Turning a motion picture into a television show is a crapshoot. TV M*A*S*H ended up with a cast arguably more likeable than the movie and lasted forever, while the show Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was, well, I have no idea what it was. You’re probably better off just getting suggestions from a film instead of trying to continue it on broadcast television; Miami Vice was drug-smuggling Florida done a lot less grim than Scarface and succeeded, but the shows inspired by big-screen sci-fi have been more miss than hit in terms of ratings.
Television mega-producer Glen Larson learned that in the late seventies and early eighties. His space- and tech-related shows were often one-season wonders that went on to Star Trek-like cult acclaim. However, one silly show of his seems to have been lost in the shuffle, and it’s well worth revisiting. Let’s look at the Tron-like visual assault of the short-lived Automan.
Don’t Change That Channel
It has to suck being a success in the entertainment industry. If you get a major hit record or show, you have to outdo yourself to get another one or risk being branded a failure. That’s a position that Larson likely found himself in on a constant basis. With involvement in popular programs like The Six-Million-Dollar Man, Magnum P.I., Simon and Simon and The Fall Guy to name a few, he was the in-demand go-to guy to get a network on the big boards. Interestingly enough, Glenn appeared to have a special interest in science-fiction programming. His 1978 Battlestar Galactica was seen by some as a Star Wars ripoff starring the actor from Alpo dog food commercials and a guy flying a TV take on an X-Wing fighter who would later play Faceman on The A-Team.
As bad as that description sounds, the end result was a whole lot better than you’d think, especially for us pre-teens wanting something, anything like a George Lucas creation on our screens. The same can’t really be said for Larson’s hokey Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century, with the voice of Bugs Bunny coming from a cheesy faux-3PO. Yuck.
Good or bad, neither of these sci-fi series stuck, lasting barely two seasons despite some “retooling.” Glenn didn’t give up, though. His idea for a 1982 show about a futuristic, superpowered Pontiac in a current-year world fighting crimes that the cops couldn’t or wouldn’t solve was beloved by more than just those who lusted for another Star Trek.
Knight Rider seemed to be proof-of-concept that you could make otherworldly technology palatable to the masses if you followed certain rules. Larson employed this technique on a new show for the next year, hoping to reap the benefits of his discovery. He would not be rewarded for his work.
Wasn’t K.I.T.T. Really An Auto-Man?
In pre-Blockbuster days, us poor kids needed to wait years between installments of Jedis versus the Dark Side, so any new sci-fi fare at the multiplex was welcome. For summer of 1982, we were taken inside the world of a mainframe computer with a hacker who physically gets into the system and interacts with anthropomorphic programs. The film was called Tron, and it featured some of the earliest examples of stunning CG combined with effective old-school techniques to create dramatic effects in the dark environment, exemplified by the glowing “light cycles” that could do ninety-degree turns at speed.
A commercial disappointment with mixed reviews, it nonetheless had a huge impact on sci-fi fans like Glenn Larson. The rather complex-for-kids plot of the film was a non-starter for a television show, but with some tweaks and clichés, he knew he’d be onto something for a show he’d call Automan (as in “Automatic Man”).
Larson basically took Knight Rider as a starting point to trace over. Two buddies fighting above-the-law criminals with skunkworks technology? Got it. Female third-wheel that’s the only one besides the creator who knows the true identity of his partner and helps out the unlikely duo? Sure. However, instead of taking place inside the computer as in Tron, the holographic “Automan” that geeky police officer and computer programmer named Walter develops joins up on the outside of the machine in the real world, with the digital creation disguised as FBI agent “Otto J. Mann”. Get it?
The glowing hologram Automan is a suave and strong character compared to his shy real-life creator (played by Lucy and Ricki’s son Desi Arnaz Jr.), but Chuck Wagner plays Automan for laughs with a big ego (“On a scale of one to ten, I’m an eleven”) in a show that doesn’t take itself seriously. Desi’s character could even meld into Automan to become one with the hologram, giving Walter powers that he’s sadly lacking as a low-level cop looked down upon by superiors.
Visually, the program was rather striking with the use of a retroreflective material from 3M that can reflect up to nearly 100 percent of the light projected on it. Highly polished plates attached to the costume added to the holographic appearance, enhanced in post-production through layered chromakey effects. Sure, it’s hokey by today’s standards, but it works surprisingly well when you consider what they had at hand.
Automan mainly left the computer at night, the excuse being that his intense need for energy would preclude daytime appearances. Obviously, the true reason was the visual effects only really working well in the dark.
Just because Automan wasn’t a car didn’t mean that he didn’t have one. Automan’s non-human sidekick was called Cursor, at a time when that wasn’t a word in the common vernacular. Even in the intro alone, Cursor also displayed some qualities of a dirty old man.
