Mission: Highly Improbable

One of my holiday gifts was the first season of MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE on DVD. M:I is virtually unique among the bushel of spy series that hit TV in the mid-sixties, in that it continued into the 1970's, and I was thus able to watch some of the episodes first run (despite being about one year old when the series debuted).

In the first season, Peter Graves had not yet joined the series; Steven Hill plays the IMF team leader. The episodes, at least initially, did not begin in the style that later became the series signature: the hiss of the message self-destructing fading into the flute of the opening theme. Instead, the episodes have no teaser; they begin with the fuse being lit in the opening credits. Further, in the pilot, the assignment is delivered on a swing LP; in the next episode, "Memory," it's delivered on a printed card. (Nowadays, I imagine the IMF gets its orders via MP3's. Or do they destroy an Ipod for every mission?)

Watching the pilot and "Memory," I learned some important tips about espionage:

• If your cinematography, lighting and music are great, you can get away with cheap production values and stock footage.
• Both South American jungles and the woods of the Balkans look a lot like Pasadena or the Arboretum.
• The IMF's job is easier when their foes are complete idiots. In the pilot, a Castro-like dictator stores two nukes in a hotel vault. (Why? Who knows?) The hotel -- which knows what is stored there -- nevertheless allows Willie the strongman to stash in the same vault two sample cases large enough to hold a person each without searching them. D'oh!
• It's easier for Martin Landau's character to impersonate a target when the target is also played by Martin Landau. And:
• Twenty-five minutes into the pilot, Barbara Bain strips off her cocktail dress -- in front of two bound and gagged guards -- and appears wrapped in a tiny towel. I think at that point, the series was sold.