Well, having been born on January 20, 1980, when this first premiered, I was just shy of 4 years old. And what does a 3-year-old notice first about Automan? Why, the fact that he doesn't have a belly button, of course! He takes off his shirt and his entire chest and abdomen is a glowing blue void. Maybe most people would be saying "oooh, glowing blue void", but not me. So one day - as this was before kindergarten, my mother took me to her office and let me hang around (I wasn't one of those obnoxious kids who are incessantly making noise and being a pest and making everyone wish the stupid mother had left him home or would at least smack and yell "shut up!" to every once in a while, so this wasn't a problem) while she worked. One day a UPS man arrived. He mentioned, soon to his great chagrin, that his name was "Otto". So of course what I immediately did was run up to him, eyes shining, and say "Do YOU have a BELLY BUTTON????" That said, Automan's car could totally kick Kitt's ass.
This show is truly unique, and unmatched and unduplicated in its premise. Well, unless you count "Weird Science". But you can't consider Lisa's hawtness against Automan's kewlness. It's just no comparison. It's unmatched TODAY at any rate. What, are you going to say freakin' "Heroes" holds a candle to it? Puh-leeze! I stopped watching television years ago and I haven't missed a thing. I personally think the 80s and early 90s (up to 1995 - I have to extend it at least to 1993 since that's when DOOM came out) were the high point of human civilization, and this show is just more evidence of that. Though you may say that my perspective is slightly biased, and if I had been born 10 years earlier, I would be saying right now (in the year 2000 it would be in that case) that the 70s and 80s were the high point, or 10 years later and I would say (right now for me, in the year 2020) that the 90s and 20-aut's were the high point. What, are you freaking kidding? Have you seen TV shows (and movies) from the 70s and earlier? With a few exceptions (The Twilight Zone, My Favorite Martian), they were positively retarded! Do you know what sort of person watches "Gilligan's Island" today? Mental patients, that's who. Have you seen the recent crud? When they're not pandering to the latest mass-hysteria, they're wasting untold millions of dollars on special effects with no clever substance to them at all. Ok, so there's no shortage of movies from the 80s that were retarded as well. (Perhaps I shouldn't use that word. Genuinely retarded people may be offended by the comparison.) But the best of them came from the 80s, even if some of the worst did too. You have to realize, this show was made when personal computers were the latest thing. Everyone wanted one of those "magic typewriters" that let you modify and store entire documents before they were ever printed and even produce complicated graphics by ordering a little turtle to take 20 steps forward and turn 10 degrees to the left - an apple 2c or 2e, though for some reason at first there was almost no interest in dos computers, it seemed to me, since most of the interesting software out there was for the apple. The sky seemed the limit when everyone and his uncle could have a fantastically powerful computer device that 40 years earlier, governments would have spent billions of dollars for espionage to get their hands on, with characteristics like 64 kilobytes of RAM, hard drives as enormous as a few megabytes and clock speeds as high as ONE MILLION hertz (say it like Dr. Evil from Austin Powers saying ONE MILLION dollars). Thus the splurge of movies like Wargames (which is interesting especially now - since the whole premise that got the kid into trouble was he was connecting to other computers with a dialup modem, in the days when the internet as the largest-scale structure of connected computers was just a government thing if it existed at all), Tron, and of course, this show. Sadly, even with all the needlessly powerful computing power that is now available, they STILL haven't succeeded in creating a fully automatic man. Or that badass car. Which leads me to the obvious conclusion. Our education system must be to blame. And those with little or no talent must be getting funneled through the system and being given the important Electrical and Computer Engineering positions. We need some mad scientists in this country, for crying out loud.
