The Man From U.N.C.L.E-TV show

[Brannigan]

(I didn't see a thread directly related to the show, so I thought I'd start one).

I've been watching The Man from UNCLE and am about midway through Season 1. I had never seen it, but read about James Bond creator Ian Fleming's connection to the show and thought I'd check it out. Its been pretty entertaining, although I'm disappointed to read that by the end of Season 2 the show has devolved into a Batman like campiness
As most are probably aware, there are several Star Trek connections, most obviously the fact that Shatner and Nimoy appeared in an episode together. In addition I have seen several Star Trek guest stars (Ricardo Montalban was in one of the episodes I recently watched, and looked surprisingly older in 1965 then he did in 1967), and there is a Del Floria's Flower Shop listed on the businesses on DS9's promenade.
Overall its been good, although limited by 60's TV. Several episodes so far could have made great two part episodes. For example The Double Affair, in which someone impersonates Napoleon Solo, would have made a great two parter that investigated how someone would have known so much about UNCLE and been able to impersonate its top agent so well (a mole?). I know it was made into a movie, but I haven't seen the movie so I maybe that is addressed? Either way, a good show.
Anyone else watch it or like/dislike Man from UNCLE?

 

[auntiehill]

I used to really like Man from UNCLE. I stumbled upon it many years ago, after college, and fell madly in love with Illya Kuryakin---you know, as one does.

But, yes, the campiness of it was a bit hard to take at times, but it definitely was a show of its time. I did enjoy the banter between the Illya and Napoleon; it was a lot of fun.

 

[Saga]

i watched the first season a couple years ago and enjoyed it. the episode with Shatner and Nimoy was a lot of fun. i haven't had time to watch the remaining seasons.

i'm curious about the upcoming film. wondering if it will be serious or campy.

 

[Forbin]

I finished a complete rewatch a few months ago. Yes, season three is utter tripe. Even Vaughn, in the extras, brought up the very scene that made me walk away from it for a few months - a "jungle girl" episode where Napolean ends up dancing the watusi in a treehouse with a gorilla.

They tried to get the serious spy biz back in season four, though, with mixed results.

I also just finished Girl From UNCLE just the other day. That show never really strays from the Batman campiness, unfortunately. But hey, Stephanie Powers

 

[Velocity]

I remember liking those shows as a child. Girl From U.N.C.L.E. was mostly about April Dancer's wardrobe. TV would (all 3 channels) copy any successful show so there would be a bunch of spy shows, and Batman launched other super hero shows, and of course there were Westerns until they fell out of favor.
Secret Agent (cue Johnny Rivers) seemed to take itself more seriously than Man from U.N.C.L.E really did.

 

[Melakon]

UNCLE's first season was its best. Producers after Sam Rolfe didn't have the same sense of style. The series first aired when I was 13, and watching the show decline was disappointing back then.

 

[EnriqueH]

I barely remember any episodes, but my dad is a HUGE fan of the show from back when it originally aired during his grade school and high school years.

I do remember "One Spy Too Many" and "Return of the Man from UNCLE", (which also featured George Lazenby in a cameo). And I remember enjoying both.

I've been meaning to watch it.

 

[Christopher]

I reviewed the first couple of seasons on my blog a while back. I found the first season moderately enjoyable, though rather backward in its portrayals of gender and race. The second season had a few good episodes, but was largely kind of a mess, and was even worse with gender and race. The show seemed to go out of its way to feature demeaning stereotypes of every non-Western culture they could think of -- they even did Eskimos once. In comparison to more racially progressive contemporaries like I Spy and Mission: Impossible, it really comes off looking bad. I got quite sick of the thoughtless stereotyping and rampant sexism by the end of season 2. And there wasn't much else to redeem it.

One problem was that Vaughn and McCallum didn't really seem to have much of a team chemistry, certainly not in season 2. If anything, they didn't seem to get along. The characters were generally acting separately in season 2, and when they did interact, it tended to be snippy and bickering. It was probably meant to be playful rivalry and teasing, but it didn't feel friendly to me.

So I haven't even bothered to check out season 3. I might take a look when the reruns on MeTV get there, some months from now. Or if I run out of other DVDs in my Netflix queue, although that's unlikely to happen anytime soon.

