Sunday, January 15, 2012

Get More Smart


Get More Smart

Secret agent stories entered popular culture with Ian Fleming’s James Bond in the 1950s.  Although there were only two serious video versions – the first two Bond films and the superior Danger Man / Secret Agent / The Prisoner television series with Patrick McGoohan – this transient fashion of the early 1960s has enjoyed a long half-life.  Spoofs, all of them good-natured, began almost immediately and continue today.  Even James Bond is no longer the patriotic functionary of a collapsing empire; he quickly became a self-parody in the dizzy Roger Moore era, and has lately fallen into to the sensitive slough of cultural despond by lesser writers and directors, failing to use the great acting talents of Young Blue Eyes.

The earliest and best takeoff of spy thrillers is Get Smart, which aired on television from 1965 to 1969.  All the spy conventions are there – the secret spy organizations (CONTROL and its evil opposite, KAOS), the stern but fatherly director, two-seater drop-tops, glamorous clothes, beautiful women, unnecessarily complicated gadgets, the mad villains, and lots and lots of firearms.  Secret Agent Maxwell Smart and the gang at CONTROL take these usages and twist them into delightful illogic: CONTROL’s government budget is so low that in one episode The Chief takes a part-time job as a cleaner.  Agent Smart is brave and tough but not very smart, and is often rescued by gorgeous Agent 99 dressed in her Carney Street best.  The various mad geniuses are Bond villains who have had too much coffee, and the gunfire, explosions, visual gags, falls, tumbles, and car wrecks are straight out of The Three Stooges.

And it is all wonderful, harmless fun. 

In cable-channel retrospectives the cliches’ “cutting edge” and “ahead of its time” are employed with illogic and abandon.  Get Smart, happily, was definitely of its time: Agent 99 dresses in swinging London style, and Max and the Chief are dapper in suits with narrow ties.  The Cold War, hippies, Russians, Germans, desert sheiks, Chinese Communists, motorcycle gangs, the threat of nuclear war, cooing seductresses, and South American dictators all come in for a comic treatment that is no edgier than Leave it to Beaver.  Cigarettes and cocktails abound in their prelapsarian innocence, and Max and Agent 99 never, never, never overnight with each other.

Repeated lines from Get Smart were omnipresent in the 1960s, and many continue.  Max’s nasal “Would you believe…?” survives, though few know of its origins.  A typical “Would you believe…?” occurs when Max is in the hands of the villains, and would go (my quote, from memory, is not precise) something like this:

Siegfried: “You are in the hands of KAOS. Put down your weapons.”

Max: “Would you believe that this island is surrounded by the 6th Fleet?”

Siegfried: “I find that hard to believe.”

Max: “Would you believe the 1st Fleet?”

Siegfried: “No.”

Max: “Would you believe two Boy Scouts in a canoe?”

A very few of the other repeated gags:

Siegfried: “Zis iss KAOS; ve don’t ‘shush’ here!”

Max: “Missed it by that much.”

Long-suffering 99: “Oh, Max.”

Max: “The old ____ in the _____ trick.”

Max (when his schemes go disastrously wrong): “Sorry about that, Chief.”

Get Smart would be funny as a stand-alone comedy without cultural references other than the fictional creations of Ian Fleming and Patrick McGoohan.  However, Get Smart engineered takeoffs on dozens of cultural markers, both transient and transcendent.  The following is a partial list of books, movies, television shows, and poems (and how many gags based on Samuel Taylor Coleridge or obscure Czech films have you heard lately?) celebrated by the brilliant writers and actors of a show only the superficial would dismiss as, well, superficial:

One of Our Aircraft is Missing
Bye, Bye Birdie
The Reluctant Debutante
The Wild Ones
Peyton Place
Our Man in Havana
Murder on the Orient Express
Ship of Fools
Charlie Chan
Casablanca
The Prisoner of Zenda
Doctor No
Island of the Da(r)ned
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.
The Mummy
How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying
Appointment in Samarra
A Man Called Horse
The Greatest Show on Earth
Cinderella
Snow White
Gilligan’s Island
Goldfinger
Somebody up There Likes Me
Witness for the Prosecution
The Fugitive
Zorba the Greek
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
National Velvet
Spartacus
Alfie
Goodbye, Columbus
Bonnie and Clyde
To Sir With Love
Ironside
Rear Window
The Great Escape
The Secret of Santa Vittoria
Closely Watched Trains
A Tale of Two Cities
The Fugitive
House of Wax
The Avengers
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
King Kong
The Grapes of Wrath
Ice Station Zebra
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
The List of Adrian Messenger

Max: “Would you believe that Get Smart is the best television show ever?”

Siegfried: “I find that hard to believe.”

Max: “Would you believe that Get Smart is the most popular television show in Khazakstan?”

Siegfried: “No.”

Max: “Would you believe that Get Smart is funnier than Republicans?”


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