This Week's 50th Anniversary Viewings
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The Saint
"The Gadget Lovers"
Originally aired April 21, 1967 (UK)
Xfinity said:
Simon impersonates the chief of the Moscow secret police to investigate the gadget-related murders of 13 intelligence operatives.
Of course, they overdo the female Russian colonel eschewing bourgeois, capitalist ways. Reminds me of an episode of
Car 54 that I saw, but that was during the Kennedy era when the Cold War was at its peak. I was under the impression that things had thawed by this point.
At least
Mission: Impossible hardened me to the few scenes in which Roger Moore sports a bad Russian accent. There's also a bit in which Templar correctly speculates that the Chinese are behind the plot, and he briefly uses his hands to slant his eyes...I'm surprised they still show that in this day and age.
It's pretty silly that the head of a major superpower's intelligence agency needs so much help from Simon to do some basic investigating and show some common sense. At one point, when she notices that a letter she's holding is smoldering and likely to explode, she just yells out for Simon while standing there holding it, because only Our Hero can daringly grab the letter from her and throw it out the window!
When the bad guys showed Simon the refrigerator in which they stored their stockpile of highly volatile micro-explosive in the last 10 minutes of the episode, I saw the destruction of their base coming right up...though I didn't actually see it when it happened, because TV budget.
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Get Smart
"A Man Called Smart: Part 3"
Originally Aired April 22, 1967
Xfinity said:
KAOS starts drying up the United States with a secret formula.
OK, this one had some moments that evoked genuine laughs:
-
99 said:
That's the first time you've ever called me Ernestine....I wish it were my name.
Now that's MAD-style humor!
- Max orders the Chief's chauffeur to "follow that car"...and the chauffeur runs down the street after it! Now that's an absurd sight gag!
- A contact that Max and 99 meet at a laundromat hides in a washing machine, which starts when they close the door while KAOS types are walking by.
If the Admiral is supposed to be a spoof on Waverly as I previously speculated, and not just a random "old man" gag, then that's pretty funny.
"This is a Code P alert...that's P as in Peter." Seems like UNCLE isn't the only agency in need of some phonetic alphabet education.
The plot takes Max and 99 to Los Angeles...the most shooting-friendly place that characters in shows that take place in other cities can travel to. In a sequence that takes place at a movie studio, there's a pretty colorful running fight scene that has Max and his opponent going through various types of sets...that's something
Batman should have done.
In their intros to the episodes that I recorded, Decades mentions how they'd use various tricks so that Barbara Feldon looked shorter when standing next to Don Adams. In this one (which is the first in this three-parter to prominently feature her), I noticed height inconsistencies between close-ups...most of the time she looks a little bit taller than him, in one scene she looked a little shorter.
Too soon for me to make any general observations about the show upon the closing of this season. Let's hope for more episodes like this one and less like the last one!
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The Avengers
"Something Nasty in the Nursery"
Originally aired April 22, 1967 (UK)
Wiki said:
Government ministers revert suddenly to childhood, when exposed to a new type of nerve gas.
Steed Acquires a Nanny
Emma Shops for Toys!
On the subject of the "we're needed" scenes and codas not being entirely in-continuity with the rest of the episode...Steed sees that carousel in a toy store during his investigation...making it pretty unlikely that he'd just happen to use it when calling on Emma, before he even knew that the investigation was going to lead him in that direction.
What's more, the coda scene downright breaks the fourth wall:
While not a particularly strong episode, this one is certainly more on the show's game than the previous installment, with the nursery hallucinations and choreographed nanny training filling the surreal quota nicely.
As soon as we got a good look at "her" in a veil, I knew that (one of the) Nanny Roberts was
A MAN, BABY!!!
A Luger-in-the-Box--Now
that's a spy-fi gimmick!
Bond film guest: Paul Hardwick (Soviet Chariman,
Octopussy)
Yootha Joyce also looks familiar--I must be recognizing her from the
Saint episode that she did. It's from early in the current season, before I started doing the reviews, so I would have seen it within the last five months, though I don't distinctly remember it.
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