 

[Forbin]

I reviewed the first couple of seasons on my blog a while back. I found the first season moderately enjoyable, though rather backward in its portrayals of gender and race. The second season had a few good episodes, but was largely kind of a mess, and was even worse with gender and race. The show seemed to go out of its way to feature demeaning stereotypes of every non-Western culture they could think of -- they even did Eskimos once. In comparison to more racially progressive contemporaries like I Spy and Mission: Impossible, it really comes off looking bad. I got quite sick of the thoughtless stereotyping and rampant sexism by the end of season 2. And there wasn't much else to redeem it.

In one of the last Girl from UNCLE episodes, the villian was a female Japanese mastermind. Of coruse she was played by a caucasian actress with bad eye prosthetics, but just to make sure we got it, she was in full whiteface geisha makeup. Then her evil headquarters featured a clever deathtrap - a blue statue of the Hindu god Kali that could throw daggers. In the final fight scene she used a sword I recognized as a Chinese design.

Apparently nobody cared at all back then.

 

[Christopher]

In one of the last Girl from UNCLE episodes, the villian was a female Japanese mastermind. Of coruse she was played by a caucasian actress with bad eye prosthetics, but just to make sure we got it, she was in full whiteface geisha makeup. Then her evil headquarters featured a clever deathtrap - a blue statue of the Hindu god Kali that could throw daggers. In the final fight scene she used a sword I recognized as a Chinese design.

Apparently nobody cared at all back then.

Absolutely. TMFU treated everything from the Middle East to the South Pacific as interchangeable, even down to using the same music cues -- all just part of "the inscrutable Orient." This was a common attitude for TV creators of the era, as seen in characters like Jonny Quest's Hajji (a stereotypical Hindu whose name is a Muslim honorific) and Star Trek's Khan Noonien Singh (whose last name is right for a Sikh male but whose first name is generally a Muslim surname in South and Central Asia and whose middle name is Chinese -- not to mention being played by a Mexican actor in brownface and not following Sikh customs at all in his attire and appearance).

Still, the one TMFU episode I've seen that actually managed to do a decent job representing a foreign culture was "The Cherry Blossom Affair," set in Japan and featuring France Nuyen. Quoting from my blog review:

Oh, by today’s standards it wallows in Orientalism, with lots of thick accents and “Oh, look how Japanese we are” moments — THRUSH’s front is a karate dojo, Harada is obsessed with baseball and life-size kabuki marionettes (which are obviously stuntmen in costumes), and a policeman mentions to Illya that they could make his UNCLE radio for half the price — but by the standards of the series to date, its portrayal of Japan is surprisingly authentic and respectful, with genuine Asian actors, real Japanese being spoken, and characters like Cricket and Harada coming off as rather respectable and non-stereotyped. There’s a bit of business where Kutuzov makes some condescending remarks about how the Japanese can’t get the air conditioning to work, only to be smugly informed by Harada that the broken A/C unit was built in Kutuzov’s own anonymous country — a nice subversion of Western condescension.

So they didn't always have white actors in yellow- or brownface, but yes, it did often happen. There was the deeply racist "The Yellow Scarf Affair," which basically portrayed all Hindu culture and religion as equivalent to the Thuggee assassin cult, a primitive, savage tradition that needed to be eradicated by Western enlightenment. It featured an actual Indian actress (Kamala Devi) as the "good," Westernized guest character, but all the other Indians were played by white actors (including Murray Matheson as Devi's evil father), and putting them in the same shots with Devi just underlined how ludicrously fake the brownface was.

 

[Kirby]

I haven't watched U.N.C.L.E in a very long time, but I did like the show. Having watched a lot of NCIS over the past several years, it's kind of weird to think of Ducky as Illya Kuryakin.

 

[Forbin]

Stepping into an aside on the casual racism subject - I'm watching some Get Smart this week, and so far we've had the evil Chinese mastermind "The Craw", who has a magnetic claw for one hand, and constantly corrects Max's pronunciation of his name by saying "Not the Craw, The CRAW!" And God help me, I laugh myself silly every time.

Another guest character was "The famous Hawaiian detective Harry Hoo" (Who? Yes, Hoo.), who was simply a Charlie Chan clone, played by a white guy, who acted entirely like a cartoon Chinese guy. Why they even said he was Hawaiian, I don't know.

