I remember being pissed after seeing the trailer for Generations, which clearly showed the Enterprise's saucer entering a planet's atmosphere. Would'a made a hell of a surprise.
Maybe it's because I grew up in the 60s, but there's just something about women's fashion and makeup of the time that I find incredibley attractive.
Now that I think about it, that would be true for a lot of spy shows -- particularly anything built around the Cold War -- but I'm not sure it applies to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. so much. After all, the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement was an international security organization in which the US, the USSR, and other countries all participated in as partners. The whole premise of the show largely glossed over the Cold War in favor of a more utopian global-partnership scenario in which the enemies were rogue states, terrorists, mad scientists, supervillains, and the like. It also relied a lot on futuristic high-tech gadgetry. So I don't see it as a premise that's very strongly bound to the '60s in anything but style. The most Sixties-ish things about it were its rampant misogyny and racial/cultural stereotypes, and those are hardly worth preserving. Now, Mission: Impossible is a concept that I've felt would make more sense in the '60s or '70s. With modern facial recognition tech, going undercover as someone else isn't really a feasible option for a spy anymore, but it's the entire premise of M:I (at least the series version rather than the very different movie franchise that uses the name). And M:I was also heavily rooted in the Cold War, even though it had to avoid referring to countries behind the Iron Curtain by name, or else make up imaginary names like the United People's Republic and the Eastern European Republic.
I'm roughly the same age as you, and I also have a preference for the women's fashions of the 1960s. In fact, I have a whole closet full of them! And imaginary languages ("Gellerese") that looked vaguely East European but could be read just like English.
New trailer looks like a lot of fun. When I see him onscreen with Cavill, I still can't help but wonder what an Armie Hammer Batman would've been like, though!
My thoughts exactly. In fact, an U.N.C.L.E. TV show/movie could be set in the present day and its communications tech could be upgraded to a instantaneous video system (which doesn't exist yet) quite easily. As well, M:I had to stop doing missions in the Iron Curtain in the 70's (when the show should have ended) because that kind of thing wouldn't fly with people anymore, so the show runners had them taking on organized crime, drug dealing, shady record company execs, corrupt politicians and labour leaders, solving the old cold case of a gangster by having him believe it's the 1930's when it's actually the 1970's, and so on-all things that can and could be handled by the FBI or local law enforcement. A better thing for them to do would have been to take on an organization similar to SPECTRE, THRUSH, KAOS or HYDRA in a story arc (or arcs) with the odd occasional terrorist organization thrown in for good measure (and they probably would have done the story better than U.N.C.L.E. usually did.)
One more week to go. I've started to see more promotion on television, but I have to say the first trailer seen sometime back remains my favourite. I'm hoping it's more reflective of the film as a whole than the later trailers that make the film seem much more generic.
Just in time for the film's release the original series is now being released in season sets as opposed to the previous expensive series set. Season One is now available on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Man-U-N-C-L-E...977412&sr=1-2&keywords=The+Man+From+U.N.C.L.E. Yeah, it's dated as hell, but it should still be fun, at least the early seasons.
Season 1 is kind of fun if you can tolerate the constant racial stereotypes and misogyny. Season 2 is mediocre, and it gives the impression that the lead actors, or at least their characters, couldn't stand each other; Solo and Kuryakin just don't have the chemistry of other '60s spy double acts like Steed and Peel, Scott and Robinson, Smart and 99, or West and Gordon. I haven't seen seasons 3 and 4, but they're widely reviled for their campiness.
It's a long while since I saw it properly (1980s screenings of the 'movies' followed up by BBC2's 1990s reruns of the colour seasons, plus a few VHS releases of season one), but I tend to go with the received wisdom that season two holds up, season three overdoes the camp, and season four tries to pull back too late. On the whole, The Avengers holds up better, even the uneven Tara King episodes, but that might just be that I have watched them recently (and the Cathy Gale episodes, while sometimes very good, often have plotholes that would be unforgiveable in almost anything else. Or indeed in The Avengers).
I just found season 2 such a drag overall that I didn't even bother to continue. Here's my blog overview of season 2. It had a few standout episodes, like "The Bridge of Lions Affair" (with fantastic performances by Vera Miles and Maurice Evans), "The Cherry Blossom Affair" (pretty much their only portrayal of a non-Western culture that wasn't particularly racist) and "The Minus-X Affair" (the first Peter Allan Fields episode that wasn't crassly misogynistic), and it had some terrific guests like Evans, Miles, Vincent Price, and Ricardo Montalban; but most of it was mediocre, and the constant misogyny and contempt toward non-Western cultures just got oppressive. And when the two lead characters didn't seem to like each other or even have a partnership in any sense, there wasn't much reason for me as a viewer to engage with either of them. I feel I can safely say that every other '60s spy show I'm aware of holds up better than The Man from U.N.C.L.E. does. It's really the weakest of the pack. If it had kept up the quality of its first season, it might've been more competitive, but at the moment I can't think of any that I'd rank below it even then. And that includes The Avengers, Mission: Impossible, I Spy, Get Smart, The Wild Wild West, Danger Man, and The Prisoner (if you want to count that as a spy show). Oh, wait, there's also The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., which I haven't seen, but I guess it counts as an extension of TMFU, and I gather it isn't all that well-regarded. Am I missing any others?
