Mission Impossible's influence
How many TV shows can you think of that were influenced by Mission Impossible?
P.S. And the orchestra's performance was top notch!
When you stop to think about it, you don't really think about it sufficiently.
Nikita and Covert Affairs.
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Actually James Bond was the inspiration for all the spy shows, Man From Uncle, I Spy, even the comedy Get Smart. And yes a western called Wild,Wild West. So MI might have influenced other tv shows, it's still a branch off the Bond tree.
Art makes the disturbed comfortable and the comfortable disturbed.
MI might have influenced other tv shows, it's still a branch off the Bond tree.I would have to disagree on two counts. First because Bond was a loner and Mission is about a team. And second because Bond wasn't a con artist, and Mission was based on a book called The Big Con. It's all in the Mission Dossier, available at Amazon.
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MI and James Bond were inspired by several/novels movies preceding them.
The 1928 film Spies by Fritz Lang is the original spy film, and created many of the standard tropes used in the genre to this day.
Films that had MI's same "team" concept of spying operations that predate Bond:
13 Rue Madeleine
Guns of Navarone--this film was definitely a huge influence for MI.
Hell and High Water
O.S.S.
The Man Who Never Was
Several Hitchcock films precede Bonds, often by more than two decades, such as:
The Man Who Knew Too Much
The 39 Steps
Foreign Correspondent
Secret Agent
Sabotage
The Lady Vanishes
Notorious
North by Northwest
Cary Grant was in many of these films, and there's definitely a
case to be made that he and his work for Hitchcock are the
primary inspirations for how the Bond character has been
portrayed on film since 1962.
Graham Greene, an actual MI6 agent, wrote several critically-acclaimed and bestselling spy novels that either predate Fleming's first Bond novel or predate the Bond film franchise:
The Confidential Agent
The Ministry of Fear
The Heart of the Matter
The Third Man
The Quiet American
Our Man in Havana
The only Greene spy novel in the list above that didn't get a film
adaptation was The Heart of the Matter. All of the other books
made it to the silver screen--and all of them did so at least 3
years before Dr. No.
Other famous spy films that precede either the Bond novels or the film franchise:
5 Fingers
Hangmen Also Die
The House on 92nd Street
Iron Curtain (sometimes titled Behind the Iron Curtain)
The Mask of Dimitrios
Mata Hari
Pickup on South Street
Saboteur
The Spy in Black
Actually James Bond was the inspiration for all the spy shows, Man From Uncle, I Spy, even the comedy Get Smart. Actually James Bond was the inspiration for all the spy shows, Man From Uncle, I Spy, even the comedy Get Smart.
You'd better clarify what you mean by "all" and "James Bond," whether you mean only all American spy shows and whether you're referring to the Bond movies or to Ian Fleming's source novels.
In Britain, the television spy series Danger Man, starring Patrick McGoohan, began in 1960 as a half-hour program that made McGoohan a star in Britain and the rest of Europe*. That half-hour format lasted until 1962, coincidentally the same year Dr. No, the first Bond movie, was released. Moreover, McGoohan, an international star already although not in the US, had been offered the role of Bond, but as we all know, he refused it.
However, McGoohan stuck with Danger Man, which returned in 1964--two years before MI premiered--in a one-hour version of the show. This was also shown in the US but renamed Secret Agent, although the half-hour version had already been aired in the US on CBS in 1961--predating the release of Dr. No. For the US version, Edwin Astley's opening theme music was replaced by the rock song "Secret Agent Man," which became one of singer Johnny Rivers's biggest hits.
Patrick McGoohan went onto develop and star in another spy series, The Prisoner, which premiered in the UK in 1967 and came to the US I think the following year, and for which he may be best remembered. Meanwhile, debate still rages whether The Prisoner is a continuation of Danger Man and its lead character John Drake or is an entirely different premise. (I believe the latter.)
In sum, the original Danger Man, launched in 1960, predates the first Bond film, Dr. No, released in 1962, and in fact Danger Man's star Patrick McGoohan had been tapped to play Bond but declined the role. However, the Fleming Bond novels began in 1953 with the publishing of Casino Royale, although spy stories have been around a long time--both espionage and prostitution are often cited as being "the world's oldest profession," and it's no surprise that espionage has enlisted the services of the "honeytrap" (e.g., Cinnamon Carter) as part of its tradecraft for just as long--was the Biblical Delilah not a honeytrap of sorts?
So, Bond may have inspired American spy series--and I have no disagreement with the assertion that the Bond film franchise solidified the 1960s spy craze in pop culture--but the British series Danger Man/Secret Agent actually was the first successful spy series of the decade, with its star given dibs on the role of James Bond in film before Sean Connery.
* Then as now, I suppose, we need to separate the two as Brexit has done . . .
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"The past is never dead. It isn't even past." -- William Faulkner share