#ralph hinkley

[gameraboy2]

William Katt as Ralph Hinkley in The Greatest American Hero (1981)

[gummyartstradingcards]

[wtstsgalor]

Action Figures That Never Were -- The Greatest American Hero

Although these figures are not new, this close-up of their face sculpts is something I haven't seen before.  If only Re-Mego would make this series! See more Action Figures That Never Were.

[lexie-squirrel]

[storyweaverofgondor]

I have seen more disabled people in my favorite 80s shows then the modern ones i watch.

[bat-in-the-machine]

"It's not like these powers came with an instruction manual!" - almost any superhero when they're just starting out.

"Mine did, but it was stolen like 200 years ago." - Marinette Dupain-Cheng

"...lost mine." - Ralph Hinkley "YOU LOST YOURS?!" "Got another one, though." "Oh yeah?" "..............lost it too"

Gods I miss Greatest American Hero

[fancoloredglasses]

The Greatest American Hero (Believe It Or Not, this was A Thing)

(Thanks to Crackle)

I'm just gonna say it. In the 70s and 80s, before there were 18,243 cable networks and 2,543 streaming services, there were only 3 networks (plus PBS) and independent stations (that mostly showed reruns from the Big Three) It was difficult to get a show on the air, so you almost had to be quirky to get the networks' attention.

Enter The Greatest American Hero, which took the super hero genre and turned it on its head. The title character was an everyman who reluctantly becomes a super hero and has no clue what he's doing half the time!

Our Hero is Ralph Hinkley, a high school teacher tasked with a classroom full of "problem" students the school has pretty much given up on. He works with them using a combination of compassion and tough love (standing up to them and not taking their BS) I'm not saying they turn into model students, but Ralph earns their respect.

All that changed when he witnesses an alien spaceship...

...that gives him a suit that gives him (and ONLY him; the suit doesn't work for anyone else) Powers And Abilities Far Beyond Those Of Mortal Men (including, but not limited to: strength, speed, flight, invisibility, and clairvoyance)

Just one problem: he lost the instruction manual shortly after getting the suit and has no clue what he's doing!

(Thanks to Sherlock)

Also present when Ralph gets the suit is FBI Agent Bill Maxwell (played by Robert Culp, who at the time was famous for co-starring with B*** C**** in the series I Spy) Bill uses his force of personality to get Ralph to team up with him on cases he's assigned to.

Rounding out Team Ralph is his fiancee, attorney Pam Davidson (played by Connie Sellicca, best known these days for having a radio show with her husband John Tesh) Pam and Bill are constantly butting heads (no doubt due to Bill dealing with crooked lawyers in the past and Pam dealing with law enforcement officials who just want a "win")

The show ran for three seasons. It was originally supposed to be about Ralph dealing with ordinary issues with his extraordinary abilities, but the network wanted to see more "action" and "saving the world" episodes, so I guess you could say it had a bit of an identity crisis.

The series is available on Tubi. If you would like to see an episode reviewed, please let me know!

[bluemoonperegrine]

It just occurred to me that my love for The Greatest American Hero when I was a kid (yes, I'm old) explains a lot of the things I've written in the last two years.

Brief intro before moving on to gifs: Ralph Hinkley is a liberal high school teacher who through a twist of fate is given a superhero suit by aliens. (Just go with it. It's absurd on its face.)

Conservative AF FBI agent Bill Maxwell happens to be in the vicinity. The odd couple teams up to fight crime.

Ralph loses the instruction manual. 😂 He's really bad at being a superhero. Thankfully he has Bill and his fiancee Pam, a smart and independent lawyer, to help him out.

The TV movie that kicked it off is really good even today. Dated, of course, but fun. Some of the episodes that follow are cringingly bad. I haven't watch much of it in years because I don't want my happy memories spoiled.

Anyway, there's an 80s TV flashback for ya.

Writing well-intentioned idiots who are competent at times is my jam.

[mmoxie]

Part 5- Liability

Everything fell away. No old man with his maglite, no predictable cabal of local manipulators. It could be taken for granted that the world was trying to kill her- how would that be different from any other day in the past twenty years?

She didn't know that they could see the fire. If she had, she might've pretended she knew how to wield it. Vomited an arc of blinding orange into the night air to show she meant business. Instead, she grit her teeth, unaware of the trails of smoke sifting between them, and bore down on the stranger in the overstuffed suit.

His Minnesotan accent bothered her. She didn't feel like taking excuses from a guy who sounded like an extra in Fargo. He reached for his radio and she swatted it out of his hand.

"Who," she repeated, her eyes shining with naked hatred, "put you up to this, huh?"

