This was one of Greg Evigan's very first acting jobs. He got the job because the writer had written the character "Joe Hamilton" after a real person he knew in High School who was just as obnoxious. He showed a photo of the real "Joe Hamilton" from his High School Yearbook to Executive Producer Harve Bennett. Harve loved the look so much that he gave yearbook to the casting director and said: find someone who looks just like this!
Andy was introduced with the intent of spinning him off into his own series. However, such plans never came to fruition.
The Bionic Boy has an interesting and dramatic origin. It was the brain-child of legendary executive Fred Silverman, who during his heyday, was the only individual to be head of all three networks. While at ABC, he continued his quest to turn all his shows into massive rating winners. One of his most challenging missions was to find a way to cut into the ratings of the most anticipated broadcast in history... NBC's first showing of Gone With The Wind. CBS threw in the towel, and NBC was expecting Silverman to do the same at ABC. But that just wasn't his style. He spend a great amount of time thinking of a way to counter-program the broadcast, something he was incredibly good at accomplishing. In fact he invented the concept. The showing of the most beloved movie of all time was to be on November 7th, 1976. For many months before that Silverman was trying out all kinds of scenarios. Then, as almost a Hail Mary, only a month before the NBC showing, he came up with a very unique concept. He realized that at the time, the children of the American household basically controlled what the family would watch. And of course, anyone under the age of 17 at the time, wouldn't have a clue as to what Gone With The Wind was all about, and how big an event it was. He therefore focused on the show that would be aired opposite it, which was also their number one show of the year: The Six Million Dollar Man. He realized that if he could create as big an event for an episode airing at the same time, he could cut into the NBC viewership. Focusing on his youthful viewers, he first came up with a title: The Bionic Boy. At the time, he had no idea what the show would be but he envisioned it to be a two-hour special, and to give it that epic gleam, he wanted it to be shot totally on location, a location that was visual stunning to his audience. The problem was that he had so little time to have such a show written, produced, and ready for the November 7th deadline. At Universal Studios, who produced The Six Million Dollar Man, was a writer under contract named Tom Greene. He was in his late teens, and was the youngest writer ever to get a contract at the studio. He had written for several shows already, and had done some impressive work on SMDM. In fact, the last episode he wrote for them, entitled Danny's Inferno, became the highest rated show of the season, and one of their most popular. Silverman realized that Greene was the perfect writer for his project. Ironically, at the time, Universal Executives, and the producers of the show, had already given Greene the moniker of the Bionic Boy, for his ability to turn out high-quality scripts in record time. Also, coincidentally, Universal had just wrapped the filming of a supernatural thriller called The Car in Kanab, Utah, right on the boarder of Zion National Park. All the crew, trucks and equipment were still there. Silverman now had a title and a location, and worked with Universal to pay the crew to stay on location while the script was written. But still, he had no story or script to go with it. It was then, on a Thursday night, that they approached Greene with his assignment: write a two-hour special episode that would take place in and around Kanab and Zion, with the title The Bionic Boy. That was it. He had to come up with the complete concept and story and characters as well as create eight exciting acts to keep the viewers glued to their screen, and never allowing their parents to turn to the big event on NBC. Even more pressure was put upon him, since they informed him that in order to get this special filmed, they would have to be given the completed script by Monday. He had no more than a weekend to develop it and write it. Greene literally stayed up for virtually 50 hours straight to develop the story, characters, step outline for the eight acts, and write the script. In those days there were no computers, nor Internet, so as his pages came out of his typewriter, they were given to the around-the-clock Universal steno-pool, who retyped them on special mimeograph paper, then made numerous copies, and then had them distributed by messenger and over-night mail to all the departments at Universal, executives at ABC, rushed to the casting department to lock in all the guest stars, and most importantly to Utah, where the department heads and crew would break down each scene, build the sets, secure the locations, work on the special effects and give the director time to prepare. Amazingly Greene completed the script right on time. The special went into production, finish on schedule, and was ready for the November 7th telecast, with the most intense publicity for a TV series up to that time. And sure enough, the special did indeed eat into the airing of Gone With The Wind on NBC. In fact, they reran the two-hour special twice that season, and they broke all ratings records.
Steve said that he and Frank Gifford played against each other in college football. In real life Gifford was nine years older than Lee Majors, and the two wouldn't have been attending their respective colleges at the same time.