The long delayed in the UK season 1 seems to be doing great guns over here (it made number 2 in the TV chart at work, I can't recall the last time a vintage show did that). It's been years since I've seen any of this show, and I don't think BBC2 ever repeated the black and white episodes (though two of them were actually filmed in colour and had new footage shot to become the first films, though I've seen them I didn't really remember any of the plot and if nothing else a lot of David McCallum must have been added to the first episode to expand his thirty second cameo). Based on the first few episodes, this is huge fun, though as they're all set in either America or the West the racism Christopher mentioned hasn't had chance to kick in yet. The plots are mostly straight spy stuff with a slight surrealistic touch (people in diving suits walking around a corn field, Robert Culp doing The Spy Who Loved Me on a budget) but it's enlivened by a fantastic performance from Robert Vaughn. The man is just effortlessly cool and makes every line and raised eyebrow ridiculously entertaining. I'm only just past the first episode where McCallum has been written into properly beyond "Hey, that extra in the pilot is cool... shove him in every episode!" moments, so it's harder to judge him. His complete lack of a Russian accent (sounding more like someone has unexpectedly shove a finger into him bum) makes Patrick Stewart's French accent as Picard seem convincing though. And as a Transformers fan it's nice to see an old friend as a regular: https://twitter.com/InflatableDalek/status/628606255003758592 I'd always assumed the scope and other additional bits were real accessories to the Walther that Takara had just nicked in the same way they "Borrowed" all those copyrighted car designs. I hadn't realised the add-ons were created especially for the show (and didn't work). I was also tickled to read the gun used to get fan mail. Who'd give a personality to a Walther P38? Amusing a Hasbro exec writing in the British Transformers comic tried to claim Megatron turned into "James Bond's gun", presumably because UNCLE was seen as too obscure for the kids (though as this would have been the year of A View to a Kill I'm not sure pensioner Bond and his PPK had that much more street cred). What's annoying about the DVD packaging is that it tells you which episodes are on which discs, but not which special features are. So I'm not sure what of the many created for the American release have been carried over (though the first disc does have the colour version of the first episode where the show's called "Solo". But the lack of information meant I had to Google what this was).
It's a shame that broadcasters and audiences so often have a prejudice against black & white. This is one of those series (like Lost in Space or Bewitched) where the early B&W episodes are much better than what came later in color. I'd say it starts to show up around episode 10, "The Finny Foot Affair" (right after the one with Shatner and Nimoy pre-Trek), where we get our first dose of "Asian" bad guys played by white actors in yellowface or brownface. But season 1 also has the dreadfully racist "The Yellow Scarf Affair," which equates all traditional Indian religion with Thuggee assassins and death cultists and insists that only Westernized Indians can possibly be civilized or moral. And it has an actual Indian actress as the lone "good," Westernized Indian alongside a bunch of brownfaced white actors, making them look far more unconvincing. (Murray Matheson? Seriously?) And after that, the stereotypes start coming so frequently it's not worth listing them individually. Rather, Culp was doing Captain Nemo for the modern age, and doing it quite well. One of the high points of the season. It seems to me that, despite the conceit of giving all "foreign" characters heavy accents to code their foreignness, in real life, people who are fluent in another language often speak it without an accent, or with the accent of the place they learned it in. So if Illya or Picard learned English in England, and were good enough to master the accent, it's plausible that they'd speak it that way. It particularly makes sense for a spy like Illya, whose job would often require him to speak foreign languages with no hint of his native accent.
One thing I never got a handle on was this notion of incvolving some average John or Jane Q. Public in their missions. To this day that still strikes me nonsensical.
I guess it was their hook, the thing that made them distinct from other spy shows -- filtering the action and intrigue and romance through the perspective of an outsider, a more normal person. Maybe the idea was to ground it, or to raise the stakes by having a civilian be at risk or out of his/her depth. Although they did often play it more for laughs, and often concocted very forced excuses for dragging "the innocent" into the story.
Hammer's Batman would probably be pretty close to Adam West's version depending on how the movie was written. His Lone Ranger was pretty goofy for the most part.
I just realized that this film is premiering today in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. That means there should be reviews on hand right now. There was a news item on the 6pm news on television with the stars on hand and where they asked a number of moviegoers whether they had ever actually seen anything of the original series. Amusing because no one interviewed was even born when the series was in its heyday.