I remember watching The Man From UNCLE as a kid and really liking it. I was ten years old when it started in 1964. It ran for three full seasons and was cancelled in the middle of the fourth. The first exciting season has 29 episodes and they were in black and white. Leo G Carroll plays the head spy Mr. Waverly, Robert Vaughn is Napoleon Solo and David McCallum is Illya Kuryakin. Originally the show was to be about Napoleon and be titled Solo. The Illya character had a smaller part until he proved popular with the fans. James Bond creator James Fleming worked on the early version of the show but creation/development credit go to Sam Rolfe and Norman Felton. Richard Donner directed several episodes in the early part of the season but is was the only name I recognized.
From it's secret headquarters, behind the tiny tailor shop, Mr Waverly sends Napoleon and Illya on missions of national importance and great danger. Sometimes they are in the US and other weeks they are in some foreign country. Mostly the guys are battling Thrush, a secret villianous organization that operates all over the world. That's why UNCLE was created and has people from around the world working for it. Each week the backlot at MGM Studios in Culver City filled in for some place from around the world. They use a lot of stock footage for the location shots and you see some of the same sets and props in several episodes. It didn't quite look as bad as these Aurora models. I remember having them as a kid. I had a bunch of those tv and movie character model kits. I eventually blew them up in the alley with firecrackers. It's two separate models that fit together to form a larger scene. There were several model sets like that. Even as a kid I liked dioramas.
The show is packed with all sorts of wonderful character actors. Fritz Weaver and Patricia Crowley guest in the first show. Patricia was a frequent guest pretty lady on many tv shows in the 1950's and 1960's and starred on the 1965 sitcom Please Don't Eat The Daises which is based on the Pegg Kerr novel and the Doris Day movie. Fritz often plays villains and here is no exception. You'll probably have seen him in some show or another in the 40 years he'd been acting. Many of the plots have Napoleon and Illya involve some poor citizen to help them in their spying activities. Luckily they usually survive but the bad guys don't. Lots of them get gunned down every week. There's usually a pretty gal that turns
up each week. Like Barbara Feldon, Anne Francis, Jill Ireland or Batgirl Yvonne Craig. Some of the actors that turned up in the first season were Robert Culp, who's building a nuclear ark for when the holocaust comes, a very young Kurt Russell, former football star Roosevelt Grier, Eddie Albert, Ceasar Romero and George Sanders. William Shattner and Leonard Nimoy starred together in an episode a couple of years before they did Star Trek and Elsa Lanchester plays a naughty old lady.
The episodes were more serious when the show started, there was a bit of humor, and a body count. It was still a 60's tv show and that seems pretty tame compared to today's cable programming. There's the usual spy on spy action each week, with a lot of sneakin' about and trickery, but occasionally they get a little more wacky with the schemes. One of the episodes had a group trying to re-animate the body of Adolf Hitler and another had Eddie Albert as a Thrush evangelist, Brother Love, who is constructing a nuclear spaceship. With that many episodes you'd guess that there might be some that aren't the best, and you'd be right, but on average they're pretty watchable. Not as bleak as Danger Man. That's the Patrick McGoohan series that started in 1960 and ran for 4 series in England. I saw those as a teen and again a few years ago and was surprised to see how many ended angrily, regretfully or sadly. The Man From Uncle is a bit more light hearted and usually ends with the villian vanquished and the guys off with some ladies. I haven't put the rest of the 3 seasonson my NetFlix queue yet and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to spend the money on a real set. The complete 4 seasons are still over 100 bucks in a box set. That's just over a buck a show but still pricey. I'll be happy with NetFlix for now.
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