Yes, Life Does Continue After 1970

 

Most shows, upon cancellation, just fade away. Sometimes there's a short after-life in reruns, but that's about it. Not our Smart! Yes, Don Adams donned (get it? then laugh!) his Maxwell Smart persona in not one, not two, but three attempts to recapture that old Get Smart magic. And even the most successful attempt--the second one--was a mixed bag. Sometimes you just can't go home again. But let's look at all the sordid details anyway:


The Nude Bomb

 

About the most that can be said about this is that if you ever wondered what Maxwell Smart would sound like swearing, now's your chance. Really, this movie is pretty awful. It was dreamed up in the late 1970s by Leonard Stern, Arne Sultan, and Bill Dana as a TV-movie, but public demand was so huge that Universal Studios optioned the thing to release on the big screen. And since it was going to be a real live movie (as opposed to a fake dead TV-movie), it had to have a real live big budget and real live hot chicks. Well, Sylvia Kristel anyway. In any case, Stern, Sultan, and Dana had control of the thing taken away from them and the once-promising script was given to studio hacks who didn't know Smart from Scrabble. Don Adams saw how terrible this movie was becoming, but had already signed on, and thus had to do the movie. Other original cast members lucked out, however. That's right, there was no 99 in this movie (and no attempt to explain why Max suddenly seemed single). No Seigfried. No Shtarker. No Hymie. No Agent 77, for crying out loud! There was a Chief, but not the Chief. Ed Platt had passed away in 1974, so now Max was working under a different Chief, played by Dana Elcar (and for some organization called P.I.T.S., not Control). Bob Karvelas did return as Larrabee, though, and exchanges between him and Max provide the funniest moments in the movie. Unfortunately, it's far from enough. The whole thing seems much too labored, incredibly unfunny, and by the end, you just want to see the end credits roll. The critics felt the same as I do, and the movie bombed at the box office upon its release in 1980. In 1981, it was nominated for a Razzie Award for the Worst Picture of 1980. It didn't win. Strangely, when the picture bowed on network TV in 1982 (under the incredibly misleading title "The Return of Maxwell Smart"), it won its timeslot. Even stranger, it has also been released on laserdisc, for those of you who want crapola with a crystal clear picture. But steer clear of The Nude Bomb whenever you can. It's terrible.


Get Smart Again!

 

In 1989, Don Adams became Maxwell Smart in a feature-length movie again. This time, the movie stuck to the small screen. Also this time, most of the original Get Smart gang was back. There was 99, there was Seigfried, there was Shtarker, there was Hymie, there was Larrabee, and there was even Agent 13! And they were all played by the original actors! (Joey Forman tried to play Agent 13 in The Nude Bomb, and it didn't work.) Also, Leonard Stern wrote the movie his way, with no interference this time around. The result should be a smashing success, right? Well, it sort of was. Though leaps and bounds above The Nude Bomb, there was a bit too much recycling going on. Several jokes were taken verbatim from various Get Smart episodes. Get Smart Again's not a terrible movie by any means, but it just leaves you with the feeling that you've seen it all before. Still, it's great fun seeing the original cast again. Well, most of it anyway. Like I said before, Ed Platt had died in 1974, and in Get Smart Again there wasn't a replacement Chief like in The Nude Bomb. There was no Chief at all, and at the end of the movie, it's revealed that the whole thing was dedicated to the memory of Ed Platt. When the movie premiered on ABC, in February of 1989, it was a modest success, finishing second in its timeslot. Still, it wasn't the rousing success some had hoped, and possible plans for more Get Smart TV movies (think the Brady Bunch reunion movies, only without Jan) were scrapped. But it's really not a bad little movie, as long as you're not expecting the high quality of the original series. Get Smart Again pops up on TV occasionally, and was released on video (although it's out of print at the moment). Check it out when you can. It ain't bad.


Get Smart--1995

 

Get Smart had been revived as a big-screen movie, and then a small-screen movie, so it only seemed that the next logical revival would be as a small-screen series, right? In 1995, the Fox network said "Make it so," and Get Smart was reborn, with Don Adams again at the helm. This time around, Maxwell Smart was now the Chief of Control, with 99 (played again by Barbara Feldon, in a much smaller role than she had in the original series) a Congresswoman. Max and 99's son, Zack (Andy Dick), was now a Control agent in his own right, following in his father's bumbling footsteps. Zack's partner at Control was the sexy Agent 66 (Elaine Hendrix), and together they battled Kaos. This new series was strangely given the exact same name as the old one. Only among Smartians is it referred to as Get Smart--1995 (or GS95 for short).

This series fell victim to some poor scripts, and even poorer scheduling decisions by Fox. For starters, the show was slotted up against 60 Minutes on CBS, and was given a horrible lead-in, repeat (!) episodes of The Simpsons. Then, the pilot episode--hands down, the worst of the series--was aired as the series premiere. Considering how much better the subsequent episodes were, it would have made sense to air one of those first. But Fox didn't, and a lot of people were turned off of the new Get Smart from the very beginning. Then, to make matters worse, the second episode of the series--one of the best of the seven episodes--was pre-empted by a football game that ran overtime in early 1995. Fox could have aired the episode directly after the football game, but chose to air Simpsons instead, and run Get Smart after all of the other Fox shows had finished airing. The result? Simpsons enjoyed some of its highest ratings ever, while Get Smart lost most of the people who had dared to come back after the pilot. As the weeks went by, the show sunk lower and lower in the ratings, rose a bit when Bernie Kopell guest-starred as Seigfried in the sixth episode, but it wasn't enough, and the show was cancelled after seven episodes. Of course, had the show continued, a new Zack would have been needed, as Andy Dick had gone on record as saying he hated the show (and thus his name isn't seen in the scren shots above), and selected the brilliant NewsRadio as his sitcom of choice.

Now, here's my official opinion on the show. For years, Smartians across the globe have been saying the best thing about the new Get Smart was the return of Max and 99. What I'm going to say here is probably going to ruffle feathers of all those Smartians, but I'll say it anyway. Get Smart--1995, as it was designed, would have worked better without Max and 99. Zack was a bumbler, and so the Chief of Control needed to be a serious, stoic individual who would keep Zack in line. Max was definitely not the man for the job. As a result, you had a bumbling agent playing off of a bumbling Chief, and the result just wasn't funny. If 99 had been Chief, and not Max, the result would have been better, but that wasn't going to happen. Barbara Feldon didn't want to committ full-time to Get Smart--1995, as she had a full life going for her in New York (the show was filmed in Los Angeles), so she didn't have the time to play a major role like the Chief. No, a new Chief of Control was needed, one like the original Chief, in order for Get Smart--1995 to succeed, and it just didn't have it.


Thanks to Suzy for most of the photos on this page. Check out her Get Smart site.

Want to discuss more volumes of forgotten Smart lore? E-mail me.

"Computer, return me to the main Get Smart page."

"Computer, return me to Mike's main page."