Oddities and Awesome abound! Only not so much this week, as I wasn’t online much. But here’s one of those things that’ll make you feel old, if you’re of a certain mindset.
When I was nine, there was a teevee show called The Greatest American Hero. In this show, aliens come down and give a schoolteacher a suit like a Superman or Captain Marvel get-up, which gives him superpowers. (Only when wearing the suit.) However, he loses the instructions, and thus our hero is unable to use the suit to its full potential. For instance, when he flies, he doesn’t do so in a Christopher Reeve-like graceful straight line or in elegant swoops as he woos Margot Kidder. No, he caroms about, flailing his arms and crashing into stuff. Fun show, if you were 9 in 1980. As I was.
Anyhow, the show had a theme song that’s pretty familiar to anyone from that time period:
Greatest American Hero went off the air in 1983, and that was that, although you’d still hear the song once in a while, and it later turned up in, among other places, as a parody in an episode of Seinfeld, wherein George Costanza used the song with his own lyrics as his answering machine’s outgoing message.
Now. As I said, Greatest American Hero last aired on February 3, 1983. This episode of Seinfeld aired Fabruary 13, 1997 — a little over fourteen years after Hero ended. And next month, it’ll be seventeen years since the Seinfeld episode aired! There’s something interesting about a pop-culture reference being almost two decades old, especially when the thing the reference was referring was more than a decade passed at the time it was made.
Anyway….
I loved Greatest American Hero. The fact that there was a book to working the suit that he can't find is brilliant. It was one of the few cool supehero shows on when I was a kid aside from the great one's on Saturday Morning like Ark II, Shazam and Isis.
Those clips are great. Love the faces George makes. Great post.
Oh yeah, I remember all those…and I had the comics, too! I remember Isis particularly because she defeated a bad guy by being willing to get a pie in the face!