Got Smart

Most sitcoms in the second half of the 60s were pretty silly. It's almost as if after The Dick Van Dyke Show left the air, TV decided to wait out the rest of the decade. Shows about country folk in Beverly Hills or mortals married to witches carried the day.

Get Smart was silly, too. But it was also clever. A parody of James Bond, with weird weapons and bizarre criminals, there was a lot going on. And in the center was Don Adams. He played the title role, Maxwell Smart. (That pun is a good example of the lengths they'd go to for a joke.) He even won three Emmys as Agent 86 (another pun, sort of--to 86 someone is to throw him out). The character didn't have a lot on the ball, much to the consternation of Chief and Agent 99, but he was smart enough to catch the crooks each week.

I first discovered the show in reruns. I was a huge fan. Its specialty was catchphrases: "Would you believe...," "Sorry about that, Chief," "The old [something lengthy] trick, and I fell for it," "Missed it by that much," "I asked you not to tell me that," "...and loving it!" My favorite was when Max would insult a criminal, calling him a gorilla or something, and punch him to no effect. Then he'd put his arm around the guy's shoulders and say "hope I wasn't out of line with that gorilla remark." Perhaps Don Adams' death will remind someone to start showing Get Smart again.

PS It brings back a lot of childhood memories. The show starts with Smart walking through a series of steel doors to a phone booth where he drops out of sight (presumably to HQ). My brother and I would stand behind a chair and drop along with him. He had a phone in his shoe. I would pretend anything I was holding--say an apple with a bite out of it--was a phone.

I was also surprised to read that, like myself, Cathy Seipp had a Get Smart lunchbox growing up.