Believe it or not, Hollywood is once again trying to tap into Greatest American Hero nostalgia, with Deadline reporting that ABC has given a pilot commitment to a half-hour reboot of the Stephen J. Cannell superhero comedy. This new project is apparently separate from the reboot Phil Miller and Christopher Lord were trying to get off the ground at Fox a few years ago, and will center on a tequila-drinking, karaoke-loving Clevelandite named Meera.
The original series, which aired on ABC from 1981 to 1983, starred William Katt as a bumbling teacher who finds himself tasked by aliens with fighting crime, using a poorly documented supersuit with a nebulous list of powers. Interestingly, the series ended with Katt passing the suit off to a female protege (in an episode title “The Greatest American Heroine”), a fact that presumably won’t do much to tamp down the ire of the kind of guy pissed off that another “classic” franchise is being “ruined” by putting a woman in the lead.
Anyway, here’s the show’s original theme song (and the Seinfeld version to boot), since it’s already stuck in our damn heads courtesy of this news.