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Fifteen years after the conclusion of the 1966-1973 TV series and eight years before the first movie, ABC launched Mission: Impossible '88.

Facts:

* The 1988 revival was precipitated by what remains the longest Writers Guild strike in history. The idea was to repurpose scripts from the original series.

* A 62-year-old Peter Graves was the only returning regular aside from Bob Johnson, who continued to play the voice on the self-destructing recordings. (The character of Phelps, who did not appear in the series’ original first season, was also the only one carried over into the movies.)Between 1973 and 1988, Graves appeared in the two “Airplane!” movies.

* The self-destructing audiotapes were replaced by self-destructing mini-laserdiscs. These displayed video as well as audio.

* The 1988 series was shot in Australia. Australian actors Thaao Penghlis and Antony Hamilton were cast in roles similar to Roland Hand and Willy Armitage.

* Though a sequel to the original CBS series, ABC originally considered making the 1988 version a reboot, with new actors playing Hand, Armitage and Cinnamon Carter.

* The Writers Guild strike was resolved in August, so only a handful of the series’ 35 episodes were remakes of old episodes.

* Lynda Day George and Greg Morris both guest starred as Casey and Barney, their characters from the old series. Though George’s character was named “Casey” in the original, everybody suddenly had to start calling her “Lisa” to avoid her being confused with 1988 IMF agent Casey Randall. (It was fleetingly noted that George’s full character name was actually “Lisa Casey.”)

* “V” icon Jane Badler joined the series in its second season as IMF agent Shannon Reed.

* Phil Morris, son of Greg Morris, was a regular on the new show. He played Grant Collier, son of Greg Morris’ Barney Collier character. Morris would grow far more famous for his role as Johnny Cochran-like attorney Jackie Chiles in five latter-day episodes of “Seinfeld.”

Long before Nina Sharp and long before Steven Anderson changed his name to Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Six Million Dollar Man could run 60 miles per hour and sported a 20x zoom lens in his eye socket. The opening credits suggest his robotic legs and arm are powered by tiny atomic reactors.
The fictional Steve Austin was an moon-walking astronaut who lost two legs, an arm and an eye while testing an experimental wingless “lifting body” craft back on Earth. The series is based on Martin Caidin’s 1972 novel “Cyborg.” The original TV movie did not feature the novel’s Oscar Goldman but instead starred Darren McGavin as crippled Office of Special Operations supervisor Oliver Spencer. Cybernetics genius Rudy Wells, later played by Alan Oppenheimer and Martin E. Brooks, was originated by Marin Balsam. Though Austin was portrayed as a civilian astronaut in the first movie, he was an Air Force colonel in both Caidin’s novels and the subsequent TV series. In the “Cyborg” novels Austin’s “eye” was just a removable camera that did not connect to his brain. The literary Austin was more into killing than capturing, and liked to dispatch his enemies with a poison dart he could fire out of his bionic finger.
The utilization of slow-motion footage during action sequences was cribbed from ABC’s slightly older “Kung Fu” series. Austin once tore the arm off a Sasquatch moments before facing down a squad of extraterrestrials.

The Girls Next Door: The Complete Collection purports to chronicle the lives of Hugh Hefner’s sex partners. Two of the girls on the cover may or may not have been boning a ballplayer and a magician while they were living rent-free in the Playboy Mansion and kissing Hef’s eightysomething lips for the E! cameras. And though Crystal Harris, whom Hefner almost married, was a big part of the series, she does not appear on the cover of the set released today. This could be why: