In 1964, audiences watched the
stylish adventures of an Ian Fleming superspy named … Napoleon Solo.
At traffic lights, on his way to a
producer’s office, young actor Robert Vaughn had leafed through the script for
a series called Solo. He realized
immediately that it was “James Bond on television” and was sold.
With the film Dr. No and its sequel From
Russia With Love, Ian Fleming’s hero had already become a successful franchise.
And the biggest hits — Goldfinger and
Thunderball — were yet to come.
In fact, the Solo producers had consulted with Fleming about their TV idea. With
Bond movies in production, Fleming couldn’t participate much, but he did give
them two character names — Napoleon Solo and April Dancer (eventually The Girl from UNCLE in a spinoff
series).
One other Fleming-inspired idea was
the name UNCLE. In his 9th Bond novel Thunderball, published in 1961, Fleming had winked at the
mid-century bureaucratic passion for acronyms by calling Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s
criminal syndicate SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence,
Revenge, Terrorism and Extortion). The TV show’s UNCLE (the United Network Command for Law
Enforcement) established the practice as a fictional superspy cliché, and KAOS,
SHIELD, THUNDER and others followed. Hydra, Marvel Comics’ evil cabal, is now
probably even more famous than SPECTRE.
The Man from UNCLE triggered and then surfed the massive wave of
popularity for spy fiction that followed in American popular culture. Even perpetually
panting teenager Archie Andrews pitched in as the Man from RIVERDALE.
The suave Solo and his stoic
partner Illya Kuryakin were often pitted against Thrush, an organization
described by Solo as believing “…the world should have a two-party system — the
masters and the slaves.” The series started out excellently, but progressively
lost focus, succumbing to “camp” claptrap. But it had made its mark.
“It was in a time of war,”
McCallum recalled. “It was in a very agonizing time in the United States
because of the Vietnam war, the cold war. It was a difficult time for people
and ‘Man from UNCLE’ came along and was totally, as they used to say, tongue in
cheek… People managed to escape for an hour with a Russian working with an
American.”
America’s dark times even cast their
shadow over The Man from UNCLE pilot,
which suspended filming because of President Kennedy’s assassination.
On TV, anyway, evil could still be
thwarted, and The Man from UNCLE attracted
eager fans. Airing on NBC from 1964 to 1968, the series not only prompted a
spinoff but numerous paperback novels, several movies, a latter-day pulp magazine
and two comic books.
Solo and Kuryakin’s missions were
always called “affairs,” and my favorite of the paperback titles was of course
“The Unfair Fare Affair.”
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