My thanks to everyone who attended last night's showing of Get Smart. After all these years, it's nice to know that the adventures of Maxwell Smart (Don Adams, who was never funnier) still resonate with audiences after over forty years!
On Thursday night, April 16th, at 7:30 pm, in the second floor Meeting Room, Greenwich Library's Classic and Cult Television will show the original "pilot" episode of Get Smart.
My thanks to all who attended the March 11th showing of the Route 66 episode "A Fury Slinging Flame", which guest-starred Leslie Nielsen. It was a lot of fun for me and I hope for you as well. (And as for that particular TV series that some of you asked about going to DVD anytime soon, alas, it doesn't seem to be in the cards, according to this link.) Our next program, spotlighting Get Smart, will be on April 16th at 7:30 pm. For more information, go here.
On March 11th at 7:30 pm in the second floor Meeting Room, Greenwich Library will show an episode of the classic "Beat"-influenced TV series Route 66. The series starred Martin Milner (later of Adam-12) and George Maharis as two young, rootless men with no family ties who travelled down the legendary highway and found themselves in a new situation each week.
One of the most popular cult television shows from the 1960s was also one of the most original and audacious ever produced. Think of a combination of the western and spy thriller genres (the latter especially as depicted by the James Bond 007 movie series) with beautiful women, colorful over-the-top villians and enough anachronistic inventions to mow down an army, then set it in the 1870s United States during the Grant admistration and you've got The Wild Wild West.
It was because of the original 1966-69 Star Trek series that I first got into (and took seriously) science fiction literature. Finding a good science fiction series on television at that time in the sixties meant you had a choice of various anthology series (The Twilight Zone, Thriller, The Outer Limits), shows with sf-inspired trappings (The Man From U.N.C.L.E., The Avengers) or just plain goofy "monster-on-the-loose" programs (Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space). Yet for whatever it's faults, Star Trek took a much more sober-minded approach to the genre than previous TV shows had.
Next Wednesday, February 11, Greenwich Library's Classic and Cult Television series will present the first episode of Hogan's Heroes in the second floor meeting room. All are invited.
The series, which ran from 1965-1971 on CBS, starred Bob Crane and Werner Klemperer. Information on the series can be found at Wikipedia, the Hogan's Heroes Fan Page and TV.Com.
As a follow-up to last week's post on the cult TV series The Prisoner, and it's star/creator, Patrick McGoohan, I wanted to mention the other 1960s show Mr. McGoohan was renowned for, Secret Agent (as it was called in the US), also known as Danger Man.
Today's post was originally just going to mention (and link to) episodes of the cult 1967-68 TV series The Prisoner, now being made available for downloading from the AMC web site. But sadly, the recent passing of the show's star/creator Patrick McGoohan a few days ago has overshadowed that news.
