That was a cool one, and had a great Gerald Fried score. And yeah, it was nice to see Cinnamon getting in on the physical action. Didn't happen a lot, though. It was interesting how, early on, they made a point of using Willy's specialty of being really, really strong. Often, his job was to carry or wear something really heavy and make it seem as if the weight wasn't there -- as in "Odds," where he's wearing a very heavy computer vest to rig the roulette wheel, or in another episode ("Wheels," I think) where he has to carry in a stretcher with a teammate hiding under it and make it look like it's empty. Indeed, this is even commented on in "Old Man Out," where they're going undercover as carnival performers, with Willy as the weightlifter. Mary Ann Mobley's character tells him he has to make it look as if he's straining to lift the barbells, to put on more of a show for the audience, and he replies that his job is usually to make it look easy. Later on, this aspect of Willy's role wasn't played up so much; he was just the guy who helped Barney with the grunt jobs and tech stuff, or the guy who played a chauffeur or workman or other supporting role when they needed one. In later seasons, with the diminished cast, Willy more frequently got involved in the kind of featured roleplaying that used to be the specialty of Dan, Jim, Rollin, Paris, etc. And he wasn't nearly as convincing at it.
First season M:I is somewhat similar to first season Star Trek as we see all the players having something in particular to do and showing off their skills. In TOS they really went the distance to make the Trek universe and the Enterprise and crew in particular seem fleshed out and believable.
It was rare, but every once in a while one of the endings made you wonder why the hell they went through all the trickery and subterfuge and disguises and risks, when the end result could have been achieved MUCH more simply. I can't pull one up in my memory at the moment, but there were one or two over the years.
Every so often something just jumps out at me saying, "this really doesn't work." In the episode I just watched, "The Ransom," I'm struck by how all the players knew who each other are and everyone can identify everyone else. I kept thinking there's no way the Crime Boss is going to let this kid live because she can identify everyone holding her. I also found it odd that some criminal, no matter how big time, just happens to know something about Briggs and the line of work he might be in enough that he can blackmail him through kidnapping a relative of an acquaintance. This whole episode just strained credibility a little too far for me. In "Wheels" I couldn't figure out why they went through so much effort to keep some schmuck from voting so that Rollin could impersonate him. I also found Briggs impersonation of a doctor with such unusual requests (turns the lights out so he can check the guy's eyes!!!) just not credible. And then Barney manages to get back under the stretcher without noticeably disturbing the curtain. None of this worked for me.
Nothing against Greg Morris (and for a black actor to be prominent in a TV series for the time was pretty good) but it struck me that in "Eastern bloc" countries he would have stuck out like a sore thumb! Not to mention all the different languages the M:I team would have had to speak. So I think we can let the crediblity in some of the plots go
Yeah, we do have to turn a blind eye (or deaf ear) to the fact that they just adopt a foreign sounding accent rather than speak the language. It's rather analogous to all the aliens in Star Trek being able to speak English. But it's a good point that Barney Collier would indeed have stood out like a sore thumb in the Eastern bloc countries. And yet I really like Barney so it's another thing we have to overlook.
The original Mission: Impossible was first class all the way. Top actors, top stories, top concept, top musical theme. It is an all time television classic. Keep in mind this show went on the air on or around 1965, before the technology explosion that changed the world. What seems so laughingly out of date now was state of the art edginess in 1965. I have never seen one of Tom Cruise's remakes. I find him insufferably boring.
They were doing McGivers before the phrase even existed. One of the most amusing ideas was when Willy was wearing a "portable" computer under his jacket so they could read the upcoming numbers of the roulette wheel in a casino. I really doubt they could have had anything remotely like a portable computer in the mid '60s even if it still weighed a lot. Today you could easily conceive of a very small computer being hidden within your clothing, but definately not in 1965/66.
Well, of course he wasn't going to let the kid live, but that wouldn't make her any less effective as a hostage, because doing what he demanded was the only chance, however slim, of getting her back. That's hardly unusual in hostage-taking stories. As for how the mobster knew about Briggs and his team, I figure he was the target of some earlier, unchronicled IMF operation and figured out who they were afterward. Yeah, why not just ask the guy to help them? There was a line in the tape briefing saying that they weren't allowed to recruit local help, but it wasn't explained why. But then, that would've required casting a new guest star, and they needed to structure the story to justify including Martin Landau, so it had to be Rollin impersonating someone. Yeah, all that stuff happening inside the voting booth would probably be considered to automatically invalidate the results. '66, actually. Same year as Star Trek's series premiere.
One of these days I'm going to do a proper revisit of this series and grade as well as assess the individual episodes season by season.
^I've already done that with seasons 1 & 2 on my blog (well, originally on the Ex Isle BBS, but then reposted) and I'm starting work on season 3 reviews now, time permitting.
I've just finished watching all of Season 1. It was a good run. Not all of the episodes were winners, but I didn't find any of them actually bad. The disappointing ones were just okay as if they were going through the motions. So it's a case of none of it being outright bad, but about 38% being somewhat disappointing. Decent: "Pilot" "Memory" "Operation Rogosh" "Old Man Out" "Odds on Evil" "A Spool There Was" "The Carriers" "The Short Tail Spy" "The Legacy" "The Reluctant Dragon" "The Trial" "The Confession" "The Train" "Shock" "A Cube of Sugar" "The Traitor" "The Psychic" Just Okay: "Wheels" "The Ransom" "Zubrovnik's Ghost" "Fakeout" "Elena" "The Frame" "Action!" "The Diamond" "The Legend" "Snowball in Hell"
I had started getting into classic M:I with Season 2 then jumped back to get through Season 1. Now I'm into Season 3. "The Contender" wasn't bad, but I had a hard time believing Barney's makeup could take the pounding of being in the boxing ring. "The Mercenaries" was also decent, but Barney's gimmick to melt gold bars and drain it out of a vault just doesn't seem at all believable. It isn't just the matter of his apparatus getting hot enough---and, yes, the vault was small and an enclosed space possibly with no real ventilation---but wouldn't the air itself within the vault have dissipated the heat from his heating elements? I just don't find it credible that his small mechanism could have generated sufficient heat to have melted all that gold.
I also noticed that in my recent review. Given that it seemed to take several weeks to train Barney, why didn't he just grow a real moustache? I don't get your problem about the air. There's air in an oven, but that doesn't interfere with cooking the food. On the contrary, the presence of air actually helps transmit heat through conduction and convection. Okay, maybe it's a bit unlikely that the device could've gotten the temperature up to the necessary 1064 degrees Celsius to melt gold, but it's no worse poetic license than the stuff they routinely do with masks. And it's a very clever and unexpected idea for a heist story. I liked it.