Production
The show was inspired by the success of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Talent Associates commissioned Mel Brooks and Buck Henry to write a script about a bungling James Bond-like hero. Brooks and Henry took the show in a different direction. Brooks described the premise for the show they created in an October 1965 Time magazine article:
- "I was sick of looking at all those nice sensible situation comedies. They were such distortions of life. If a maid ever took over my house like Hazel, I'd set her hair on fire. I wanted to do a crazy, unreal comic-strip kind of thing about something besides a family. No one had ever done a show about an idiot before. I decided to be the first."
Brooks and Henry proposed the show to ABC, where network officials called their show "un-American" and demanded a "lovable dog to give the show more heart" and scenes showing Maxwell Smart's mother. Brooks strongly objected to their latter suggestion:
- "They wanted to put a print housecoat on the show. Max was to come home to his mother and explain everything. I hate mothers on shows. Max has no mother. He never had one."
Although the cast and crew—especially Adams—contributed joke and gadget ideas, dialogue was rarely ad-libbed. An exception is the third season episode, "The Little Black Book." Don Rickles encouraged Adams to misbehave, and ad-libbed. The result was so successful that the single episode was turned into a two-part episode.
Read more about this topic: Get Smart
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—State of Utah, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, nor is it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)