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| Gold Key offered kids helpful types on spying and sabotage. |
In 1964, television audiences watched the stylish adventures of an Ian Fleming superspy named … Napoleon Solo.
At traffic lights, on his way to a producer’s office, 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.
The suave Solo and his stoic, taciturn partner Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum) were usually pitted against Thrush, an organization described by Solo as believing “…the world should have a two-party system — the masters and the slaves.”
America’s dark days cast their shadow even over The Man from UNCLE pilot, which suspended filming because of President Kennedy’s assassination.
The series started out well, but progressively lost focus, succumbing to “camp” claptrap. But it made its mark.
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 Gold Key comic book titles.
Solo and Kuryakin’s missions were called “affairs,” and my favorite of the paperback titles was, of course, The Unfair Fare Affair.
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| The Man from UNCLE's debt to the James Bond movies was always apparent. |
