15 replies to this topic

[Turn]

Today marks the 50th anniversary of one of television's greatest spy series' debut on NBC: The Man From U.N.C.L.E, with the pilot episode The Vulcan Affair, which I plan to watch to mark the occasion later today.

 

While sometimes thought of as television's answer to Bond, it carved out its own mark in the genre, especially since it was developed and the pilot filmed before FRWL ever came to the U.S. I think of the series as a complement rather than a rip-off.

 

U.N.C.L.E. has a fascinating history, from its Fleming involvement to almost being cancelled midway through the first season to being a national fad to a quick fadeout. I'm actually looking forward to the new film in 2015, if for nothing else more interest in the series.

 

 

 

 

[thecasinoroyale]

50 years? Wow. The United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. Epic stuff. And behind a dry cleaning store? Priceless.

 

I watched this as a child on TV (I may only be 29, but from the love of James Bond at a young age this was a good watch for action/adventure fans!).

 

I loved the super-cool theme tune (in the latter episodes) and Robert Vaughn was just brilliant as Napoleon Solo - how cool is that name for a spy?

 

I too am eager to see the film, thankfully it seems to be set in and around that era with a solid cast and a great amount of source material. I just hope they keep the theme tune and modify it faithfully like Danny Elfman did in the 1996 'Mission Impossible' remake.

 

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=CjmOkqU6Roo

[DLibrasnow]

I also am interested in the new movie....I just hope they make it in the style of the classic series. I caught an old episode in a rerun the other day and it was the first time I had seen the show in about 25 years.

[Turn]

I think anybody with an interest in this classic era of spymania  would enjoy UNCLE. Given they don't start in the third season when they went camp in trying to follow the Batman trend of the time. Some of those even have some fun qualities.

[Guy Haines]

I also enjoyed The Man From Uncle - one of those shows from the 1960s which made an impression on me (I even have the original version of the theme tune, before it started to sound mid 60s pop influenced, as a ringtone on my mobile!)

 

The TV series was staple fare on UK TV in the 1960s, and I remember in the 70s and early 80s the "films" - TV episodes bolted together to make a movie - were shown on a fairly regular basis, on ITV I think.

 

Plus, does anyone remember the "comeback" TV movie from 1983, with the unwieldy title "The Return Of The Man From Uncle: The Fifteen Years Later Affair"? (Uncle agents never went on missions or assignments, did they - always "affairs", though not necessarily the kind 007 embarked upon!). It wasn't a bad attempt to bring back the originals, Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, and featured three actors who appeared, or went on to appear in Bond movies - Patrick Macnee as the new UNCLE chief, Sir John Raleigh, Anthony Zerbe as the THRUSH villain Justin Severin, and a certain Mr George Lazenby as a character named "JB" (Now, who on Earth could that be? )

[Major Tallon]

I remember both the original series and the "Return" movie.  The middle years of UNCLE were hard to take, but the first year in particular was simply excellent.  And Lazenby's turn as JB was great fun.

[Turn]

I remember the hype in late '82 and early '83 with The Return of the Man From UNCLE movie. One of the big deals for Bond fans at the time was all three actors who played Bond were playing the role again simultaneously for various projects in '82.

 

Return was my first UNCLE experience, save for a screening of To Trap a Spy on a TV showing. So I was excited for it. But it was tough not really knowing the characters aside from what I'd read and a lot of it seemed trying too hard to copy Bond. It wasn't until the CBN Network (a cable channel) began showing the series in the fall of 1985 that I got a taste of the real series. That first episode shown was The Arabian Affair.

 

The great part about having the series on DVD is finding an episode from whichever season you feel in the mood for. I've been rediscovering a lot of those first-season episodes.

[Call Billy Bob]

I'm glad this is finally being made into a proper film! Now, if we could only get proper adaptations of I Spy, The Saint, The Avengers and Danger Man...

