Wayback Wednesday: Get Smart
04 Jun
This show’s run ended before I was born, but for some reason, I have memories of watching it when I was little. Did they do reruns in the days before Nick at Night? No matter, I do remember liking the bumbling Maxwell Smart and his cool shoe phone.
The other day my daughter and I went to see Indiana Jones and the Stupid Alien Thing and one of the previews was for a movie version of Get Smart starring Steve Carell. I’ve never been sure of the wisdom of making movie versions of old 60s TV shows, but I will pretty much see anything Steve Carell is in
The show, for the uninitiated, featured Agent 86 (Smart) who worked for CONTROL whose job it was to periodically foil the plans of KAOS whenever they attempted to take over the world. Because the show was a comedy, inevitably Smart would get in trouble and his infinitely more capable partner (or assistant, since these were the 60s and the women weren’t quite all liberated and equal yet), Agent 99 (played by Barbara Feldon) would have to bail him out.
I wonder if Get Smart and his gadgets were a sort of parody to the smooth and suave James Bond. I’m almost sure it was.
Anyway, this was a gem of a show, with wonderful dialogs and jokes. Here’s hoping the movie will be a gem as well. But it might miss Gem status “by *that* much.” (Oh come on, I had to work the tagline in somehow :))
Bit o’trivia: Agent 99 was originally supposed to be named Agent 69; NBC censors nixed the name after deeming it to be too “sexually suggestive”. Also, in the 1930’s, a group of women pilots formed an organization called the “99’s”. They called it that because at the first meeting, 99 women showed up, one of them was Amelia Earhart. - From the IMDb.

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