He pivoted at the hips and threw out a meaty hand- only to retract it, rather than grab her wrist, when he saw the crackling fire climbing up her arm.

"What the hell are you? You sick? This, uh- spon- spontaneous combustion?!"

She didn't answer. He didn't like that.

"If you're dyin', just go ahead and die. Don't wait for me to finish you off!" He scoffed exaggeratedly and swung himself out of her reach.

She lunged at him, a moment too late. The oldster's maglite connected with the back of her head in midair, driving an eruption of pressurized fire out of her lungs. She saw both figures blown away at different angles, into the darkness, as she suddenly soared up, screaming and flailing limbs.

A huge gouge of burnt grass and smoking earth marked where she'd taken the blow and lost control- and if she didn't think of something fast, it would serve has her reentry target, too. No point in all the blazing and blasting if she was going to land right back in the middle of it with broken legs.

Let's see...

In the comfortable, going-to-die dilation of time, she flipped through the mental rolodex for action plans.

Bruce Willis? No, don't need to crash a Honda.

Rudy Ray Moore? God no, but I need to watch Dolemite again.

Mark Hamill? Not a lightsaber or pair of Chanel boots in sight.

Wait.

Roddy Piper. Keith David. '88. It was a long, ugly fight, six minutes at least of slamming into pavement and shattering windows. That's how two evenly-matched jocks take care of business.

And that's just it- that's how they're going to fight me. Low, dirty, direct. They might have guns, they definitely have flashlights. Distance is death maybe, up close is death absolutely.

Her mouth was full of ash. All her teeth seemed to be there, but whatever bits stuck to them from her last break were carbon dust, enough to make her cough. The coughing snapped her out of her momentary trance, and made her realize she had finished falling up, and was now on the return trip.

Fuck. Solved the wrong problem.

With no plan for her landing, she could do little but scan the scorched lawn for her opposition. They were split into two groups- one getting the story from her former coworker, and the other crowded around the Minnesotan, checking on his burns.

Damn, damn, damn. Ralph Hinkley. Christopher Reeve. Baxter Stockman. Wilbur and Orville fucking Wright, someone tell me how to fly!

Sorry, Seebs.

--That was odd. She thought hitting the ground would be the worst thing she ever felt- but this sharp ache through her core, seconds before the splat... it was as if a vice had tightened around her whole body and cranked down until she burst in all directions from the pressure. A dark little voice mocked her as she resigned herself to die.

"Typical. Give up again. At least they'll call you consistent."

Oh, you wanna see giving up?

It incensed her with the kind of outrageous hatred for a person that one typically only finds in a bathroom mirror. She threw out her arms in a last-ditch attempt to spread out her impact, maybe save a bone or two for the police to find. But there wasn't any crunch, and no blood or bone or viscera or identifiable scraps of a meatball sub from three hours prior.

Dani had spent her whole life folding to the greater will. Whoever signed the checks that paid the bills, whoever put the roof over her head, whoever shoved a pack of cigarettes in her hand in 1983 because she "would look hot" smoking one. Sure, what the hell. What the hell to all of 'em. It's no skin off her nose. Just a few seconds of time, and you got plenty of those here on good ol' Earth.

Except, when the chips were down and there were only a few seconds left, she found that they were HERS.

These creeps weren't going to give her answers. They were a frat, a country club- a big club, some Carlinite spirit murmured in a far-off corner of her brain- and you ain't in it.

"Same one they use to hit you over the head."

The ground had been the greater will, rushing up to flatten her. And for the first time in her entire life, Dani refused to fold. She erupted with open flame, the air shimmering around her, the grass curling into embers, and made herself a meteor. Her back and shoulders dug through the dirt, carving a long trench that sizzled and smoked- but ate every bit of her impact. Loose rocks tore at her skin, but she fared no worse than a gash up the arm. When she stood, intact, she heard hoarse gasps and the cocking of several guns.

Holy shit, I almost abandoned Seebs.

She looked out at the crowd under their spotlight, her eyes smoldering in a wreath of flame that covered her from the waist to the shoulders.

They almost made me give up on my boy!

"You fuckers almost had me! You were this close!" She held up a pair of pinched fingers and let out a loud, miserable laugh. "Suicide by politician. I look like Budd Dwyer to you?"

She strode into the spotlight and pointed at the old man. He took a step back, but bumped into someone behind him- older still, and in a gray suit, who grunted and shook his head.

"Give him his money. What he expected, not whatever crap you tried to pull." And count yourself all kinds of lucky I can forgive a bump on the head, you old bastard.

"And you," she squinted at him. "Pack it up elsewhere. There ain't gonna be a job to come back to."

