I asked you not to tell me that!

When I was a kid my favorite show was Get Smart.  Anachronistic, I know, but I grew up watching Nick at Nite and of all the shows of the 60s and 70s I liked the most Get Smart was tops.  Sure there was the sophisticated wit and realistic marriage of Rob and Laura Petrie of The Dick Van Dyke Show, there was the delightfully surreal meta comedy of Green Acres, there was the show that seemed to blend the two Bewitched, there were the many loves of Dobie Gillis, the sanitized live-action Dennis the Menace, the NewsRadio (at least in terms of the relationship between the male and female leads) in the Civil War type show F-Troop, and then there were the later shows like Mork and Mindy, Taxi, The Brady Bunch, and The Partridge Family (not to mention the shows on there now, shows that I remember as new.  But that's not unusual as Nick at Nite always had shows that were roughly 30-15 years since ending in first run).

But of all those hit shows none of them made me laugh like Get Smart.  It was just a cool show.  There were cool spy gadgets like the tape recorder hidden in the camera and the camera hidden in the tape recorder, there were exotic locales and diverse locales ranging from an airport in Washington D.C. to an airport in Russia, from the headquarters of CONTROL to the headquarters KAOS, from dungeons to carnivals and recording booths and the Arctic.

There were the catchphrases:

* Would you believe?  An example from Don Adams old stand-up act is below courtesy of WouldYouBelieve.com:

Faversham: You think you've got me, but I have you surrounded by the entire mounted 17th Bengal Lancers.
Khan: I don't believe you.
Faversham: Would you believe the First Bengal Lancers?
Khan: No
Faversham: How about Gunga Din on a donkey?

* Max: Don't tell me I [fell off the horse]
  99: You fell off the horse Max
  Max: I asked you not to tell me that!

* Missed it by that much!

* The old explaining-a-Get-Smart-catchphrase-said-by-Max-to-congratulate-a-foe-by-using-a-cumbersome-name-for-a-trick trick.

* Oh Max!

And why was 99 so fond of this guy who talked to everyone like he was reading a children's book to them?  I loved the chemistry between the two, but it's clear this show was fairly family friendly because of the hands-on-his-hips incredulity he had about him whenever he encountered any situation.  It's that kind of mix of scolding and surprise that adults have when they found out a kid only stole a cookie from the jar, but the adult isn't too MAD (okay, is it too much of me to include a pun from the series inspired by Get Smart...Inspector Gadget?).  It was a silly show with jokes for kids, but it was also a sly satire of beauracracy, government, and the Cold War.

It was a show rendered in ultra-groovy 60s style so I think it may have contributed to my near obsession for anything that looks mod.  But there were also classic episodes like the above mentioned carnival one where the strongman could tear apart a phonebook but couldn't tear apart an envelope with top secret information.  There was the one where KAOS agents kidnapped all the CONTROL agents and vice versa.  It was "The Departed" long before even the Hong Kong original!There was the one where a decendant of Christopher Columbus is negotiating with the villains that want to buy the United States.  He's naively agreeable so he signs a contract.  Max rips it from his hands and tears it up leading the villian to produce another one, which gets ripped, ad infinitum.

This movie version is being directed by Peter Segal, who's directed movies like Tommy Boy, My Fellow Americans, and 50 First Dates.  I liked My Fellow Americans and 50 First Dates, but Tommy Boy, Naked Gun 33 1/3, and Nutty Professor II: The Klumps give me pause.

In the commercials you can see Segal reuse a gag from My Fellow Americans in which a pointy roadside decoration crashes through a windshield.  I loved My Fellow Americans because it pit good guys against bad guys instead of Right against Left.  It developed characters while serving a plot straight out of a political thriller and cracking jokes throughout.  But while I was watching it the first time I felt the tone was inconsistent and that it was a film that didn't know what it wanted to be.  But I was won over by the end and had a fun time.

All the early reviews of this film adaptation of my favorite classic sitcom, both positive and negative, say that it's not much like the show, that it sets its own tone owing more to action films than to comedy.  I'll take that to mean that it's probably most similar to My Fellow Americans in tone.  If that's true that's fine by me.  What it also means is that I'm going in there with expectations that it'll be a satisfying movie in its own right since it's a reboot anyway.

Part of me misses the classic Mel Brooks and Zucker comedies where the bright, flat, sitcom style lighting and cinematography were just as much a part of the gags as anything else, lowering the realism so that one's full attention could be on the next sight-gag, but I think this will be an enjoyable film nonetheless.

When I first heard of this project I was reading a magazine in study hall ten years ago.  Jim Carrey was attached and I was a little nervous about such a film.  Now the casting seems perfect.  Not only does Carell look very much like Don Adams, but this cast looks fleshed out as an ensemble, which I suspect a Jim Carrey vehicle probably wouldn't be.  Patrick Warburton is perfectly cast as Hymie the Robot and Dwayne Johnson has presence to spare.  Anne Hathaway is younger than Carell by more years than Barbara Feldon was to Don Adams but she looks like she'll be great as a super spy.  Alan Arkin is clearly playing the Chief in a more cynically sarcastic manner than Edward Platt did, who always seemed too old for Max's crap, very put upon, and all too ready to pop an aspirin.  Edward Platt was a brilliant straight man, so time will tell if Arkin's interpretation will work as well.

To top all of this off, this movie is coming out today, June 20th 2008, when my grandma would have turned 80.  So in her honor I'm wearing a green buttondown shirt I bought for work recently, as that was a favorite color we shared not long before I discovered Get Smart.

Me: Don't tell me "There are many stretches when it's easy to forget that Get Smart is a spoof; it's more like a third-rate James Bond with pratfalls," Scott Tobias of the A.V. Club

Scott Tobias (A.V. Club): There are many stretches when it's easy to forget that Get Smart is a spoof; it's more like a third-rate James Bond with pratfalls. 

Me: I asked you not to tell me that!