How Brazil used bionics to defy dictators

In the late 1970s, Brazilians living under a military dictatorship needed a way to mock the government without getting arrested. Their solution? They borrowed from American pop culture, calling the regime's unelected, hand-picked politicians "bionicos" — after The Six Million Dollar Man's Steve Austin. It's one of the strangest collisions of entertainment and political resistance in modern history, and this episode tells the full story.

We start with the political crisis: a Brazilian military government bypassing democratic elections to install loyal officials in positions of power, and a public searching for coded language to express their outrage safely. Then we trace the unlikely source of that code word back to Martin Caidin's 1972 novel Cyborg, the original story of a test pilot rebuilt with mechanical limbs after a catastrophic crash, and its transformation into the iconic 1970s television series starring Lee Majors.

Along the way, we explore how producer Harv Bennett stripped away the spy-thriller gloss of the original TV movie to create something more domestic and relatable — a reluctant hero audiences could trust in their living rooms every week. We examine the show's cultural reach across Latin America, where it became so popular that it gave Brazilian citizens the perfect metaphor for politicians who appeared human but were artificially manufactured by those in power.

This episode sits at the intersection of Cold War politics, science fiction history, Latin American resistance culture, and media studies. If you're interested in how pop culture becomes political language, how television crosses borders in unexpected ways, or simply the wild story behind one of the 1970s' most beloved shows, this is a deep dive you won't want to miss.

Source credit: Research for this episode included Wikipedia articles accessed 4/3/2026. Wikipedia text is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; content here is summarized/adapted in original wording for commentary and educational use.