The Greatest American Hero
| TheGreatest American Hero | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Genre | Comedy-drama |
| Created by | Stephen J. Cannell |
| Starring |
William Katt Robert Culp Connie Sellecca Michael Paré Faye Grant |
| Theme music composer |
Mike Post Stephen Geyer |
| Opening theme | "Theme from Greatest American Hero (Believe It or Not)" Performed by Joey Scarbury |
| Composer(s) | Mike Post |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of seasons | 3 1/2 |
| No. of episodes | 44 (4 unaired) (list of episodes) |
| Production | |
| Running time | 60 minutes |
| Release | |
| Original network | ABC |
| Original release | March 18, 1981 – February 3, 1983 |
The Greatest American Hero is an American comedy-drama television series that aired for three seasons from 1981 to 1983 on ABC. Created by producer Stephen J. Cannell, it premiered as a two-hour pilot movie on March 18, 1981. The series features William Katt as teacher Ralph Hinkley ("Hanley" for the latter part of the first season), Robert Culp as FBI agent Bill Maxwell, and Connie Sellecca as lawyer Pam Davidson.
The series chronicles Ralph's adventures after a group of aliens gives him a red suit that grants him superhuman abilities. Unfortunately for Ralph, who hates wearing the suit, he immediately loses its instruction booklet, and thus has to learn how to use its powers by trial and error, often with comical results.
Ralph Hinkley (Katt) is a Los Angeles public school substitute teacher of special education high school students. During a school field trip, the group encounter aliens who give Hinkley a suit which endows him with superhuman abilities. Also during the encounter, he is instructed by the aliens to thereafter collaborate with FBI Special Agent Bill Maxwell (Culp). Their instructions are to use the suit as a means to fight crime and injustice in the world.
Subsequently, Attorney Pam Davidson (Selleca), who handled Ralph's divorce, also encounters the aliens. Through some coercion, she eventually agrees to, on occasion, join Ralph and Bill during missions.
Ralph's uniform grants him the powers of flight, super strength, invulnerability, invisibility, precognition, E.S.P., telekinesis, X-ray vision, super speed, pyrokinesis, holographic vision, shrinking, psychometry, and even the ability to detect the supernatural. As Ralph lost the suit's instruction manual, his discovery of these different powers often come as a surprise even to himself. Notably, while the suit enables Ralph to fly, it does not endow him with any particular skill at landing, so he frequently crashes in an undignified (if undamaged) heap. In the episode "Fire Man" he displays resistance to fire/heat and uses 'super exhalation' (the ability to blow out a flamethrower - or any other large source of fire); he also uses this ability in the episode "There's Just No Accounting...", to extinguish a Molotov cocktail. Ralph also shows signs of being able to control minds after he's exposed to high doses of plutonium radiation. In the season two finale episode, "Lilacs, Mr. Maxwell", Ralph is shown to control a dog via a holograph. This may have been an improvisational power of the suit, but isn't tried again in later episodes. In "The Shock Will Kill You", he (or the suit) becomes strongly magnetized.
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