"She's threatening us," the man in the gray suit groaned, looking expectantly at some of his larger colleagues. His voice was nasal and needy- the audacity of a motherfucker who had everything, sounding like that.

"Let me cut it down to just one." She wheeled around, a trail of flame following her accusing hand. "The rest of you want out in one piece? Give me the man who wanted to play Caesar tonight."

There were yelps, scuffling, swearing, and the shape of a former fellow goon darting off into the darkness, before the enormous Minnesotan stepped forward, holding a smaller man by the scruff of his neck- or at least the scruff of his crisp white button-up.

"Smart businessmen know when to cut and run." She looked past the scrawny man in the giant's grip, and to the rest of the murmuring crowd. "You've cut!" Her left index finger jutted at the captive. Fire poured from her mouth in a liquid arc that rolled through the air, an orange wave of anguish surging toward the crowd.

"Now run!"

They scattered. All but the little one, suddenly her sole audience, dumped on the ground by a giant in a poorly-tailored suit, currently booking for the horizon with perfect ear-to-pocket running form.

"They sold you out. Tell me something- are you surprised?"

She crouched, and saw the sweat beading on his forehead. Even in the harsh spotlight, her incandescent glow was blinding.

He refused to answer. Dani grabbed him by the collar- and then the knot of his tie, when she realized how quickly his shirt was turning to cinders.

"Are you surprised, Gaius Iulius Caesar?"

"What the fuck are you talking about?!" He was shrill and creaking with every other word. Maybe the threat of being cremated has him going through puberty all over again.

"I bet you got a big laugh out of the room when you proposed, what, betting on some goon fights to liven up the evening?"

He swallowed. Dani's expression flattened, and she exhaled a gray cloud through grit teeth.

"What was your first job, ah-" She raised her eyebrows. "-Didn't catch your name."

"My firs- what? Listen, I'm- I can give you whatever you want. I- we've got money. You know that. My name? I'm Sean. You know, Mayor Sean?"

"Answer the question, Sean. First job."

"Why?"

"If you don't, me and you will do a little experiment. See if a single Sean is as good as firewood on these cold desert nights. Who knows? You could be the economical choice."

His eyes widened. She went on.

"Or, because I want to get to know you. You like that better?"

Oh, how she relished this. She had never had the power to fuck with someone before. She could tell him whatever the hell she wanted. It was enough to make her dizzy.

"I- I cut lawns for my folks," he said. He was blinking a lot. Smoke must be stinging his eyes.

"Real job. Someone else cutting the check."

"I pushed carts at Gwep's for a couple months, but... that was like, punishment, for crashing the car I got for my birthday."

"Haha, yeah. Working retail, that's punishment alright." She relaxed her grip on his ashen remnant of a tie and instead grabbed his shoulder. He screamed, but she stared at him and made him listen to the sizzle beneath her palm.

"I did that for twelve years, Sean. Thought I'd be done in a couple months too, right back to college. Woulda been jockeying the camera for the Channel Nine News by now, but... you know what they say at Wilson Titlee, Sean?"

Anguished and terrified, he shook his head.

"It's right under the logo. You deserve it. I see those three words when I close my eyes to sleep, Sean."

She lifted her hand, and his face was a rictus of horror at his own ruin of a shoulder.

"Do you think I deserved it, Sean? The dreams I had before people like you took hold of my life- I gave them up over and over and over again. Just to keep a roof over my head while I 'waited' to go back to college."

"Nobody-- nobody deserves anything!" Ooh, maybe he's made of more than tissue paper after all. "You earn it in this life! That's what I've always been told."

Nah.

"You got the money on you, Sean?"

"I got my money." He shivered with pain and honest-to-Christendom pouted. Dani wasn't having it.

"Who's your favorite Marx brother, Sean?

"What? I'm not- what the fuck? You think I'm a Marxist?"

Holy shit. Come on.

"Sean." She ran a hand through his hair. The gel caught fire before the strands, but after a few seconds, she had torched him into a flaky, blistery tonsure.

"You need to appreciate that making conversation with me is the only thing keeping you secured to this mortal coil. So I need you to dig deep, and strike those burnt-out neurons together until you get a roaring fire full of shit I want to hear. Favorite Marx brother."

"I don't know who the fuck you're talking about!"

"Mine's Groucho. You probably know him. Cigar, big eyebrows and mustache- ooh, the Genie turned into him in Aladdin.

--You know, 'No substitutions, exchanges, or refunds.'"

"Well, I guess- I guess he's my favorite too. I, yeah, I do remember that from Aladdin! Haha, see? I- I know stuff."

