Mr. Big (Get Smart)

"Mr. Big" is the first episode of the first season of Get Smart and originally aired on September 18, 1965.^[1] In it, Maxwell Smart must rescue Professor Dante, whose device (the Enthermo) is being used by KAOS to menace the world. Max is told to rescue the professor, and bring back the Enthermo.

Produced as the pilot episode of the series, this episode was filmed in black and white in early 1965. All other episodes that followed were in color.

Plot

Maxwell Smart (Don Adams) is called up during a concert by his shoe-phone, and is then told to meet the Chief (Edward Platt) at CONTROL Headquarters to talk about KAOS. The Chief tells Max that it is his turn to do a very important CONTROL mission, and he asks Max to analyze a diagram. He tells Max that the object in the diagram is called the Enthermo, and it is a device that can convert heat waves into immense destructive powers. It is then revealed that Mr. Big (Michael Dunn) is demanding $100,000,000 or else he will use the Enthermo on all the major cities of the World.

After gathering his gear, Max is told that Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon) will meet him at the Airport. Max finds Agent 99 and they head to Mr. Big's lab, where they find an important clue written on a rubber banana, which belongs to a novelty shop. KAOS then announces that at 4:00, they will destroy The Statue of Liberty in New York City to prove the power of the Enthermo. From the novelty store, they find that a garbage scow, covered in rubber trash, is being used as a base for the Enthermo. They are captured trying to climb onto the ship, but later escape by using Max's Inflato-Coat. They rescue the professor, who is able to reverse the Enthermo so it blows up and destroys the scow, the Enthermo and Mr. Big.

In this episode Smart's car was a Sunbeam Tiger, that never left the studio plot as Buck Henry complained about on the DVD's commentary in 2008.^[2] The DVD of the episode shows otherwise, the vehicle appears to be a Ferrari 250. As opposed to carrying a .38 caliber revolver in the rest of the series, Max's sidearm is a Beretta M1915 automatic pistol.

Production

Mel Brooks says he got involved because of Talent Associates (Danny Melnick and David Suskind), who said that they wanted to talk to him about something involving a CIA parody. They suggested a few people, one of them Buck Henry whom Brooks chose as his writer. They wrote a take-off of spy stories, with the idea that they thought that the people running their country were inept, and that they would show the world. It took them 3 and a half months, because they enjoyed playing pool so much.^[3]

Literary allusion

Professor Dante's "Enthermo" was an obvious allusion to Inferno, the first major division of Dante's Divine Comedy. This allusion was then lampshaded when Dante admits that he'd originally intended to call his thermal death-ray "Dante's Inferno."

References