Tron with an extra couple of wheels…

There are always more ideas out there than anything can be reasonably be expected to support, and in the United States prime time television seasonally suffers a glut of good and bad ideas in the form of new series. Many never get off the starting block, producing nothing more than a single pilot programme¹ that vanishes into oblivion². Some manage a single series, or wither before that, leaving a sense of what might have been possible without any hope of resolution. One such series was Automan, a series with a novel idea that failed to hit the mark and ran far short of a full season.

The Premise

Walter Nebicher is a frustrated member of the Los Angeles Police Force. While he’d love to be out on the streets fighting crime head on, he’s stuck behind a computer doing a job that nobody, especially his boss - Captain Boyd, appears to appreciate. Seeking to find a means to resolve this frustration Walter creates Automan, a three-dimensional holographic computer construct that looks just like a human being - apart from the fact that he can walks through walls, create things like cars and helicopters in an instant and consumes more electricity than an army of kettles during a SuperBowl ad-break.

Automan is a computerised vigilante and law enforcer, capable of chasing down the criminals Walter, and even the whole Los Angeles Police Department, can’t. He’s accompanied by a flying companion called Cursor, who creates the various vehicles and tools that he uses to fight crime. Being computer-generated he has the ability to tap into the resource to talk with other computer-controlled mechanisms - e.g. traffic lights. His existence consumes a massive amount of electrical energy so he can only functional effectively at night when local energy consumption is low³. During the day, robbed of peak power potential, he would fade away.

The Auto-Effect

The gimmick for the show was the computer-generated aspect, achieved in a fashion similar to Disney’s “Tron”. Automan himself was dressed from neck to toe in a black body suit with glowing blue lines running along the limbs and outlining the torso. Within the lines the black panels featured a ‘moving’ blue-speckled effect to simulate the computer-generated nature of Automan’s existence.

The theme was continued in Automan’s vehicles - the most used being the Autocar and the Autocopter - which were, again, black with glowing blue highlights. The vehicles came into existence from nothing, building through a line-drawing effect - creating a skeletal model - before solid form was achieved. The resulting vehicles were always considerably enhanced - faster, stronger, more agile, etc. - providing criminals very little chance of escape unless the sun came up and the power supply died! The Autocar was capable of astonishingly tight turns.

The Main Cast

• Desi Arnaz Jr. as Walter Nebicher
• Chuck Wagner as Automan
• Robert Lansing as Lt. Jack Curtis
• Heather McNair as Roxanne Caldwell
• Gerald O’Loughlin as Captain Boyd

Episode Guide

The show ran for a total of thirteen televised episodes.

1. Automan - 90 minute Pilot [15 Dec 1983]
2. Staying Alive While Running a High Flashdance [22 Dec 1983]
3. The Great Pretender [29 Dec 1983]
4. Ships in the Night [05 Jan 1984]
5. Unreasonable Facsimile [12 Jan 1984]
6. Flashes and Ashes [19 Jan 1984]
7. The Biggest Game in the Town [26 Jan 1984]
8. Renegade Run [05 Mar 1984]
9. Murder MTV [12 Mar 1984]
10. Murder, Take One [19 Mar 1984]
11. Zippers [26 Mar 1984]
12. Death By Design [02 Apr 1984]
13. Club Ten [09 Apr 1984]

The episodes aired approximately six months later in the United Kingdom.

The theme for the show was a mix of synth drums, violins and laser beams, but it wasn’t the sort of theme that stuck in the mind after the show had finished. Automan himself explained the premise of the show as a voice over, describing himself as a work of perfection. In his own words, “On a scale of one to ten, think of me as an eleven.”

The Future

There are always possibilities even for those programmes that appear to have been long laid to rest. While the chances of a new series are limited, there is still life to be found in nostalgia channels on cable/satellite, video and fan-driven web sites. The series has already aired on the Sci-Fi Channel and there has been a recent increase in the number of ‘classic’ TV favourites being resurrected to video - either as one-off tasters or complete releases.

Links

You can find more information at the obvious source - www.chuckwagner.com. A site that covers Chuck in board strokes, including his TV, movie and stage career.

1. A single show filmed to establish the concept of a programme intended to win over possible viewers and those who are ultimately expected to finance an ongoing series. [↩]
2. Though occasionally a resurrection is possible with a little reworking by the creators - the original Star Trek being a prime example of this. [↩]
3. This also made it easier to achieve the various special effects involved in creating Automan and his ‘computer-generated’ vehicles - all of which used a black base with fluorescent blue outlines. [↩]