The Greatest American Hero only ran for three seasons in the early ’80s, but it left a lasting impression on a lot of fans of sci-fi and superhero television. Ralph Hinkley, played by William Katt (son of Barbara Hale, who played Della Street in the original Perry Mason series), discovers an alien suit and becomes an unlikely hero.
The strange red and black suit the aliens give Hinkley grants a broad range of different superpowers, none of which he can anticipate, thanks to losing the instruction manual. The suit’s powers seem to be limitless, with the best powers being very familiar to fans of comic books.
Flight
One of Ralph’s best – and funniest – superpowers is the power of flight. The special alien suit, given to him to fight crime and injustice in the world, lets him fly like Superman does, but landing is a different story. Without the instruction manual, Ralph doesn’t really know how to operate the suit. That makes landing a difficult and comical exercise. Nearly every landing in the series is him crashing into the ground or through a window, with him flailing through the air one of the signature moments of the opening credits.
Super Strength
Another superpower that Ralph shares with Superman is super strength. He shares many powers in common with the Man of Steel, which led Warner Bros., the owners of DC Comics, to file a lawsuit against ABC. The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed, as numerous comic book characters share the same skills and abilities. Ralph showed off his strength a lot in the series, including in one episode where he faced off against a villain played by iconic wrestler Andre The Giant, who delivered one of the best quotes from The Princess Bride.
Invulnerability
Another power Ralph shares with Superman and many other superheroes is invulnerability. Crashlanding isn’t so bad when the suit makes him nearly invincible. He can take a punch from Andre The Giant, get hit by a freight train, get shot, it doesn’t really matter. His invulnerability made for some silly moments in the show. The general comic tone of the series and the many allusions to Superman would have fit in just fine with some of the silliest moments from the 1980s Superman movies.
Invisibility
One power Superman doesn’t have (technically) but Ralph does is invisibility. In the fourth episode from season one, “Here’s Looking At You, Kid,” Ralph starts to turn invisible without any intention or explanation. It’s ultimately down to the suit, which he constantly struggles to control.
Invisibility is a pretty common superpower amongst superheroes and supervillains alike, with the most notable being the Invisible Woman from Fantastic Four, a franchise that deserves to be rebooted and will be in the MCU in the near future.
Telekinesis
Ralph starts to drift into the realm of ‘OP’ – overpowered – with the discovery of his telekinesis. He was able to use his telekinesis to stop a car at full speed. Ralph is also telepathic, with his mental abilities becoming a bigger feature of the show as the series went on. After he is exposed to high doses of plutonium radiation, Ralph is also able to control minds. This would eventually extend even to animals. He could telepathically communicate with them in later episodes of the show.
Precognition
Precognition is the ability to see into the future. Ralph developed this ability over time, and later in the series, other people were able to see his visions as well by touching him. Also, people in the future can see him when he has a vision, suggesting that his precognitions were much more concrete than he even really knew. Precognition is a major ability with some serious comic book heavy hitters, like Captain Marvel, who has yet to use the ability in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Super Speed
Ralph could fly and run very fast in the costume. One of Ralph’s villains in the series estimated that Ralph could run at about seventy miles per hour, twice as fast as the fastest land animal, and his top airspeed was somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,600 MPH, as he outran a jet flying Mach 6.
Ralph would have generated enormous friction and pressure at these speeds, so his suit clearly protected him against those as well.
Shrinking
In one episode, Ralph borrowed a power from another famous comic book character: Ant-Man. The Ant-Man movie got a lot of things right about the character, and like Ralph, Scott Lang had to go through some trial and error learning his powers. In “Divorce Venusian Style”, Ralph gets a new copy of the suit instruction manual from an alien. But then he shrinks down to a tiny size, and when he returns to full size, he doesn’t have the book. He loses it forever just like he lost the first one.
Super Exhalation
In the episode “Fire Man,” Ralph shows off a pair of new and staggering powers. He is resistant to fire and heat and uses super exhalation – super breath, basically – to blow out a flamethrower. H also uses this ability in the episode “There’s Just No Accounting …” to put out a Molotov Cocktail. Super breath is of course another power of Superman’s. Rather than be coy about the connection, the Superman references were fairly overt in The Greatest American Hero, to the point that Superman himself actually makes a cameo in the first episode through a clip from an episode of the classic DC animated series Super Friends.
