The Greatest American Hero (Pilot)

I got a toy lightsaber when I was a kid, a cheapo, cruddy flashlight actually, with a plastic cone at the end that was colored red. Supposed to look like Luke's iconic laser sword. Grandma, several years in her grave now, got it for me at the old Hills Dept. Store when I was six years old. It was a place always smelled like rancid popcorn and shitty cheese dogs from the snack bar out front. I came home that aternoon, turned on the TV, and saw a huge spaceship floating over William Katt as he stood, awe-struck, in the desert sands below. I approached the tube television and put my tiny hands on the screen, as enraptured as if some televangelist had just proclaimed he was sending the power of Jesus over the airwaves. I knew then that I had a first love.

It was the show The Greatest American Hero, and it starred William Katt, who had previously been drenched in blood by rampaging telekinetic Sissy Spacek in the first cinematic adaptation of Stephen King's quintessential coming-of-rage horror shocker Carrie (1976), as well as the gorgeous Connie Sellecca and veteran television actor Robert Culp, who starred many years earlier in an "Outer Limits" episode penned by the late, great Harlan Ellison called "Demon With a Glass Hand." Culp has since passed away, but here he was in fine form and definitively played the role of crass, cynical, if rather witty and verbose FBI special agent Bill Maxwell.

The strange thing about the series is the pilot episode, the origin episode as it were, which features a huge, Close Encounters-style hovering UFO encounter in the desert, not unlike that chronicled by an Adamski or something, and the presence of the ...dead. Not typical comic book superhero tropes, I think, although Superman is, of course, an actual alien when you get right down to it, and it must have warped my mind as a child to hear the opening narration of the old Fifties Superman with George Reeves, describing Superman as"that strange visitor from another planet."

Here we have a rather weird, dream-like beginning to a show that defined what it meant to be a bungling, bumbling, reluctant superhero. Katt, playing a school teacher for the wayward named "Ralph Hinkley" (the producers later changed the name to "Hanley" after JOHN Hinkley shot Ronald Reagan) is tasked with being the new teacher of a bunch of allegedly misfit kids (one of them, Faye Grant, would go on to star in the mega-TV blockbuster sci-fi movie V (1984) and its sequel V: The Final Battle) who seem rather mature and curiously clean-cut, but who call him "Mistah Aitch" in a laughably bad imitation New York accent and try to behave like off-brand Sweathogs. Except, with better hygiene. (A few blacks and Latinos are mixed in to try and stress in a stereotypical fashion that these are PROBLEM KIDS, from the WRONG SIDE OF THE TRACKS. At least their accents seem all wrong. Isn't this supposed to be L.A., not the Bronx?)

So unaccountably and quite strangely, Hinkley/Hanley loads his Special Ed students into a van and drives them out into the desert at night. And the viewer is wondering if the movie has suddenly taken a turn for the surreal. But he's "Got some things I want you to see out there." Okay.

So along the way, John Pare, whose role is a sort of imitation of Travolta, picks a fight in a diner with FBI man Maxwell (Culp, who, adorned in aviator sunglasses, bears a weird, vague resemblance to Boyd Rice), who pulls a gun. Later, when the van breaks down, Hinkley meets up again with Maxwell, and they both see a couple of weird UFO orbs; then the HUGE UFO that looks weirdly hollow inside but has like, neon tubing around it, hovers overhead and they are approached by (get this) Maxwell's DEAD partner (who has been killed by weird religious skinheads or something at the beginning of the picture), who proclaims, "Bill, I'm dead!" So maybe these aliens are something MORE than just space explorers? Do they travel with literal ghosts?

(Also, the radio at the beginning of the close encounter starts to shoot up and down the frequency band, the "message" being comprised of various bits of broadcast. This is exactly how the ITC "ghost box" communication devices are said to enable those seeking communication with the other side to speak in real-time with departed entities. The whole thing is just a bizarre.)

The aliens or the dead guy or whoever give Hinkley a superhero suit that is flaming red and has a weird symbol on the chest. It's in a plastic casket with an instruction book. But walking away from the encounter, he LOSES the instruction book. And herein lies the most famous gag from the short-lived series, the "Superhero Who Can't Fly Straight."

"THE GREATEST AMERICAN HERO" Opening Credits | Crackle Classic TV | THEME SONG

Katt jerks around in terror as he's shot close up (head and shoulders), bluescreened against an aerial view of the city. Crash-lands into things. There are, of course, other aspects of the magic alien super suit he can't fully "operate" either. But flying is the running gag throughout the whole series. Albeit, one that eventually wears thin.

The rest of the pilot is Hinkley, girlfriend lawyer Pam (Connie Sellecca), and the boorish, chauvinistic male pig Maxwell, who hails from the "old school", trying to come to terms with Ralph's new superpowers and reoncile their differences. Maxwell is endearingly, stereotypical of men of this period, a middle-aged sexist who calls Ralph "Kid," Pam "Toots," exclaims to her "You're gorgeous when you're angry," and speaks in a lot of weird, kooky phrases and slang the screenwriters must have thought was charming. By contrast, Katt is often irritable, overly serious, and idealistic, sometimes likable but sometimes harsh. Sellecca is a serious-minded career woman, who doesn't take kindly to being objectified.

The rest of the pilot episode has something to do with the skinhead cult and its leader (G.D. Spradlin, who was later in 1994's Ed Wood), who is a presidential adviser or something that is trying to either get the President (Richard Herd, who also starred in V) reelected or assassinate him. I'm not sure which; and I don't think it matters. It seemed superfluous to the rest of the show, which is what was really interesting and fun.

Ralph Hanley and his flaming red super suit bumbled, stumbled and crash-landed their way through another forty-odd episodes until cancellation loomed in 1983. Later episodes, such as "The Beast in Black" explored themes that even bordered on horror. "The Beast..." features a hidden wall in a haunted house that leads to the "Fourth Dimension." There is the ghost of an old woman sitting in a chair, and a terrible demonic entity rips a wound in Ralph's chest. Later Bill becomes possessed, and a voice "Speaks" through him. I remember watching this episode sitting on the bed beside my other grandma, who is long dead, and what a huge impact it had on me. Nearly Lovecraftian themes, it's actually a rather nerve-jangling episode for a buddy cop/ superhero action show.

My favorite shows as a child were The Fall Guy," "The Incredible Hulk," "The Dukes of Hazzard," and "Superman" with George Reeves. And, of course, 'The Greatest American Hero," whose theme song like "Dukes" and "The Fall Guy" was one of my favorite. To this day, I still love it. It takes me back to a day sometime in 1982 when I got a cruddy, fake lightsaber, and fell in love with a floating mothership.

Believe it or not.

The Greatest American Hero - Season 1, Episode 1 - Full Episode