A couple more good things:

Cosby and Culp worked out a lot of the repartee between Scotty and Kelly on their own during script readings and rehearsals. The good bits were kept for the final edit.

If you watch the episodes carefully you catch bits of dialog that give Kelly and Scott a shared back-story that goes back before they became agents; they didn't meet for the first time in Spy School. The long-term friendship means more to the pair's loyalty than plain vanilla good-guy patriotism.

But Cosby mentioned something in an interview that was really groundbreaking for the '60s; he got to beat up white guys! He said, "It was fantastic, 'cause what could the bigots say about it? I was beating up Communists and gangsters and saving America! It was so cool, man!"

I didn't recall that about their "deep background."

Cosby beating up (bad) white guys must have been rather empowreing to a generation; Cosby had been an athlete in high school and college and his Alexander Scott had a certain "pre-Shaft" toughness that was almost movie star-like in its charisma (that Cosby was also then known as a great comedian "softened the menace" a bit.)

A few years later, Sidney Poitier teamed up with Cosby for a few movies, and it was clear: Cosby was the raffish tough guy of the two; Poitier the "nice one."

In the 70's, Robert Culp flipped his arch brand of toughness into memorable villainy on Peter Falk's "Columbo" show. Culp was so good in his cold, deadpan wit as a "guest killer" on one first-season show that he came back two more times as the guest killer in later seasons, always playing a different guy: security specialist, football coach, subliminal advertising guru.

In the 90's, Cosby and Culp reunited for an inevitable TV sequel, "I Spy" returns; it was bittersweet because in the years in between, Cosby had become the TV superstar of "The Cosby Show" while Culp had basically "hung on in Hollywood."

In the film, Cosby and Culp ruefully stood by and watched their grown children become spies, too, but I recall Cosby's confident challenge to his son (or daughter?):

"You'll have a hard time living up to us. We were the best."

This was just a fabulous show.

I didn't watch it until a few years ago (I was 5 to 8 when it was on).

It is amazing in our modern "rich" world, that we will never be able to reproduce a show like that. We might see a wonderful "virtual" copy of mexico or carracas but "I SPY" was actually filmed in those and many other places for real. It is astonishing the many fabulous sites around the world that I got to travel to and will never see in real life because of "I SPY".

The producer was Sheldon Leonard, a Bronx-tawkin' character actor who played the bartender in "Its a Wonderful Life" and all manner of Damon Runyon gangsters before becoming a TV producer and making big bucks with "The Andy Griffith Show" and other stuff. In a nicely nostalgic episode, Leonard acted one last time by playing a "Mr. Big" gangster villain on "I Spy," with that great dese-dem-and-dose accent, but he was really a mogul by that time.

Leonard evidently negotiated some sort of deal to use NBC's news and sports bureaus around the world to borrow camera and crew to film all those locations. I assume that interiors -- no matter how "Japanese" or "Mexican" they looked -- were then mocked up on Hollywood soundstages for filming after the location work was finished for the year.

Still, with all that documentary-style location footage, "I Spy" ended up looking and sounding like no other 60's TV show. It was, in some ways, a look forward to the gritty 70's movies.

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The other more backlot-bound and hermetically sealed TV spy shows of the 60's were also a fun lot, though none of them had "I Spy"'s mix of realism, social comment, and travelogue glamour:

"The Man From UNCLE": MGM created this show to mix James Bond and "North by Northwest," Hitchcock's sole MGM film. Robert Vaughn's suave Napoleon Solo (a name given to MGM by Bond creator Ian Fleming from a gangster killed by Goldfinger in that movie) was meant to be the sole lead, but as with Cosby on "I Spy," the "sidekick" was moved up to co-lead status. That would be Brit David McCallum as "Illya Kuryakin," a cute Blond Russian moptop. Just as "I Spy" was promoting racial equality, UNCLE was looking to thaw out the Cold War: The United Network Command for Law Enforcement (UNCLE) was a UN-based international alliance of good guys, Russians included. 60's TV was more progressive than you'd think.

The "North by Northwest" connection: Leo G. Carroll, who played the CIA chief in the Hitchcock movie, played the boss of Napoleon and Illya here. And "UNCLE" usually involved some "innocent bystander" who stumbled into spy plots, chases and danger, and had to be saved by Napoleon and Illya. That was Cary Grant as a Mad Man Ad Man in the Hitchcock film; on "UNCLE," the innocent could be a housewife, a salesman, a secretary, a pest control operator (William Shatner), etc.

"Get Smart": NBC commissioned this one to spoof "Man From UNCLE" (UNCLE vs. THRUSH became CONTROL vs. KAOS), and to combine James Bond with Inspector Clouseau. Mel Brooks and Buck Henry created the show, which began with lots of vaudeville slapstick, but as the years went on, the writers actually got more sophisticated, and so did "Get Smart," which had a very witty edge in its last seasons. The new movie will be hard-pressed to beat Ed Platt's slow-burning "Chief" under siege from the bumbling nasal-toned Maxwell Smart (Don Adams.) Platt had been a serious down-level character guy for many years, but "Get Smart" was his finest hour. All the comedy plays off of his dead-serious, long-suffering gravitas.

"The Wild Wild West": Westerns were huge on TV in the late fifties and early sixties, and this idea was perfect for the mid-sixties: James Bond meets Gunsmoke (with a touch of Jules Verne SciFi.) Short but hyper-macho Robert Conrad played perhaps the most muscular and thuggish of the superspies, James West, but he was "softened" by the casting of bookish mensch Ross Martin as Artemis Gordon, master of disguise. For school boys across the nation, "The Wild Wild West" postulated a fine fantasy: close friendship between a athletic jock and a brainy wit. (The movie blew this key to the show, with Will Smith's West hating Kevin Kline's supercilious Gordon for the entire movie, to the very last line: "Shut up, Gordon." Wrong.)

