Mister 8

This will wrap up February’s theme of spy surf, and carry us into March’s similar theme, which is instrumental spy music. Seems similar, but I wanted to cover non-surf bands like the Revengers and Billy Strange, and perhaps bring some left-field items into the mix as well.

Tomorrow, we’ll be featuring a lengthy interview with Spy-Fi’s Tom Pervanje, and he’ll be talking about spy surf in general, and his band’s latest album, Black Tie Spy. So stay tuned for that!

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This version of the Get Smart theme is taken from a 1993 compilation album called B Movie Brain that features tracks from The 3D Invisibles, The Zombie Surfers, The Hellbenders, and the perpetrators of this track, the Kaos Killers. The track was sent to me by a reader calling himself Reverb Herb, but now that I’ve seen the track listing, I think I might hunt down the album. I believe the Kaos Killers share members with the Hellbenders and the Invisibles — at least I suspect Chris Flanagan and Rick Mills on bass and guitar, respectively. The Kaos Killers have three tracks on the album, including another that seems Get Smart-related, “The Man From Control.” I’ll try to track down some more information on these guys. Thanks, Herb!

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I’ve always debated whether The Persuaders was a spy show or not, but since A&E included it on their recent sampler of British spy TV, I won’t argue the point. At the very least, the adventures of Danny Wilde and Lord Brett Sinclair qualify under the “international crimefighters” part of this site. This cover of John Barry’s Persuaders theme was successfully orchestrated by the German band The Sidemen on a really solid 2007 release, The Sidemen Go Too Far. Uwe Grefrath plays guitar, Andy Bungert takes on the drums, and Oldrik Scholz plays bass. For more information on the Sidemen, check out their website, or their MySpace page, where you can hear other awesome spy surf songs and buy their albums.

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Our next band hails from Janesville, Wisconsin, and that’s about all I know about them. They’re The Dynamic Subarashi, and their website is under construction. This version of the Mission Impossible theme is certainly dynamic, though. I downloaded it last year from a music blog that seeks out cover songs, and haven’t been able to find more on the band, except a track listing for the self-titled album this song came from, on a German website, with no ordering information. Dynamic Subarashi, if you’re listening, I think you’re awesome and would like to know more about you!

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Last, but certainly not least…this version of the Avengers was performed by one of my all-time favorite surf bands, Laika & the Cosmonauts. Featuring Mikko Lankinen (guitar), Janne Haavisto (drums), Matti Pitsinki (organ and guitar), and Tom Nyman (bass), Laika enjoyed a 20-year career that ended last year. This cover of the Avengers theme was on their 1995 album Amazing Colossal Band, which also had a great cover of the IPCRESS File. For more information on Laika & the Cosmonauts, check out their website.

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If you haven’t signed up to win the first season of Get Smart at Jason Whiton’s Spy Vibe, I’m willing to certify you as crazy! What are you waiting for? You only have until Saturday! Details follow:

Two ways to enter:

ONE- visit SET COUNTDOWN #4 on the Spy Vibe Blog site and post your memory of Get Smart or Thunderball. Don’t need the Get Smart DVDs? Post your memories (we want to hear them!) and indicate that you don’t want to be included in the drawing.

TWO- Send your movie memory to me at jason@spyvibe.com.

The winner will be chosen from a random drawing on March 21st

Fiction, especially spy fiction, is rife with robots created by evil geniuses bent on world domination and/or destruction. Sometimes those robots are destroyed by superhero secret agents, but sometimes they miraculously develop a moral consciousness, turn on their creators, and choose to do good. Let’s take a look at a pair of those today!

The first is truly a “cybernaut,” a human-looking (specifically Dick Gauthier-looking) bot named Hymie, invented by Dr. Ratton and dispatched by KAOS to kill Maxwell Smart (of Get Smart, naturally). In the end, when Hymie’s creator calls him a monster, he short circuits and is able to overcome his programming and save the day:

Hymie became a full-fledged member of CONTROL, though he was sure to say that his first preference is IBM, which he thought would be a, “nice way to meet some intelligent machines.” I’m wondering if, since the Avengers episode that seems to have coined the term “cybernaut,” hadn’t aired in the U.S. yet, if the episode where Hymie first appears was the first time American audiences heard the word. I also wonder if the writers of Get Smart used the term independently of the Avengers?

(For anyone interested, Dick Gauthier sells autographed pictures of himself as Hymie, for a relatively inexpensive price, as far as celebrity autographs goes.)

Our next good guy robot is not from a secret agent television show, but, like Jonny Quest, exists in a world predicated on Cold War tensions. Even beating out the Pixar movies, which I adore, this is my favorite animated film of all time: The Iron Giant.

Based on a novel by Ted Hughes, The Iron Giant was directed by Brad Bird, who later went on to make The Incredibles and Ratatouille. The film features a giant metal man who crash lands off the coast of Maine, and the young boy who teaches him about the important things in life: love, fun, Superman. A four-story tall robot is hard to hide, and so rumors begin to spread about the Giant. Those rumors are investigated by the U.S. Army, specifically Kent Mansley, who comes to see the Giant as a threat to the American way. Mansley, though the villain of the piece, does have a semi-valid point: the Iron Giant is a weapon, though with Hogarth’s help, he learns to suppress his violent programming.