[Dustin]

Given some of the previous results I'd rather no see any further attempts at bringing the classic TV shows to the big screen. A new AVENGERS TV series though...

[chrisno1]

I also enjoyed The Man From Uncle - one of those shows from the 1960s which made an impression on me (I even have the original version of the theme tune, before it started to sound mid 60s pop influenced, as a ringtone on my mobile!)

 

The TV series was staple fare on UK TV in the 1960s, and I remember in the 70s and early 80s the "films" - TV episodes bolted together to make a movie - were shown on a fairly regular basis, on ITV I think.

 

Plus, does anyone remember the "comeback" TV movie from 1983, with the unwieldy title "The Return Of The Man From Uncle: The Fifteen Years Later Affair"? (Uncle agents never went on missions or assignments, did they - always "affairs", though not necessarily the kind 007 embarked upon!). It wasn't a bad attempt to bring back the originals, Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, and featured three actors who appeared, or went on to appear in Bond movies - Patrick Macnee as the new UNCLE chief, Sir John Raleigh, Anthony Zerbe as the THRUSH villain Justin Severin, and a certain Mr George Lazenby as a character named "JB" (Now, who on Earth could that be? )

 

I had an old vinyl single of some pop combo doing an interpretation of the theme from The Man from Uncle. It's 90 seconds long and better than a ringtone.

I never saw any of the original TV series but I did catch all the cobbled together movies in a series on BBC2 on early Friday evenings. They used to do things like that in the '80s (eg, MGM Tarzan, The Saint with George Sanders, Flash Gordon with Buster Crabbe, Dr Who repeats, you know the stuff). 

The pilot was incongruously entitled To Trap a Spy over here when released in the cinemas and was a bit of a hatchet job as characters and scenes were created and filmed to fill out a 95 minute running time. For instance Lucianna Paluzzi's sexy turn wasn't in the original. I hated it.

Much better weres One of Our Spies is Missing, How to Steal the World and The Spy with My Face. The other three were a bit tedious I thought: The Spy in the Green Hat (terrible title), The Helicopter Spies and The Karate Killers. All harmless good fun though.

I used to have quite a few of the books, which were bone fide original spin off novels not novelisations of TV episodes. I thought the titles were crazy ('The Stone Cold Dead in the Market Affair' anyone? Or The Radioactive Camel Affair? Priceless.) Sadly I gave them to charity. I gave a lot of stuff to charity I wish I hadn't - that's girlfriends, huh...

The '83 TV movie was rather a plodding effort I thought. 'Nuff said.

I too rather hope they do a decent job of an 'UNCLE' movie.

My main issue with UNCLE was the constant use of THRUSH as a nominal international cure-all villainous megaconglomorate. Still I much prefer it to Mission Impossible which was too bloody smart for my liking and repeated the same basic scenario episode after episode. I think its cause UNCLE has the ultra-smooth Robert Vaughn, who as a kid I considered a hero because he was one of The Magnificent Seven.

[Turn]

Good observation on Mission Impossible. I have several seasons and I can't binge watch those, just once in a while. Whereas in my recent UNCLE viewing marathons they don't get as tedious. I seem to want to watch more. If I feel more serious I can watch the first or fourth season, in between the second season and goofy the third season. MI is pretty much the same over its first four seasons, which are what I own.

 

With MI, I end up thinking a lot about the logistics and how they supposedly have this super-tight timeframe to overthrow a dictator or whatever and how they can get this airtight scenario down and that can sometimes drag down the enjoyment. Still, some of the best episodes are some of the most worthwhile television for the genre.

[chrisno1]

Good observation on Mission Impossible. I have several seasons and I can't binge watch those, just once in a while. Whereas in my recent UNCLE viewing marathons they don't get as tedious. I seem to want to watch more. If I feel more serious I can watch the first or fourth season, in between the second season and goofy the third season. MI is pretty much the same over its first four seasons, which are what I own.

