final credits - don adams
Another icon of sixties television is now gone. In early September, Bob Denver who played Gilligan on "Gilligan's Island" died. Just over three weeks later, the star of "Get Smart" -- Don Adams aka Maxwell Smart aka Agent 86 to millions of TV fans -- passed away on September 25, 2005 at the age of 82 from lymphoma and lung infection.
"Get Smart" debuted on the NBC network on September 1, 1965. The show ran for 138 episodes, and finished the final year of its run on CBS in 1970. "Get Smart" was a product of its times and the creative genius of some of television's top comedic writers. Against the backdrop of the cold war, spies were the protagonist du jour in film (James Bond) and on television ("The F.B.I.," "The Man From U.N.C.L.E.," "I Spy" and the British imports "Secret Agent" and "The Avengers"). The time was ripe for a send-up of the genre.
Enter Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Buck Henry and Jay Sandrich. Brought together by Talent Associates, these four individuals represented the best minds in TV comedy. Brooks worked with Reiner, Neil Simon, Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart ("M*A*S*H") on the ground-breaking Sid Caesar TV shows of the 1950s. Reiner created "The Dick Van Dyke Show." Henry would go on to write screenplays for "The Graduate," "Catch-22" and "To Die For," and Sandrich went to direct "Mary Tyler Moore," "The Bob Newhart Show" and "Laverne and Shirley" episodes. The quartet set the stage for TV's most inept spy, the small screen's espionage version of Peter Seller's Inspector Clouseau, working for CONTROL and battling against the evil forces of KAOS. The man born to play the part was Don Adams.
Adams was born Donald James Yarmy on April 13, 1923 in New York City. He was the only member of his U.S. Marine Corps. platoon to survive the Battle of Guadalcanal. In 1954, he entered "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts" and won with a stand-up comedy act written by friend Bill Dana. It was the essence of the act written by Dana that later became Maxwell Smart. Adams' clipped delivery style came about after he served as a Marine drill instructor when he returned Stateside.
Adams adopted the stage surname of wife Adelaide Adams because he was tired of being called last when auditions were held in alphabetical order. Soon he was appearing on the Ed Sullivan and Steve Allen shows, and he also recorded several successful comedy LPs.
Bill Dana, best known for his bellhop character Jose Jimenez, cast Adams as the incompetent house detective on the hotel-based "The Bill Dana Show" which ran from 1963 to 1965. At the time, Adams also was the voice of the penguin cartoon character on "Tennessee Tuxedo" (which also featured the voice of future "F-Troop" star Larry Storch).
Adams, under contract to NBC, was leery about doing a spy spoof. But when he learned that Brooks and Henry had written the pilot script, he accepted immediately. Adams added many of the "Get Smart" catchphrases, based on material written by Dana, that soon became part of everyday lexicon. "Would you believe ... ?" "Sorry about that, chief" and "Missed it by that much" were soon heard on school playgrounds and around office water coolers across North America.
"Get Smart" had running gags a-plently, from the ridiculous spy gadgets (including the shoe phone) to Agent 13 cramming himself into lockers and mailboxes. As well there was the cone of silence that all but doomed any hope of intelligent conversation.
Adams was supported by a strong cast of characters. Edward Platt played his Chief, echoing Clouseau's Herbert Lom playing Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus, always at his wit's end. KAOS' Vice President of Public Relations and Terror, Conrad Siegfried, was played by Bernie Kopell who later set sail on "The Love Boat." And then there was Barbara Feldon.
As Agent 99 (whose name was never revealed) Feldon raised the question of how such a babe could fall in love with such a boob. Feldon first appeared on television in 1955 winning the top prize on "The $64,000 Question" fielding questions in the category of William Shakespeare.
The model next came across cultural radar appearing on a tigerskin rug in an advertisement for Top Brass men's cologne offering up a hormone-tingling growl while wearing nothing but a smile.
"Get Smart" twice won the Emmy for best comedy series with three Emmys for Adams as comedy actor. Adams had directed a number of the "Get Smart" episodes, which led to his successful later career as a commercials director, for which he won a Clio Award in 1971. Adams worked on several other sitcoms including "The Partner" and Canadian sitcom "Check It Out," which also starred a pre-"NYPD Blue" Gordon Clapp. "Get Smart" eventually spawned a horrible feature film, 1980's "The Nude Bomb," as well as two made-for-TV movies and a short-lived Fox TV revivial in 1995. During the 1980s, Adams was the voice of "Inspector Gadget."
While Adams never re-captured the success that Agent 86 brought him in the 1960s, the early seventies showed he was onto an idea ahead of its time. While touring the talk shows, Adams often brought out-takes from "Get Smart." The reaction the clips received gave him the idea to do a whole series of out-takes and bloopers. However he discovered that the required clearances made such a show prohibitive from a cost perspective. Years later, changes in union rules and Screen Actor Guild requirements paved the way for Dick Clark's "Bloopers" and other shows that populated the airwaves during the late 1980s. Missed it by that much ...
For more about Don Adams and "Get Smart," visit Wikipedia's entry, the page at the Museum of Broadcast Communications and Carl Birkmeyer's Get Smart tribute site.