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Martin E. Brooks was the third and most-used actor in the role of Dr. Rudy Wells on The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman.

He was eventually "promoted" to the status of "regular" in the last two seasons of both series. Although his name and image now appeared in the title sequence, he did not appear in even the majority of episodes of any one season. He was most present in the third season of The Bionic Woman, by which time the series had switched networks, though he continued to appear in both series. He appeared in most of the multi-part storylines, like "Kill Oscar", "The Bionic Dog", "Doomsday Is Tomorrow", "Deadly Ringer", "Fembots in Las Vegas", and all of the episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man focused on Jaime Sommers, except for her introductory story.

Brooks appeared with Lindsay Wagner on an episode of her television series Jessie (1984) as "Dr. Welt". One of his most recent film appearances was in the 1995 science-fiction B-movie T-Force in which he plays Dr. Gant, a Rudy Wells-like character who creates a team of terrorist-fighting androids who run amok.

Due to Brooks being the third actor to play Wells, two circumstances arose in episodes produced after he joined the series that resulted in previous actors being brought back. The Bionic Criminal required the services of Alan Oppenheimer as Rudy since it relied heavily on flashbacks from The Seven Million Dollar Man, in which Oppenheimer had appeared and switching between the two actors would have sacrificed continuity. Similarly, when the 1973 pilot film was re-edited into the two-part The Moon and the Desert for syndication, Martin Balsam, who played Wells in the TV movie, was commissioned to record new narration for the episodes rather than Brooks.

Pilot[]

Although Brooks did not participate in the 1973 pilot film (Wells was played by Martin Balsam on that occasion), he does appear in the two-part re-edited syndicated version of the pilot film, entitled "The Moon and the Desert". First (and probably erroneously) the opening credit sequence for later seasons was grafted on to the pilot, crediting both Brooks and the completely non-existent Richard Anderson; later in Part 1, Brooks can be seen in operating room footage lifted from later episodes, being observed by Martin Balsam's Rudy Wells!

External links[]

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