldn’t generate as much sympathy as that of a civilian forced into government service by circumstances beyond his control.

This first film is also more violent than the series would be.  On reluctantly agreeing to take Spencer’s assignment, Steve says, “I don’t want to kill people.”  Nonetheless, Steve racks up an impressive body count in this film, taking out terrorists with a machine gun and grenades in precisely the sort of high-firepower climax the later series would studiously avoid.

Nearly 35 years after it first aired, “Cyborg” (aka “The Six Million Dollar Man”) still holds up as compelling drama and thought-provoking sci-fi.  As an action flic, the pacing can be a bit slow, and the anemic musical score by Gil Melle can’t touch the heroic, jazzy coolness of Oliver Nelson’s work on the series proper, but all in all, this is a solid 90 minutes or so of entertainment.  IF, that is, you can get your hands on it. Hopefully Universal will work out the legal issues keeping this and the rest of the Six Million Dollar Man saga out of reach of DVD collectors here in the United States.

Steve Austin.  Better, Stronger, Faster. And the first inductee in my Pop Culture Hero Hall of Fame.