Cursor was a floating, shifting polyhedron that would appear to “draw” things that would then be generated as glowing physical objects. Here’s cursor at work after breaking into multiple points of light:
… and this is the result of the tracing:
Naturally, a car was one of the things Cursor drew, and as a futuristic show, the “Autocar” had to be based on an out-of-this-world car: a 1974 Lamborghini Countach LP400. This was an older model without the wing and fender flares; it’s cleaner and more futuristic than the rather fussy-looking later ones and, more importantly, it was reportedly Glenn Larson’s own personal car. Yeah, all those hit TV shows gave him a bunch of fun money.
Retroreflective trim was used to outline it, and while much of the imagery was animation, it was important to have a physical car for times when characters needed to interact with it.
Like the Tron Light Cycles, the Autocar could take right-angle turns at full speed or shift left to right like a car in a video game, a fact that was played up by human passengers getting comically thrown about inside.
There was also an Auto Chopper based on a Bell JetRanger:
Need a bigger plane? Cursor could do it:
A motorcycle reportedly based on a Yamaha XJ650 Maxim (but clearly a dirt bike below) had the requisite shiny stuff added for effects.
To save a little development time, the writers and special effects people had Cursor also make a flying machine that used most of the body of the Countach as well:
Of course, it’s silly bleep-bop-boop cassette-era futurism, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t entertaining. My kid, who just turned into a teenager, never looks at what I’m working on but was drawn to my screen by the show clips I was watching. Imagine what kids his age thought of this witchcraft forty years ago.
All of this hocus pocus didn’t come cheap. Reportedly, each episode of Automan cost upwards of a million 1983 dollars to make ($3.35 million in today’s cash). Compounding matters was the show’s poor ratings compared to shows in the same time slot like Scarecrow and Mrs. King or, worse yet, TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes. That latter turd was dirt cheap to make and paved the way for inexpensive reality TV shows that have cursed us for decades on. Faced with such competition, Automan went back into the mainframe for good in 1984 after only 12 of the 13 episodes made were aired.
Hit The Highway(man)
Critics point out a lot of reasons for Automan’s failure. Some felt the chemistry between Automan and his creator simply wasn’t there, or at the very least they didn’t gel the way that The Hoff did with his talking black Firebird. The rather two-dimensional characters were further marred by derivative scripts, as if Larson was just photocopying stuff from Knight Rider. In truth, Automan was probably too far ahead of its time; it was early in the video game age and needed Hollywood movie level money to produce with the technology of 1983. A single Autocar chase could cost more to make than a full episode of a more traditional show.
Another sad fact of the short run of Automan was the lack of show-related toys. There was an action figure available at some point:
Today, with 3D printers, there are plenty of now much older fans that have created additional Automan trinkets to enjoy:
It wasn’t until 2012 that the series was available on DVD (in the UK of all places) and 2015 when you got it in America, nearly thirty years after it debuted. Like early Star Trek and Larson’s Battlestar Galactica, it lives on with a cult following of fans who appreciated Glenn’s diligence against the almost insurmountable odds of getting cool-looking sci-fi onto the small screen.
Maybe if Autocar had a speaking role and Automan more chest hair, we’d have had a hit?
Top graphic image: ABC TV
The show was originally planned to be called ‘Autopian’, but it was considered to be too noble and thus got changed to ’Automan’.
“Imagine what kids his age thought of this witchcraft forty years ago.”
I was 12. I thought it was hokey. The AutoMan casting was all wrong. That hairstyle just never worked. Someone like Matt Frewer with a shaved head might have worked better.
My dad always named our cars, the first ’87 Conquest we had he named Cursor after this show because of how well it handled.
If you want to understand the glory of 1980s television for 10 year old boys, please grasp the fact that two armored helicopter shows, Airwolf and Blue Thunder, were launched in 1984.
We will never have that again.
One had a killer theme song, the other Dick Butkus and Bubba Smith. Truly a great time to be alive.
This was on prime-time British TV. It must have been really bad, because I was a car-mad tween at the time and can’t remember anything about it beyond that single fact.
I didn’t know this, being an impoverished student with no telly at the time, but the Bishop’s comment, “It wasn’t until 2012 that the series was available on DVD (in the UK of all places)…” threw me anyway.
I could understand the air of surprise if it had been “…(in North Korea of all places)…” I mean, we do speak English, and even had DVD players in 2012.
I know they did an actual named ‘Ferris Bueller’ sitcom, but I think the better TV version of ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off’ was actually ‘Parker Lewis Can’t Lose’, which I remember being pretty good for the time.
I didn’t know they made a Ferris show. Parker Lewis brings on fond memories, though. Thanks for reminding me!
Is this the show where there was a gag that when there was a passenger in the car, and the car took a 90º turn, the passenger was smashed up against the window?