 

With MI, I end up thinking a lot about the logistics and how they supposedly have this super-tight timeframe to overthrow a dictator or whatever and how they can get this airtight scenario down and that can sometimes drag down the enjoyment. Still, some of the best episodes are some of the most worthwhile television for the genre.

 

One of the joys of the Tom Cruise modern stuff is they don't dwell on the logistic stuff. I mean, it is there, but they gloss over it and ensure it doesn't detract from the main action. In a way I find the movies quite Hitchcockian, the rising of tension towards moments of peril, the MacGuffin, the double cross, etc, etc - though of course they are NOT Hitchcockian in substance, merely in execution. I wonder if that was part of the original TV series aim?

Edited by chrisno1, 27 September 2014 - 05:44 PM.

[Turn]

Nice observation, chrisno1. I've never heard of the TV series intentionally going for anything Hitchcockian. It seems the moments of tension are aimed at somebody coming close to calling out the operation before a commercial break and one of the characters easily talking their way out of it and so it goes.

 

I'm a huge fan of the movies as well, which handle the action and the suspense well in equal measures. Of course, the first MI was directed by Brian DePalma, who has often been referred to as a Hitchcock wannabe. That break-in scene in the vault room still holds up well. I also enjoy in the more recent films the kidnapping at the Vatican and the tower sequence with Cruise hanging off the building.

[Guy Haines]

A rather unusual postscript to my previous post from last year.

 

Recently I bought the DVD boxed set of the first series of The Man From UNCLE - and I also have a set of three DVDs featuring five of the feature films. One of those five is "The Spy With My Face" - the one where THRUSH creates a duplicate of Napoleon Solo, kidnaps the real Solo and uses the fake to try and gain access to a super-weapon in a vault in the Swiss alps.

 

The film - and an episode in the TV series called "The Four Steps Affair" - features an Australian UNCLE agent named Kitt Kitteridge, a bearded chap with something of a sense of humour. He was played by a Canadian character actor named Don Harron.

 

I discovered recently that this was the same Don Harron whose humourous books I encountered when I first visited Canada to see my relations over there many years ago. He created a character that Canadian Cbn members may have heard of named Charlie Farquharson, a rustic type from Ontario who appeared on TV over there, and wrote several very funny books - well, I found them very funny - about Canada, its history, people, geography and so on. They were "written" in what I can only describe as "Manglish" - mangled English, where you can just about get what the author is writing. It's quite deliberate - the nearest I can think of as an equivalent over here in England was the late Stanley Unwin and his version of English "Basic Engly Twenty Fido" which members of a certain vintage may remember. Or, musically, the late great northern UK comedian Les Dawson playing the piano - badly! Dawson was in real life an accomplished pianist - you can only get away with that piano act of his if you already know how to play properly.

 

So, behind the beard of UNCLE operative Kitteridge was someone whose books had made me laugh for years - and I never realised until now.

 

And another book I read over the weekend was "From Thunderbirds to Pterodactyls" - the biography of the voice of Scott Tracy and three time Bond supporting player Shane Rimmer. If you want an insight into not only working with Gerry Anderson but the life of an actor who has made a very good career out of mainly supporting roles - plus his views on the likes of, among others Sean Connery and Roger Moore, then it's worth a read.

[quantumofsolace]

https://uk.celebrity...rt-vaughn-james

[Guy Haines]

I agree with Robert Vaughn about the direction the TV series took after season one. There's a certain charm about series one - a bit like the one hour Danger Man episodes. Black and white, with the "Uncle" theme played a bit like the "Dragnet" or "FBI" theme tunes. I've enjoyed watching these B & W episodes again - decades after the first time.

Incidentally, at the moment my mobile phone ring tone is the series one version of the UNCLE theme, which is my favourite interpretation of it. If my mobile was to suddenly go off during council business - unlikely - then my younger council colleagues will be even more bemused - or most likely completely indifferent! ;-)