"Mm. Anyone ever called you a coward, Sean?"

He balked at that, and actually wrenched himself away, scrambling to his feet. "I'm not afraid of you," he hissed, half from pain and half a jab at bravado.

"That doesn't make you not a coward. It just makes you a liar, and we already knew that."

She advanced on him. "How about what your friends call you?"

He seemed so small, like a child looking up at the glow of a shop window in the middle of winter. For a moment, his contempt was consumed by the strange magic of it all. A fire elemental advanced on him. If that could be real... anything could be. Even heaven. Even hell.

"I'm going to end your life tonight, Sean."

The slack look on his face bordered on numb awe. He wasn't a deer in the headlights- he was a cow caught in the tractor beam of a UFO.

"They abandoned you for the same reason they abandoned me, and everyone else at the bottom. You might have cost them something."

She set both her hands on his neck and stared into his eyes.

"You and me? We're the same."

She tightened her grip and filled his chest and throat with living fire. Ribs cracked as the hollow parts of him filled with exploding oxygen. Every strained breath he sucked in stoked the embers she'd pressed into his skin. He cooked in her hands for a long time, until the fire had gone out of her and he was nothing but ash. Tears streamed down her face, cutting lines through the thick layer of soot, zigzagging over her cheeks and down her neck. Her arms swung down at her sides, and she let out a short, quaking laugh.

"A liability."

<-Prev Next->

[melmac78]

For @janetm74 and her guess word on the fanfiction work in progress guessing game:

I have Gold… if a bit cheating, again from crossover.

(For context…. and it’s needed here… Aidan has a superhero suit passed down from Ralph Hinkley (the original suit wearer in show - there’s clips on YouTube of the original show if needing more clarification on why the Lifter mask would be needed, and is a what-if continuation):

••••••

"Lifter, CATCH!" he ordered and watched as little rings of light came out of the lenses of his mask to envelop his friends.

Aidan, still seeing in infrared, saw multiple golden rings come up from the eyes of Bruce's mask but then felt a pleasant sensation of energy surround her and Dusty. Her flight slowed down to a stop, but neither person dropped like a rock.

Hearing the other men cheer, she took a deep breath, resting and blinking quickly so infrared stopped working, and adjusted her position to land on her feet holding Dusty. Aidan was glad that this time - well, really one of the few times ever, she would successfully land after a flight.

••••••••

Only thing I’ll pass along is this and heavy scenes are not connected.

Still taking guesses and I do have a TAG WIP. It’s just the words have fit it better here.

[jerimystoltzcreations]

September 26, 2022 The Creative Multiverse presents: #scifitember #scifitember2022 Day 26 Overcome The Greatest American Hero is an American comedy-drama superhero television series that aired on ABC. Created by producer Stephen J. Cannell, it premiered as a two-hour pilot movie on March 18, 1981, and ran until February 2, 1983. The series features William Katt as teacher Ralph Hinkley, Robert Culp as FBI agent Bill Maxwell, and Connie Sellecca as lawyer Pam Davidson. The lead character's surname was changed from "Hinkley" to "Hanley" for the latter part of the first season, immediately after President Ronald Reagan and three others were shot and wounded by John Hinckley Jr. on March 30, 1981. The character's name was reverted to "Hinkley" after a few months had passed. #CreativeMultiverse #GreatestAmericanHero #art #artwork #artistofinstagram #artist #artistforhire #Custom #create #drawing #drawingaday #draweveryday #illustration #pencil #sketch #ink #colordrawing #fabercastell #copic #twitchstreamer #blickartmaterials https://www.instagram.com/p/CjzVo-bM0vm/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[maximuswolf]

Blind Melon - Change [Woodstock '94]

Blind Melon - Change [Woodstock '94] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liZUTMMM5pE Submitted September 10, 2024 at 04:28PM by Ralph--Hinkley https://ift.tt/w3TBz70 via /r/Music

[superheronapper]

The Greatest American Hero (Ralph Hinkley)

[wtstsgalor]

Added to The Disney Point

New characters, both Disney and non-, are doing the Disney Point.

[lexie-squirrel]

[blog-oscar-iglesias-casado-23675]

REMENBER TV "EL GRAN SUPERHEROE AMERICANO"

Sugerencia de escritura del día¿Qué series veías de pequeño?Ver todas las respuestas “El gran héroe americano” (título original: “The Greatest American Hero”) es una serie de televisión estadounidense creada por Stephen J. Cannell, que se emitió entre 1981 y 1983. La serie sigue las aventuras de Ralph Hinkley, interpretado por William Katt, un profesor que recibe un traje de superhéroe de origen…