When Automan came on, I Automatically changed the channel. Just kidding, I was stationed in the Pacific during that time and Automan did not make the cut as one of the shows picked up by the Far East Network of AFRATS (Armed Forces Radio and Television Services, later just called Armed Forces Network). But we got Miami Vice!
(slow clap) I see what you did there. Take your star.
Loved Automan, but weirdly only remember it in black and white. Reading through reminded me why – the parents just had to watch that dumb bloopers and practical jokes show thus I was relegated to the downstairs 13″ b/w tv with the straightened slinky I had made an antenna out of shoved into the broken stub on the back.
This and the movie Wargames definitely had an early impact on how I ended up now using 3D graphics to simulate vehicle accidents.
The scary thing is how close the world came to Wargames becoming reality just a few months after that movie came out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident
Living in San Jose I later found out we had a lot more warheads targeting us than I realized. The IBM facility I worked at years later was the target of its own warhead, or so I was cheerfully told by the senior engineers that worked there. They even claimed to know the missile’s location and the warhead’s yield. And we had a LOT of IBM facilities around, many underground like mine but still targeted, still vunerable. So I’m pretty sure had Leiutenant Colonel Petrov made a different choice I and everyone I knew and would know for the next few years would have been ionized that day. He truly was the hero who wore no cape.
This false alarm incident was sandwiched by the TV miniseries “The Day After” which showed us a vision of a nuclear exchange jet like the one that had almost happened in real life. The series was (supposedly) compelling enough to scare Reagan.
I now however wonder if was intelligence reports of the false alarm incident that scared Reagan and the TV show was just a convenient excuse.
“cheerfully told by the engineers” I will always be impressed by how much engineers enjoy acquiring knowledge, no matter how dire.
I’ve also wondered if “The Day After” was what really swayed Reagan, particularly given his acting background. Now, if “Threads” had been referenced as the movie that swayed him, I wouldn’t have much doubt.
Well we all know Reagen wasn’t the kind of guy to let truth get in the way of politics. Given the secrecy and the huge potential for embarrassment to the Soviet heiarchy of the near disaster I expect it would have taken western intelligence at least a few weeks to piece it all together. I think such a delay would have meant Regan’s briefing (IF it happened) roughly coincided with his early screening of the show. So seeing that apocolyptic vision on top of the knowledge of how close the world had come to living though a much worse nuclear reality just a couple of months before AND knowing it was his own stupid sabre rattling that pushed the Soviet paranoia might have been the real reason for his revised attitude.
I dunno, man. I’m leery of trying to re-watch any TV from that era after attempting to watch Riptide a few years ago. Made it an episode and a half before I just gave up. I think some things are better left as a pleasant memory.
This. I rewatched a couple episodes of the original Miami Vice and was astounded by how genuinely awful they were!
The first 2 seasons of Miami Vice hold up amazingly well, they could be released today. The 4th and 5th seasons don’t hold up as well, you can tell the writers were running out of ideas.
Totally agree. I’ve been re-watching it, and aside from the car phones and constant smoking, it’s amazingly contemporary. The early season two episode Out Where the Buses Don’t Run – with Bruce McGill as an eccentric but driven retired cop who can’t let an old case go – is haunting, maybe the best of the entire series.
Yeah, you have to get to the one where James Brown is an alien or something and then the Viking Bikers from Hell episode where the badass biker gang all ride 450cc UJM bikes. That one felt more like a Knight Rider episode… Anyways, the last season takes an amnesia trip and can be skipped entirely but the first 2 seasons I watch over and over again.
Or the frozen dead reggae star episode…I still remember the WTF?! feel of that one.
Edit: you can usually roughly gauge the episode’s quality by Crockett’s hair. Longer and combed back early seasons = great; shorter and spikey middle seasons = hits and misses; shaggy mullet late season = ugh.
You can also tell if Tubbs is about to meet a woman by the smooth jazz they start playing in the background.
For a possible antidote, try Stingray on Tubi. It’s actually better than I remember it as a kid, probably b/c it’s fairly dark, has minimalist characterization, and ran for only 2 seasons.
I gave A-Team a shot and it missed me like one of the bad guys in their shootouts. (I didn’t actually make far enough for a shootout IIRC.)
In the summer of ’83 I would have been six years old and I clearly remember watching Automan just as clearly as I remember being glued to the Knight Rider premier the previous year.
Having been exposed to Cannonball Run at the age of five I was already mildly obsessed with the Countach and this show magnified that. Automan was briefly one of my three favorite non-cartoon shows alongside Knight Rider and The Dukes (which I had started watching at the age of three.) I was bummed when Automan went away, but soon after I discovered the A-Team and that slid comfortably into the top 3.
Humanity has created a whole civilization to honor Torch Jr.
