This is somewhat rare for movies and television.
The fall guy theme series#
From the first moment, in other words, the series deliberately blurs the line between star and character. What’s interesting about the reference is that in the first moments of the series (and each episode) the viewer is reminded that the star of the show - not the character, the star - has been famous for quite a while, played other characters, had a famous marriage to another star.
Nobody under 40 will get the reference: Lee Majors was married to Farrah Fawcett in 1976, when she hit it big with “Charlie’s Angels.” He was already a big hit with “The Six Million Dollar Man.” They separated in 1979, divorced in 1982, but apparently remained on stable enough terms for him to include the reference and for her to cameo in the 1981 pilot. The first two lines (four seconds) of the “Fall Guy” theme song reveal a lot about the show: So I went to YouTube, repository of all video ephemera, and found the theme song in seconds: The theme song (which ran for a staggering minute and forty-one seconds) got stuck deep enough in my cranium that some odd collision of neurons brought it back up to consciousness. The series (about a stunt man who is also a bounty hunter with two young assistants) ran 1981-1986 with a staggering 19.9 rating.
It’s a stumper as to why or how this happened, and it proves only that I watched way too much TV in my youth. The Lee Majors-crooned theme song from his old TV show “The Fall Guy” snuck into my head this morning.