The Greatest American Hero / YMMV

Broken Base:
- Ralph losing the second instruction booklet. Some fans claim that They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot about a ton of scenarios involving Ralph learning the full capabilities of the suit, while still maintaining the mishaps that made the show more than a conventional action adventure show (when Ralph begins to read the second book, he displays the ability to shrink and becomes smaller than an ant, but can't figure out how to return to normal size), and that it could have opened up new scenarios where Hilarity Ensues because what Ralph tries to do goes horribly right; while others think that letting Ralph kept the instruction manual meant that he'd no longer have a reason to be incompetent at super-heroics, and thus risk turning him into a boring Invincible Hero.
- There's also considerable Mood Whiplash in the aliens showing Ralph why they gave him the suit— that their world had been destroyed and they were intervening on Earth to try to prevent the same from happening— then Ralph immediately losing the manual in a scene played for laughs.
Fridge Brilliance: Ralph's son Kevin is gradually Brother Chucked over the course of season 1... which ties in with the custody battle briefly alluded to in the pilot. Ralph lost.
Harsher in Hindsight:
- The near crash of the space shuttle Columbia, until Ralph catches it and brings it down intact.
- The second half of the pilot involved Ralph Hinkley attempting to thwart the assassination of the President. The pilot aired on March 18, 1981; almost exactly two weeks before John Hinckley's assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan that forced (among other things) the temporary name change to "Hanley".
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- The "Captain Bellybuster" episode features Chuck McCann as said role, years before he'd become the voice of Duckworth on Disney's DuckTales (1987). What's amusing is in this episode, Bellybuster, along with Ralph and Bill, are referred to as "Huey Dewy, and Louie" by a villain at one point.
- Seeing Faye Grant and Richard Herd in the pilot when you know they both appeared in another 1980s series involving aliens visiting Earth.
- In "Classical Gas" the students' band has Rhonda on vocals as Tony can't sing. Hence Tony's portrayer lipsyncing when he played a rock star!
Nightmare Fuel: The show was generally pretty light and fluffy, but occasionally...
- The murder victim in "Operation: Spoilsport" who gets reanimated by the Suit-bestowing aliens and abruptly looms up into view as a white-faced zombie/ghost.
- "The Beast in the Black" features, yes, a set of giant disembodied chomping teeth zooming around in a lightless void.
Parody Displacement:
- Parodies of the theme song, basic plot, and the goofy looking Hinkley are well known among people who were born years after the show ended and have no idea what is even being parodied.
  - Most notably, there's George's infamous Funny Answering Machine from Seinfeld.
  - And its use at Jackson's inauguration in Gilmore Girls.
  - The theme song is also used as the intro theme in most episodes of The Cinema Snob.
  - One year Homestar Runner was Ralph for Halloween
    Homestar: Baweeve it or not I'm walkin' awound, never thought I could Twick or Twe...ee...eat!
  - It was also used in Dog of Wisdom, being sung by the two dogs in the video.
  - In Kickassia, it forms the tune on Sean's answering machine ("Believe it or not, Sean isn't at home..."), which may have been a parody of both the original theme and the Seinfeld spoof.
Retroactive Recognition: Danny Glover is a vice cop in the episode "Fire Man". And Joe Mantegna turns up in "Now You See It" as an FAA clerk.
Special Effect Failure:
- The sea monster at the end of "The Devil in the Deep Blue Sea" is a laughably bad hand puppet that thankfully only appears for a few seconds.
- The current page image for the live action TV subpage is from an early episode ("Here's Looking at You, Kid") in which Ralph is trying to control his invisibility powers, and ends up becoming partly visible—with great dirty overlaps between the blended shots.
- superimposition of Zephyr 1 (a prototype jet sent on a collision course with Air Force One by the villain) in the climax of "This Is the One the Suit Was Meant For" is worse than the climax of Airport '75.

YMMV / The Greatest American Hero

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