The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

When I was eight years old, I began to watch The Man from U.N.C.L.E., one of the American responses to the successful British James Bond movies. In it, secret agents Napoleon Solo (played by Robert Vaughn) and Illya Kuryakin (played by David McCallum) worked for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, a.k.a. U.N.C.L.E.. Their nemesis was the evil organization THRUSH, similar to James Bond’s enemy SPECTRE. U.N.C.L.E.’s chief was an elderly man named Mr. Waverly (played by Leo G. Carroll). Most of the episodes, titled as “affairs”, revolved around Solo and Kuryakin being given assignments to unravel and foil sinister plots by THRUSH to do naughty things to the world: in other words, pretty much like James Bond, but in the U.S. on TV! From late 1964 through most of 1966, this series was my favorite show on television. The stories were well-written and they brought top-notch stars to play various guest roles. I would list and memorize the titles for each episode, going through old issues of TV Guide to find episodes that I had missed (they used to list episode titles back then). One Christmas, I got a toy Man from U.N.C.L.E. kit, complete with toy gun, ID badge, and “official” membership card.

The quality of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. gradually began to dip as the years wore on, and I began to lose interest in the series. It seemed to me, even at my young age, that the producers had decided to make the episodes more juvenile to appeal more to a younger audience. This was especially true with its spin-off series The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., which ran for a relatively short span. After the original series was cancelled in 1968, I expected to be seeing reruns in a few short years, as was the case with other old series. But this mysteriously did not happen, and it wasn’t until 1986 that I was able to see a rerun of my old favorite show on a cable TV channel. As it turned out, MGM Studios, which owned rights to the series, had withheld it from syndication for all these years, in spite of its popularity. The turkeys!

Now, for some time, AOL has been showing old episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. from its television “In2TV” service. And I’ve had a great time getting back into the series! From my vantage point in 2007, I get a kick out of seeing U.N.C.L.E. headquarters’ huge “advanced” computer with its rows of buttons, switches, and flashing colored lights, along with the “pen” phone/radios that the agents used to talk to Waverly or each other. Nowadays, of course, with cell phones shrinking and even “disappearing” with innovations like Blue Tooth, Napoleon Solo wouldn’t have a prayer of a chance of impressing a pretty young woman with his then-seemingly-magical pen-phone.

When I discovered that AOL was rerunning some shows from the old series, I checked out a good website called The Man From U.N.C.L.E. episode guide that listed and described all of the episodes. And something hit me: I remember that, in late 1966, I had seen a really good two-part U.N.C.L.E. (The Concrete Overcoat Affair, co-starring Jack Palance and Janet Leigh), but my recollection of watching the series afterward is very vague. Upon seeing the list of episodes in the sequence that they were broadcast then, I discovered my “two-parter” was followed by probably the two worst episodes of the series. And one of them, The My Friend the Gorilla Affair, has been described as not only the worst episode of the series, but also one of the worst episodes in the history of television! So, of course I’m now waiting for AOL to offer that one! But I wonder whether the effect of watching this episode was so traumatic for me back in December 1966 that I wiped it and subsequent episodes from memory!