The Man from UNCLE

The Man From UNCLE will probably always be my favorite TV show, not for itself, but for what it did for me. I was 11 when it first aired and went through puberty with it. I formed an emotional attachment to the show and Illya Kuryakin/David McCallum (I adored David McCallum and didn't appreciate Robert Vaughn who played Napoleon Solo until I was much older) and still get a thrill when I see McCallum in something. I saw him in three not very good plays here in NYC specifically because he was in the cast. I got his autograph after one of them.

And the show got me started writing fiction — fan fiction, more than a decade before I ever heard the term — because it was cancelled and I wanted more adventures. And I wrote fan stories for other shows, too. My best friend in junior and senior high and I became friends because we both loved Man From UNCLE (MFU) and The Monkees.

I bought the books, and spent a few bucks tracking down the last 3 (fairly rare next to the earlier ones because fewer were printed). I bought the digest-size magazines that featured a MFU story every issue. I was an UNCLE junkie and I still have the books and mags. The lunchbox, with intact thermos, came after the show was off the air for a number of years. I'd never gotten media tie-in lunchboxes when I was a kid. But when I saw the set at a Creation (science fiction and comic books) fan convention in the late-'70s for a reasonable price (meaning, I had enough cash left to buy it), I had to have it.

I did buy a crudely-built, homemade "pen communicator" at a con and played with it endlessly. It was the show I missed more than any other (tho now there are many others I miss as much or more), cancelled as part of the backlash against TV shows in the mid-to-late-'60s. By then, after 3 1/2 seasons on the air, Napoleon and Illya became iconic characters and it didn't matter that Illya's name was misspelled (it should've had one L only).

In 1980, I discovered my then-best friend had also grown up a MFU fan. She said she'd read MFU stories if I wrote them. At that point, I hadn't written fiction for nearly 10 years, but with the promise of an audience, albeit of one, I took the bait and wrote five. She read and liked them and when she found out about fanzines, she gave me the info, I got the stories published, and was soon doing my own zines. I really believe that if it weren't for that, I wouldn't be writing original fiction now and I wouldn't be finishing the draft of my first novel (not a spy story, as one might expect, but science fiction tho with an element of suspense).

And I met my best friend of the past nearly 20 years because she wrote me a letter of comment (LoC) after reading my MFU fan fic stories. We became fast friends and collaborators and go to fan conventions together to this day.

So I can honestly say that The Man From UNCLE had a positive and longlasting effect on my life. And how many folks can say that about a TV show.

Feeling:

man from uncle