Get Smart

Get Smart was an American comedy television series that ran from September 18, 1965 to May 1970, and from January to February 1995. It satirized the secret agent genre, which was quite popular in the late 1960s. It ran on the NBC television network from 1965 to 1969, on CBS from 1969 to 1970, and on Fox in 1995, airing a total of 145 episodes.

Gadgets

Smart would communicate with CONTROL using a dial telephone concealed in his shoe. While it is decades ahead of its time in real life, the need to take off his shoe to use it and the loud bell among other design flaws lead to various humorously awkward situations. The term "shoe phone" has returned to currency as a slang expression for a handheld cellular telephone.

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Smart would always insist on following the rules and, when in the Chief's office, would insist on speaking under the Cone of Silence. One of the show's recurring gags, the Cone of Silence was two transparent plastic hemispheres which were electrically lowered on top of Smart and the Chief, and which invariably malfunctioned, such that the characters wound up shouting in order to be understood by each other. At least one time, the device worked so badly that an outside observer, who could hear everything spoken inside, had to relay messages to the people inside because they couldn't hear them themselves. The 1989 reunion movie revealed that Max and 99 had purchased a surplus Cone and placed it over their bed; it still didn't work.

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The AMT Corporation, a major producer of model car kits, produced a replica of the Sunbeam Tiger roadster Smart drove in the opening credits. Complete with a cache of hidden weapons, it is the only kit of the Tiger produced to date and is highly coveted by collectors. The start of the 1968 season put Smart in another Carroll Shelby creation, a Shelby GT-500 convertible with a variation of the shoe phone, namely a giant rotary telephone dial covering the steering wheel.

Related Topics:
AMT Corporation - Model car - Sunbeam Tiger - Carroll Shelby

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Communication devices have been hidden in other contraptions: once, the chief used the hour and minute hands of a clock (detached from the clock face) to communicate; once, Max had to use the Bunsen burner that the phone was hidden in, with the flame as the microphone, but he had to put Code P into effect, and he kept "disconnecting" when saying "P".

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