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Post by taylorfirst1 on Jan 19, 2018 22:50:49 GMT
One of my all time favorite TV shows. It had some low points due to "batmanitis" but it remains one of the all time greats as far as I'm concerned.
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Post by mikef6 on Jan 20, 2018 22:42:48 GMT
A while back, I think on the old boards, I saw some first season episodes via DVD and then wrote this little appreciation essay:
Some of the most well remembered TV shows from the ‘60s had fairly short runs (e.g. The Munsters for 2 seasons and Gilligan’s Island for 3). UNCLE was canceled after four years and, amazingly, only cracked the Nielsen Top 20 during its second year. When the first season was in development, NBC brought in Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, as a consultant. Fleming was only around long enough to agree that the show could use a character name from Fleming’s novel, “Goldfinger.” A gangster in the book was named Napoleon Solo. If you remember the film, Solo was the guy who was shot by Oddjob and left in the back seat of a car that went through a metal crusher. After doing this service, Fleming promply died (August 12, 1964) without contributing anything else. Robert Vaughn was cast as Solo who was the chief investigator of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. He is aided by Russian-born Ilya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum. (McCallum is still fighting TV crime as a regular on the CBS crime show “NCIS.”) The head of UNCLE, Alexander Waverly, is played by the always delightful Leo G. Carroll. In the first two episodes, McCallum only appears in a brief scene at the start and then disappears. He doesn’t have a substantial part to play until the third week. As the first season continued, McCallum’s appearances grew in proportion to the flood of calls and letters from female fans who demanded more of Ilya. A recurring theme in all the stories is that an ordinary citizen is either recruited by UNCLE to help or is swept up in events. The first broadcast episode uses the former method as Solo solicits the help of an ordinary housewife who had been the college girlfriend of Bad Guy Fritz Weaver. Solo come close to getting them both killed. That’s another recurring theme. Solo and his citizen sidekick always get captured and threatened with death during the final quarter hour. The first season of UNCLE was shot and broadcast in black and fact – something I had forgotten. The second season arrived in glorious color and was much more outlandish and spoofish than it had been before. Classic TV. I very much enjoyed revisiting it.
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Post by teleadm on Jan 21, 2018 1:24:19 GMT
A while back I gave my brother a box of Man from Uncle movies, two episodes cut together, and he called me up after seeing The Karate Killers, and said now he knows why Every Mother's Son had a sudden hit.
Curd Jurgens, Telly Savalas, Herbert Lom, and Terry-Thomas, but wait he said....the one and only Joan Crawford was in it too. WOW
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Post by geode on Jan 22, 2018 19:00:33 GMT
One of my all time favorite TV shows. It had some low points due to "batmanitis" but it remains one of the all time greats as far as I'm concerned. The first season (B&W) was really good, and its episodes still hold up well. It was played far more seriously than subsequent seasons (color) but occasionally some of those still click. I was an avid watcher at first but it got more cartoonist each year. By the last season I was finding it rather silly. I was almost 17 when it went off and perhaps that was starting to have an effect on how I perceived the show.
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Post by telegonus on Feb 8, 2018 8:11:55 GMT
A while back, I think on the old boards, I saw some first season episodes via DVD and then wrote this little appreciation essay: Some of the most well remembered TV shows from the ‘60s had fairly short runs (e.g. The Munsters for 2 seasons and Gilligan’s Island for 3). UNCLE was canceled after four years and, amazingly, only cracked the Nielsen Top 20 during its second year. When the first season was in development, NBC brought in Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, as a consultant. Fleming was only around long enough to agree that the show could use a character name from Fleming’s novel, “Goldfinger.” A gangster in the book was named Napoleon Solo. If you remember the film, Solo was the guy who was shot by Oddjob and left in the back seat of a car that went through a metal crusher. After doing this service, Fleming promply died (August 12, 1964) without contributing anything else. Robert Vaughn was cast as Solo who was the chief investigator of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. He is aided by Russian-born Ilya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum. (McCallum is still fighting TV crime as a regular on the CBS crime show “NCIS.”) The head of UNCLE, Alexander Waverly, is played by the always delightful Leo G. Carroll. In the first two episodes, McCallum only appears in a brief scene at the start and then disappears. He doesn’t have a substantial part to play until the third week. As the first season continued, McCallum’s appearances grew in proportion to the flood of calls and letters from female fans who demanded more of Ilya. A recurring theme in all the stories is that an ordinary citizen is either recruited by UNCLE to help or is swept up in events. The first broadcast episode uses the former method as Solo solicits the help of an ordinary housewife who had been the college girlfriend of Bad Guy Fritz Weaver. Solo come close to getting them both killed. That’s another recurring theme. Solo and his citizen sidekick always get captured and threatened with death during the final quarter hour. The first season of UNCLE was shot and broadcast in black and fact – something I had forgotten. The second season arrived in glorious color and was much more outlandish and spoofish than it had been before. Classic TV. I very much enjoyed revisiting it. Thanks for the UNCLE write-up, Mike. I liked the show's first season the best. Are you sure it went all-color for its second season? It was NBC, and corporate owner RCA was pushing the sale of color television sets (something most Americans, even middle class ones like my family, did not on the average own), so the quick switch to color makes sense, although I don't remember the show getting campy that early. You're sure about the second season? Not arguing, just wonderin'. To me the first season was truly the show's "iconic" year. It put spies on a weekly TV series, a new thing at the time; for American television, that is. Strange, offbeat shows were all the rage that year (1964-65), and The Man From UNCLE was but one of many, most of them comedies ( The Addams Family, Bewitched, I Dream Of Jeannie), as offbeat became hip that year, and within the next couple of years TV got even more offbeat. For those of us who were around back then and, especially, have a strong historical or cultural-sociological bent it was only a year or so earlier that prime time was dominated either by westerns or doctor and lawyer type shows.
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Post by taylorfirst1 on Feb 16, 2018 21:28:57 GMT
The first season was the only one in B&W. The second season began adding more camp but it was still mostly serious. Season 3 was when the show went off the rails and tried to be as goofy and zany as Batman. They tried to make a correction back to more serious stuff in the 4th season but it was too late and the show ended halfway through season 4.
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Post by bravomailer on Feb 16, 2018 23:28:53 GMT
I loved the show and was especially taken by the cool music by Jerry Goldsmith. The show's success spawned a slew of books. I had several, including The Doomsday Affair.
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Post by taylorfirst1 on Feb 17, 2018 22:59:31 GMT
I loved the show and was especially taken by the cool music by Jerry Goldsmith. The show's success spawned a slew of books. I had several, including The Doomsday Affair. I have one of the books, "The Copenhagen Affair".
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Post by geode on Jul 16, 2018 17:25:27 GMT
I loved the show and was especially taken by the cool music by Jerry Goldsmith. The show's success spawned a slew of books. I had several, including The Doomsday Affair. I have one of the books, "The Copenhagen Affair". I bought several books when first published including that one. I think only one of them impressed me. I still have them somewhere or other. The covers were nice.
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schicklgruber
Junior Member
@schicklgruber
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Post by schicklgruber on Jul 20, 2018 1:16:58 GMT
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Post by geode on Dec 23, 2018 10:17:19 GMT
Thank you for the link. I have the original issue that was in but it is in storage and unavailable to me for decades. I have also gotten to other satires I remember through the link.
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