PS: BSG has got to be the best TV remake of the worst TV show.
BSG remake is simply one of the greatest shows ever aired. Love it.
44 years later and I still find myself saying ‘Auto, Cursor!’ from time to time
For the longest time, my kid brain had Berenstein-ed the “Cursor!” line into Tron, and I kept being confused when it didn’t turn up on rewatches. Other than the 90° turns gag, I remembered nothing else consciously about Automan.
But I’ll bet folding money that the Autocar imprinted on me strongly enough that the Lambo Bros Sideswipe and Sunstreaker became two of my favorites when they appeared just a year or so later on the syndicated G1 Transformers cartoon.
Action figures! Spinoff shows (“Cursor“!) Board Games! Computer Games!
I tell you we’ll be sitting on top of an Automan Empire!!
The two Dogg Zone podcasts about episodes of this show made it sound like a truly amazing trainwreck.
It’s so weird seeing this referred to as a flop (even though I know now it was a flop). When it came out the hype was big. 8-year-old me was glued to the TV along with most of my family to watch this show and there was a lot of build-up to the pilot. I don’t remember much else, and may go back and watch it (might be a nice jumping off point to kick-start Reels and Wheels again).
Side note, there was a running gag where Dezi’s character was named “Walter Nebicher” and everyone he talked to would mistakenly call him “Walter Nebbish”, which is yiddish for someone who is a total dork. I had to have my father explain that to me so I could understand why he was laughing.
Totally. Back then, Tron was mindblowing, and since we could only (at first…I remember getting the VHS of it eventually at the local video barn) see it in a theater, we were desperate for anything we could get our hands on that was even vaguely connected to the idea of this amazing futuristic world.
I remember watching this show in it’s first run airings. I actually hoisted my Jolly Roger last year and re-visited it. I’m really surprised Chuck Wagner didn’t move on to better things. He’s got the looks and did about as well as can be imagined while looking like a human glitter dome.
This low but effective tech solution was also memorably used in Escape from New York!
The wire frame “computer” navigational map of Manhattan that Snake utilizes in the glider near the beginning is actually a filmed scale model with glow in the dark stickers added to the edges. It’s strikingly effective.
I have to admit I think the Countach looks pretty sweet in that pic of it in daylight. Maybe it’s just a good angle.
I would have been 16 the summer of 1983 (depending on the actual debut date), loved Tron immensely, but do not remember this show at all. Maybe that’s a good thing.
Pretty much the same for me. Says debut was December ’83 but by that time I had my drivers license and my friends did too. A lot less time in the house when the whole world opened up in so many ways.
Well any model car or product made by Shitty Toys LLC has to be good! I’m sold.
I preferred Manualman, to Automaticman. Plus, it was shortened to Manman!
I initially thought you were referring to Manimal; surely this will be next weeks tv installment (also a Glen Larson one season show). Then you can do The Phoenix which was amazingly cancelled after only 4 episodes and has lived in my head for 40 years.
The Phoenix also starred Khan’s right hand man from Star Trek II who has no credit in the film; Judson Scott had some bad luck there.
Holy Tales of the Gold Monkey, Batman!
Ah yes, the television series where Captain Decker flew a Grumman Goose before going to the stars. Jack will never forgive Jake for losing his eye.
Also the short lived series lovingly copied for a full season of Archer.
And of course Disney’s Tail Spin.
I remember watching that in black and white on the 12″ TV because my parents always watched something else in that timeslot. I was 9-10 at the time. I spent years thinking the show was called “Cutter’s Goose”, though! I found the DVD’s in my local library about a decade ago and rewatched it.
I feel like at one point Automan and Manimal were on back to back. Which is a pretty wacky 2 hours of tv.
So sad we didn’t get a crossover episode. Though apparently they existed in the same fictional universe.
Though only a little more so than the Love Boat and Fantasy Island.
If you are too young to have lived then or to remember, 80’s TV was weirder than you think.
…as a ’90s kid, we had the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-fueled boom of action-adventure Saturday morning cartoons featuring anthro animal characters. Usually with action figures. Biker Mice From Mars comes to mind…
Which culminated in its final form, Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills.
I loved this when I was a kid, mainly because I loved cars and I loved Tron, and this had both (sort of)!
As with pretty much anything 80s/nerdy, Secret Galaxy has a great video on it:
https://youtu.be/k4DWOn_4QqQ?si=06XVADDJr3jfkFz6
<3 Secret Galaxy.
Same
I was 8 years old when this aired and I was obsessed with it. While I credit my career as a programmer to Tron and the Apple 2+ (and autism), Automan was there, too.
Same age, and could have sworn it ran at least a couple seasons. Anything with special effects back then was fascinating. Turns out TV didn’t rot our brains after all.
I like your screen name!