"The Avengers": The British entry in the spy craze (which may have even pre-dated the James Bond movies, I think) paired a derby-wearing, tweedy, pleasant-faced man named John Steed (always played by Patrick MacNee), with a succession of tough, beautiful women (first Honor "Pussy Galore" Blackman, then, much more famously, cool dominatrix Diana as Mrs. Emma Peel, then, finally, just some silly cute chick.) There was delightful sexual tension to MacNee's middle-aged-seeming Steed's match with the sexy widow "Mrs. Steed", and just as "I Spy" had a black hero and "UNCLE" had a Russian one, here was a show where the woman could kick ass just as well (no, better than) the man.

The spy show craze died out in the 60's; only James Bond himself really carried on the tradition, and he became quaint (before his "Bourne" reboot.) Our modern ones like "Alias" and "24" are far more heavy and grim than the 60's fantasy spy romps. The times have changed.

A toast to the witty and glamourous "buddy pairs" of the 60's spy shows, from another time and place.

P.S. We've gotten really bad movies out of all the TV spy shows ever made, less "The Man From UNCLE" and with "Get Smart" about to reveal itself. These shows were too distinctive unto their era to transfer to today. And their stars WERE stars. Uma Thurman was no Diana Rigg.

vis-a-vis The Avengers, it's interesting to note that Patrick McNee was actually the subordinate star in the first season; the show was meant as a vehicle for Ian Hendry, who had scored big a couple of years earlier with a show called Police Surgeon. The title refers to the fact that Hendry originally teemed up with McNeed to avenge the death of his fiancee, who was collateral damage, so to speak, in a gun fight between cops and drug dealers. Hendry was the straight arrow, McNee the rougish rule-bender who helped get his friend out of tight spots. When Hendry left the show to take film work, McNee was moved up to the top spot. The same thing happened when Honor Blackman left the show to make Goldfinger.

Yes, I was most "fuzzy" on the origins of "The Avengers," which came to America in the midst of the mid-60's spy craze with the McNee/Rigg episodes. I think maybe the American distribution of the British show helped keep "The Avengers" going in Britain and America, even past Rigg's departure, with the addition of a new female.

"The Avengers" was perhaps the most exotic of TV shows on American network television in the 60's. Its quirky Britishness led the way for "Secret Agent" and "The Prisoner" (both starring Patrick MacGoohan) to be imported for American viewing as well. Though I think that the snappy rock theme song for "Secret Agent" was added in the US to British prints.

I saw some black-and-white Honor Blackman "Avengers" on cable a few years ago -- many of them were shot on VIDEO TAPE, like a daily soap opera. I've never seen the Ian Hendry versions.

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Trivia: On the "Man From UNCLE" episode in which William Shatner was the innocent bystander embroiled in international intrigue, one of the European villains was...Leonard Nimoy. And Werner "Colonel Klink" Kemperer is in the same episode as a baddie, too. Its a trivia classic.

"The Man From UNCLE" was first called "Solo," after Napoleon Solo, but "Goldfinger" stopped that. And as I noted, even though the title was "The MAN From UNCLE," soon the show was about the MEN from UNCLE. Robert Vaughn was one cool and witty spy lead though, without the surface macho of other tough guys, almost cerebral.

The Avengers first made it to the U.S. in 1966 (while the show was still in black-and-white), but only on the ABC affiliate in New York City, I think. It was probably a test to see if the show would do well in America (this was after CBS had scored nicely during the summer of 1965 showing episodes of the show Danger Man under the title Secret Agent (that's where the song "Secret Agent Man" comes from). Apparently, the New York showings were successful enough that ABC decided to go national with the show, and the money they paid for broadcast rights allowed Associated British Company, the producers, to start filming in color (at a time when most British television shows were still being shot in black-and-white--among the few exceptions were the shows being produced by Lew Grade's ITC company; he was aiming for world-wide distribution and knew that most American television was now being shot in color--and indeed, several of his shows made it to American television in the late 60's; The Saint and The Champions on NBC[the latter as a summertime replacement series], and shows such as Department "S" and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)[under the title My Partner The Ghost] in syndication).

And so the '67 series of The Avengers was shot in color and shown on ABC in the spring of 1968, which is where my mother discovered it. It was a big enough hit that ABC picked up the '68 season as well, which was shown on ABC in 1969. Unfortunately, they moved the show from eight on Wednesday nights to eight on Monday nights, opposite the hottest season of Laugh-In. ABC canceled the show in the spring of 1970, and the loss of American money meant the end of the show. The sequel, The New Avengers, got made because there was Canadian money in the show.

"I did not know that." All helpful to me. (Now, can report it to others!)

I recall the "weirdness" of the veddy British "The Avengers" on American TV. It just didn't have that backlot studio feel of "UNCLE" or "The Wild, Wild West," though perhaps "I Spy" approximated its gritty non-studio feel.

The American financing makes sense for how "professional" "The Avengers' started looking. Bigger budgets, I suppose.

I never saw it, but I think "The New Avengers" used Joanna Lumley as the female action lead. She, of course, later moved on to playing one of the boozy broads on "AbFab."

The Avengers actually began working with larger budgets during the 1965 season, when it went from video to film; even in black-and-white, it was one of the handsomest-looking shows on television (One wonders if the producers were already thinking of international distribution--Lew Grade had already begun to sell such shows as Danger Man and The Saint in the States)

One of the reasons that The Avengers probably avoided the studio-bound look was that all of the filmed episodes were set in England; not having to fake exotic foreign locales, they could afford to shoot on location, since most of the locations were probably within no more than an hour's drive from the studio . . .