Bourne Smart

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with "Get Smart." I remember getting teased one day in class when as part of a game, I named it as a favorite TV show, and people laughed thinking it was some nerdy show that literally had to do with getting smarter. (We were supposed to draw a picture representing the show and someone drew a brain.) I don't know if loving a 1965 TV series is any more cool for an 8th grader than loving a "getting smarter" show, so I didn't press the point.

So it is of course with mixed feelings that I do somewhat anticipate the upcoming movie remake. I am warily excited because I can think of no better person to fill Don Adams' shoes than Steve Carrell. And I am just going to say it, I love The Rock. Between "Supe R. Man," and the Rundown, I'm a fan, despite having never watched him wrestle. And who doesn't love Alan Arkin, or Anne Hathaway, who so lovingly bared her chest for all us straight men who watched Brokeback Mountain?

But I remember another attempt to revive "Get Smart," the very short lived same-name series from 1995, which featured Don Adams returning as Max, now chief of Control, and starred his son, Zach Smart, played by... Andy Dick (yes, really.) And despite the very awful casting choice, the show did feature the original Max, and also Barbara Feldon returned as 99. But the show flopped. Again, maybe due to the fact that Andy Dick has never been enjoyable in anything ever except the Ben Stiller show, and NewsRadio, but also because, it wasn't a show for the 90's.

What makes me nervous about the idea of a Get Smart remake is a problem that faces a lot of contemporary remake, in that they often don't connect with the context of today's world. This problem was embraced by the Brady Bunch movies, but is usually something of a bane for remake attempts. The Duke boys can't gleefully ride around in the 21st century south the way they did in the 1970's and still connect. Miami Vice, though adapted by Michael Mann himself, translated into something more like a Bad Boys rip off than an actual remake of the original series.

In the case of Get Smart, the genre it parodies has undergone a massive overhaul, mostly on the tail of a little franchise called the Bourne Identity Trilogy. As Jason Bourne, Matt Damon changed the face of the spy movie hero from one of the debonair playboy to a rougher around the edges human weapon, a metamorphosis fully confirmed by the rebooting of the James Bond franchise with Casino Royale, essentially turning Bond into Bourne. By the majority of accounts it was a breath of fresh air that the series needed, but where does that leave Maxwell Smart?

Oddly enough, the one true bit of hope that the remake has going for it, is that the actual nature of the humor itself will work on audiences in 2008, without the contemporary connection to the spies of the sixties era. This potentially makes Carrell an even smarter casting choice beyond his similarities to Don Adams. As Michael Scott on the American "Office," Carrell has helped create an audience favorite out of a show that embraces the humor of awkwardness in a way perhaps no other American series has done since the original Smart. Hopefully this combination puts together a product that works better than the Cone of Silence.