Get Smart: Season Four – DVD Review

DVD Reviews, Reviews

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After exchanging meaningful looks and almost-kisses for three seasons, Max and 99 finally profess their love and get married. That’s if Kaos will let them.

Typically a show with a strong “Will they? Won’t they?” subtext fizzles out once the two characters move past the point of sexual tension and into a relationship, but at least for Season Four, Get Smart manages to stay just as funny and corny as ever.

This is probably due to the fact that the general concept of the show didn’t change. Married or not, Max and 99 are still spies working for Control, and the majority of the humor comes from the spoofing of the spy genre and Max’s incompetence. It also doesn’t hurt that the main three actors—Don Adams, Barbara Feldon, and Edward Platt—work great together. In Season Four the three foil various Kaos plots, such as destroying the United State’s potato harvest, destroying space shuttles with nuclear golf balls, or sinking the Sixth Fleet with a super magnet.

The recent movie proves that the concept and characters are still viable, and for me the TV series holds up just as well. I grew up watching Get Smart on Nick at Nite, so there is a definite nostalgia factor working for me, but the core of the humor—the puns, the slapstick physical comedy, and Max’s bumbling—come from a basic place. The places where the show falls flat are when it strays into racist territory, particularly when where Asian characters are concerned. While these episodes manage to avoid being quite as offensive as, say, Mickey Rooney’s character Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, they certainly aren’t comfortable to watch, and definitely not funny.

That bit of unpleasantness aside, the rest of the show holds up very well. The references and the fashions are a bit outdated, but considering this is a forty-year-old show, it’s a statement to how good the writing and acting were that those are the only areas where it shows its age.

The episodes are presented in fullscreen 4:3 aspect ratio with the audio in English 2.0, and they look and sound remarkably good. HBO did a great job of restoring and remastering the show.

Commentary by Barbara Feldon and Buck Henry on “With Love and Twitches – Of the two commentary tracks, this one is the more focused, although not too terribly entertaining. It’s sort of fun in that Feldon and Henry obviously have many fond memories of the show and the people they worked with, but sometimes it seems like they’re talking more with each other than to the viewer. I will say it was fun to hear Feldon trash the wedding dress they made her wear for the wedding episode, especially the helmet veil.

Commentary by James Caan on “To Sire, With Love, Part 2 – As much as I like James Caan’s acting, the only reason to listen to this is to hear his hilariously wretched impression of Don Adams. Most of the time Caan rambles and loses himself in reminiscing.

The show may be cornier than a Nebraska harvest, but that’s part of its charm. Get Smart is just as funny today as it was forty years ago, and Season Four belongs in any fan’s DVD collection. Highly recommended.


Home Box Office presents Get Smart Season Four. Starring Don Adams, Barbara Feldon, and Edward Platt. Running time: 650 minutes. Rated TV-G. Released on DVD: October 6, 2009. Available at Amazon.