It starred Bill Bixby as stage illusionist Anthony "Tony" Blake, a playboy philanthropist who used his skills to solve difficult crimes as needed.

Years earlier, Blake had been in prison on a trumped-up espionage charge in an unnamed country in South America.

Initially, Blake used a private Boeing Jet airliner named The Spirit[1] as a base of operations; it was outfitted as a mobile residence ("It's like any other mobile home, only faster") with live-in pilot Jerry Anderson (Jerry Wallace in the pilot episode, same actor).

Blake drove a white '73 Chevrolet Corvette C3 with soft nose, mostly open T-top Targa roof and custom vanity license plates ("SPIRIT") and, for its time, an exotic feature - a car phone.

The pilot film had shown a four engine jet airplane in gold and brown livery, parked on an apron in daylight, with Spirit painted as nose art.

The show is noteworthy in that Bixby, a keen amateur magician, insisted on performing all of the illusions in person, without any trick photography, although it was not possible for this to be the case in the TV-movie/pilot.

[6] In the Quantum Leap episode "The Great Spontini", Scott Bakula's character, Dr. Sam Beckett, leaps into an amateur magician in 1974 who aspires to appear on Bill Bixby's The Magician; however, owing to his partial amnesia, Dr. Beckett, at first, can only recall Bixby's connection with The Incredible Hulk, which had not been made at that time.