If you haven’t seen this film, go out and find it. Playing the voice of the Giant is by far Vin Diesel’s best performance, and I still prefer this over Bird’s Pixar films. If you have seen it, perhaps you’ll enjoy revisiting the climax of the film:

Two questions to think about today:

1. Isn’t a robot that breaks programming, by it’s very nature, defective?

2. Is it wrong (speaking hypothetically) to build robots that do bad, or morally ambigious things, to give them self-awareness to realize this, and yet to not allow them to break their programming?

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A few additional notes:

NOTE #1:

I play pub trivia every week with my wife and other students in my program. Our trivia czar is a swell guy, and each week, the winning team gets to choose a category for one of the rounds of the next week’s trivia. My team had won the week before, and so last night, we answered questions in a category of my choosing, “60s spy TV shows.” We aced the round. How would you have done?

1. Who was Maxwell Smart’s partner on Get Smart?
2. How many seconds does Jim Phelps have before the tape self-destructs?
3. What is the cover career of Alexander Scott and Kelly Robinson?
4. Why is KAOS located in Delaware?
5. If you referred to yourself as a Steedophile, you would be a fan of what show?

Bonus: For whom was Artimus Gordon a sidekick and master of disguise?

Unfortunately, we lost all of our points on a wager in the final round, so we didn’t get to pick the category for the following week. Maybe next time!

NOTE #2:

The next Man v. Machine post may be a little late, because I’m having a birthday party tomorrow night! Expect our week-long look at spies and technology to extend into the weekend, and perhaps even spill over into next week….

Another day, another match-up in Mister 8 May Madness! Today’s pairing sees the agents of two different organizations, UNCLE, and Control, vying to enter the next round!

Napoleon Solo & Illya Kuryakin

The illegitimate children of Ian Fleming with Sam Rolfe, the Men From UNCLE were, some would say, at one point as big as Bond (maybe bigger). The pairing of the American agent ladies man with the Russian mod Kurayakin was winning team. Bring in the Hitchcockian element of throwing an average citizen into the crazy world of international espionage (and have the whole Affair be orchestrated by one of Hitchcock’s spy bosses, Leo G. Carroll as Alexander Waverly) and you’ve got a formula for success on your hands. While the later episodes veer into camp, the early shows are quality, classic 60s spy, one of the few American efforts that matched the espionage television of the Brits.

Maxwell Smart

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A message from David Foster – Permission to Kill

Maxwell Smart - Secret Agent 86

My fellow spy fans, I come before you today to put forward the case for a man, who in my opinion redefined the espionage genre for a whole generation. That man is Maxwell Smart – Secret Agent 86. Some may see him as an inept bumbler, but that’s just on the surface. Underneath he is a man of quick decisive action. Okay his choice of action may sometimes be the wrong one, but hey, you can’t have everything.

I have always believed that your should judge a man by the company he keeps and the strength of his enemies. Now don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of the work of Mr. Solo and Comrade Kuryakin, but let’s compare them to Agent 86.

company that they keep

Maxwell Smart with Agent 99

Firstly, Solo and Kuryakin: Remembering they were at their peak in the swinging sixties, but somehow, while a sexual revolution is going on – with beautiful, capable women in skimpy costumes available to carry out missions – these guys still managed to get paired together. Other agencies such as THRUSH and SPECTRE managed to find quality female operatives; why not UNCLE. Was UNCLE an exclusive boys club? I don’t know. But Maxwell Smart, who worked for the far more liberated CONTROL agency was partnered with Agent 99. An agent who, if I may say, was one of the most glamorous field operatives to have ever played the ‘game’. Now those comments may seem slightly sexist, or hetrosexist if you prefer, but if I was to turn, I do not think it would be for the flat-faced charms of Napoleon Solo or for the glib turtlenecked witticisms of Illya Kurakin. On that strength alone, I believe that this makes Maxwell Smart a superior spy to Solo and Kuryakin, but if that weren’t enough – there is more!

strength of enemies

Sigfried - Evil incarnate!

Sure Solo and Kuryakin ran a three year battle with THRUSH…but who were THRUSH? They were little more than the obsolete remnants of a late nineteenth century criminal organisation. However Maxwell Smart, over a period of five years battled KAOS, and furthermore had direct confrontations with evil incarnate – distilled into one man. I am not talking about Blofeld, Fu Manchu, or Diabolik – but the one and only Siegfried.

The show, Get Smart was quality comedy television, made at a time when most shows of it’s type were family based sitcoms. Get Smart broke that formula and came up with something quite new in television entertainment. Forty years down the track the shows freshness may have been diminished by the countless imitators and followers, but the show was groundbreaking in it’s day and deserves to be looked upon as one of the classics of the spy genre. And as a character, Maxwell Smart and his comedic routines may have been diluted by the countless imitators – but he did it first. He is the spiritual godfather of Austin Powers, Johnny English, and even Hubert Bonnisseur de la Bath in recent revision of OSS 117 as portrayed by Jean Dujardin. If you like spies and have a sense of humour, the choice is obvious.

I ask you to consider voting for Maxwell Smart.

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