It Was 50 Years Ago...

[glennagirl.livejournal.com]

Here's an article about the end of UNCLE, on the Spy Commander blog.  It's an interesting read about the last episode that aired 50 years ago this month. Thanks to mrua7 for finding it.
https://hmssweblog.wordpress.com/2018/01/11/50th-anniversary-of-the-end-of-u-n-c-l-e-and-60s-spymania/

Comments

[mrua7.livejournal.com]

Time flies doesn't it? In a way it's hard to believe it's been 50 years.

[laurose8.livejournal.com]

Thanks for sharing. It does look as if UNCLE might have been tarred by some other poor spy film.

[st-crispins.livejournal.com]

As I posted on FB, I did extensive research on why MFU was canceled in 4th season. Contrary to general opinion, the ratings for third season were not bad. Indeed, the best ones were for episodes we hate ---Gorilla, Sonny and Cher, etc.

Batman had made a big splash and great success in campiness and MFU followed suit by hiring many of those writes. Blame Boris Ingster who never took MFU seriously. But Norman decided enough was enough and hired Anthony Spinner [as Bill K sreports, of the Quinn Martin school of tv drama] to produce. Unfortunately, he did not inform the folks at NBC of this change in tone. So, NBC, thinking MFU would remain successfully campy, paired it with The Monkees who appealed to the same general audience --ie: teens.

They also expected Gilligan's Island to be the competition and that also accounted for an effort to counter-program and go more serious.

BUT what happened was this: 1) Spinner not only went way over budget but overshot the goal in both seriousness and violence. Norman was constantly telling him to spend less and protecting him from the angry NBC execs. 2) the new MFU direction was not compatible with The Monkees and teen audiences simply turned MFU off. The ratings dropped like a stone from September onward. 3) Gilligan was not their competition after all. Paley loved Gunsmoke and kept it on. Gunsmoke appealed to dads who had control over the set. They tuned into Gunsmoke at 7:30 and would not relinquish the tv to their children at 8 pm for MFU.

There were plans ---pretty good ones, I might add ---to fix MFU midseason, but Laugh-In was waiting in the wings and NBC decided to drop MFU. It was a good decision on their part: Laugh-In was a huge hit for the network.

Bill K writes how this was part of the overall end to that spy era [there have been others since]. He's right. 1968 was when the fun stopped. It is a watershed year and spies, politics, and the Cold War weren't 'fun' any more. Women's Lib and Civil Rights were on the rise; a generation of young men were dying in Vietnam. The violence of the Dem Convention would be that summer. Breezy, sexy spies just not longer fit.

I don't know what the right answer would have been for then. But it has struck me ever since how prescient MFU was and how predictive Norman's vision was, to this very day. Jingle Bells, Candidate's Wife Affair and various other episodes [not to mention the technology] have seen their real life counterparts. Even about something that seemed, at the time, as outlandish as Thrush. A bunch of rich industrialists and evil geniuses allied with elements of leftover fascism and Nazism trying to take over nations, undermining individual security agencies, using an all powerful computer system to gather riches and power and ruling the world? Nah, could never happen...

[glennagirl.livejournal.com]

Now I must watch Candidate's Wife.
The trend in the 60's, as I recall even as a kid, was to keep hammering on the idea that the enemy was still the Nazis, all of them resurfacing in thinly veiled disguises as post war zealots.
To their credit, the writers gave us Strigas and Terbuf in the first season; still veiled but at least identifiable as portrayals of the Cold War. And The Deadly Games Affair was not a comic portrayal of the previously mentioned zealots, and perhaps reflected what some remnant did indeed hope for.

[st-crispins.livejournal.com]

Thrush brainwashes the wife of a candidate. He's Republican because the Republicans had their convention in San Francisco around that time.

His campaign manager reminds me of Bannon.

[st-crispins.livejournal.com]

Terbuf was modeled on Yugoslavia.

Strigas has lots of Soviet material. Illya's undercover identity looks exactly like Leon Trotsky, an inside joke.

[glennagirl.livejournal.com]

I appreciated the mood, as do most people, of the S1 portrayals. Of course there's Gurnius, which puts us back at stopping the New Nazis. Perhaps the Seven Wonders of the World was a look into the New Age folk ;)
In all seriousness, the grasp of technology and political futurism is interesting from our current POV.