Going Solo

American Life TV network has been showing The Man From U.N.C.L.E. for years now on their "Spy Night," which is Wednesdays. For the past two months they have been having what they call "U.N.C.L.E Movie Mania" showing one two-part episode together each week. This coming Wednesday is their last "Movie Mania" night and it will end where it began, showing the pilot to The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Well, sort of anyway.

The show opens with a very well done scene of a quartet of THRUSH agents infiltrating U.N.C.L.E. headquarters. Finally one agent makes it to the core of U.N.C.L.E. where he fires at a silhouette of a man. The bullets however, smash into a glass partition, tracking cracks across the screen. A light finally comes on revealing the face of Robert Vaughn as he slowly raises his gun. The scene was used as part of the title sequence for the first season of the show.

But it is now that you get the shocker. You hear the familiar Jerry Goldsmith theme, you see the map of the world, which is then overlaid with the title of the show: SOLO!

For as I said, this is not quite the pilot for The Man From U.N.C.L.E., this is actually the pilot for Solo, the show that became The Man From U.N.C.L.E. James Bond creator Ian Fleming was part of the creative team that developed Solo, the adventures of an agent for an International spy organization called U.N.C.L.E. The show was to star Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo and an uncast actress as agent April Dancer. By the time the pilot was filmed, the Dancer character was dropped (later to be resurrected as The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.).

The show does feature for a few brief minutes actor David McCallum as agent Illya Kuryakin and he must have impressed the powers that be in those few minutes because when the series did finally air he was Vaughn's co-star and the witty banter began. Now some of you may think that you have seen The Man From U.N.C.L.E. pilot and you are sort of right. NBC did air the Solo pilot as an episode of TMFU, but there were a couple of changes made.

Two of them are obvious. First, the standard The Man From U.N.C.L.E. title sequence was put on the show. Second, it was aired in black and white, not color like the Solo pilot. The third change involves the head of U.N.C.L.E., Mr. Waverly; he wasn't in the pilot. In this episode the head of U.N.C.L.E. was Mr. Allison, played by actor Will Kuluva. For the aired TMFU pilot, Kuluva's scenes were cut and reshot with Leo G. Carrol as Alexander Waverly.

I know some people cringe at how dated TMFU can seem, and some seasons were campier than others. But the pilot episode is not a bad show at all and has a great guest cast including Fritz Weaver, William Marshall, Rupert Crosse, Ivan Dixon and Pat Crowley. Set your TiVos for next Wednesday and see what I am talking about. See Solo.