As I mentioned last week, I was obsessed with Get Smart as a kid. For the uninitiated, this is a late 60s Mel Brooks spy comedy starring Don Adams and Barbara Feldon. Here’s a full episode I found on YouTube.
If you loved Inspector Gadget, you will adore this. Maxwell Smart, the titular character, had this amazing, colorful, very mod apartment in New York that really informed my sensibilities. While the time period in which this show is set is contemporaneous with Mad Men, it’s a lot more exuberant and expressive than you see on those sets, probably because it’s supposed to be a joke about the 60s. I dreamed of an apartment like this when I was little, and even though I now know I can’t have the exploding telephone or the bullet-proof invisible wall. Sigh.
And patriotic, too.
The whole show is just an explosion of color blocking, sharp lines, fake eyelashes, and Cold War-era humor. It’s a big winner. Fun fact: Agent 99 and Max Smart get married in the fourth season and have kids, and she became the first working mother on television. Like I said: this show was hugely influential for me. Let’s move into the Smarts apartment after the jump.
