Well, after last week’s foray into Lee Majors’ magnum opus, The Six Million Dollar Man, how could I resist a little stroll to take in his follow-up, The Fall Guy?
The Fall Guy took its inspiration from a big pile of Burt Reynolds films: Smokey and the Bandit had made the whole of the US just a bit mental about car chases and other stunts, while Hooper had pointed out that it’s not actually actors that do the stunts, it’s stuntmen and stuntwomen. Add on the success of The Dukes of Hazzard and, well, you can guess the rest.
So in The Fall Guy, Majors played Colt Seavers, a Hollywood stunt man who moonlights as a bounty hunter to pay the bills. He uses his physical skills and knowledge of stunt effects (especially stunts involving cars or his very large GMC pickup truck) to capture fugitives and criminals. He’s accompanied by his extraordinarily dull cousin and stuntman-in-training Howie (Douglas Barr) and far more interesting fellow stunt performer Jody Banks (Heather Thomas).
Typically, every episode would start with Colt’s crew performing a stunt for a film or TV series. They would then be assigned to finding an escaped crim, but then the case would turn out to be more complicated than it first seemed. Then hey, a hey hey – guess what? Somewhere along the line, they’d end up doing a stunt just like the one shown at the beginning of the show (again, using that great big pickup truck of his).
The series is basically best known for a number of things:
- The theme tune composed by the omnipresent Glen A Larson with Gail Jensen and David Sommerville, but sung by… Lee Majors. He did do a bit of singing on The Six Million Dollar Man – most notably with ‘Jamie’, which was all about the Bionic Woman – but, well, it wasn’t the best bit of singing ever. Nevertheless, the song actually was quite fun, with Seavers basically moaning about how Robert Redford and all the other Hollywood stars are famous but he isn’t, despite the fact they’d have been nothing without him. Bravely, it also mentions Farrah Fawcett Majors, Majors’ then wife, with whom he was having a bit of marital strife.
- Cameos by Hollywood celebrities in more or less every episodes, including Tom Selleck, Farrah Fawcett, James Coburn, Robert Wagner, Milton Berle, Lou Ferrigno, Linda Evans, Cathy Lee Crosby, Roy Rogers, Doug McClure and Richard Burton. Seriously.
- Lots of in-jokes about The Six Million Dollar Man
- Heather Thomas, who soon turned into one of the biggest pin-ups of the 80s, possibly helped by her being in a bikini in most of the show’s title sequences. For those of you wondering what she went on to do afterwards, she wrote a screenplay called School Slut, and founded the liberal fundraising group LA Cafe, which has contributed over $280,000 to Democratic political candidates and special-interest groups. Huh.
- Stupid stunts
So, here’s the weird old title sequence for The Fall Guy, followed by the famous explanatory dialogue and a few stupid stunts. Enjoy!