 

[Christopher]

Another guest character was "The famous Hawaiian detective Harry Hoo" (Who? Yes, Hoo.), who was simply a Charlie Chan clone, played by a white guy, who acted entirely like a cartoon Chinese guy. Why they even said he was Hawaiian, I don't know.

Because it was a parody, I suppose, so they wanted everything to be almost-but-not-quite.

 

[Saga]

Stepping into an aside on the casual racism subject - I'm watching some Get Smart this week, and so far we've had the evil Chinese mastermind "The Craw", who has a magnetic claw for one hand, and constantly corrects Max's pronunciation of his name by saying "Not the Craw, The CRAW!" And God help me, I laugh myself silly every time.

Another guest character was "The famous Hawaiian detective Harry Hoo" (Who? Yes, Hoo.), who was simply a Charlie Chan clone, played by a white guy, who acted entirely like a cartoon Chinese guy. Why they even said he was Hawaiian, I don't know.

i love that episode. everytime they do that 'The Craw!' bit i crack up.

 

[Brannigan]

Reading the comments about racism and sexism in UNCLE, I believe Christopher put it best in post 10.
I think you have to put 60's TV in the context of the time. Yes, we cringe at the apparent racism and sexism, and perhaps UNCLE was more overt about it than other shows, but it was accepted at the time in a world before PC. Star Trek had its own sexist and racists moments as well as had been well discussed on this forum. An example of sexism in Trek would be Marla McGivers falling prey to Khan's charms in a way that makes her betray her crew and uniform. It paints women as being weak minded and easily susceptible to male charm.
I'm not saying that any of this is acceptable and nor am I apologizing for the content of the shows, but again I think we must put them in the context of the time.

 

[Christopher]

^That's true, of course, but part of the context of the time is that there were other shows that were starting to rise above that. And most of the spy shows of the era were surprisingly progressive -- I Spy and Mission: Impossible in terms of racial inclusion, and M:I, The Avengers, and (somewhat) Get Smart in terms of depicting strong, capable female leads. TMFU fell short of its contemporary spy shows in both respects. True, they were all sometimes guilty of stereotyping; Get Smart's use of Asian stereotypes has been mentioned, and while M:I generally avoided non-Western countries altogether, it did have some unfortunate moments of yellowface, like the one where Leonard Nimoy was supposedly able to pass successfully for Japanese among actual Japanese people. But none of them actively embraced ethnic stereotypes as constantly as TMFU did, and none of them wallowed in misogyny as much as TMFU did. Of the '60s spy shows I've seen, TMFU is the worst in this regard.

(Although I should add that the '88 revival of Mission: Impossible did more frequently visit non-Western cultures -- a consequence of being filmed in Australia -- and it was sometimes quite racist, or at least painfully ignorant, in its portrayal of them. Its second-season episode "Cargo Cult" was horrendously racist in its portrayal of "primitive" South Pacific islanders, even in the course of attempting to portray them as innocents in need of protection; and its final episode was set in a cartoon version of Egypt as portrayed by a writer who evidently knew nothing of Egypt beyond what he'd seen in old movies.)

 

[Silvercrest]

I haven't watched U.N.C.L.E in a very long time, but I did like the show. Having watched a lot of NCIS over the past several years, it's kind of weird to think of Ducky as Illya Kuryakin.

I'm in the same boat, but I've watched a little U.N.C.L.E. recently and it's interesting to look for Ducky's mannerisms in Illya's performance.

 

[Velocity]

On NCIS someone once asked Gibbs what Ducky looked like and he answered, "Illya Kuryakin" which pleased me to no end.

 

[Melakon]

One problem was that Vaughn and McCallum didn't really seem to have much of a team chemistry, certainly not in season 2. If anything, they didn't seem to get along. The characters were generally acting separately in season 2, and when they did interact, it tended to be snippy and bickering. It was probably meant to be playful rivalry and teasing, but it didn't feel friendly to me.

The teen mags of the day were always trying to promote a backstage feud, though the actors always denied any such thing.

 

[Christopher]

I knew nothing about the magazines, but I got the impression just from watching that the actors didn't get along. Of course they wouldn't have admitted it at the time.