Well, since I'm here...
Some interesting links about my avatar and the Shoe Phone, as well as the start of the entire portable phone revolution!
Maxwell Smart (link), AKA Agent 86 - my avatar
View attachment 50973
Get Smart is an American
comedy television series that
satirizes the secret agent genre. Created by
Mel Brooks with
Buck Henry,[SUP]
[1][/SUP] the show starred
Don Adams (as Maxwell Smart, Agent 86),
Barbara Feldon (as Agent 99), and
Edward Platt (as Chief). Henry said the creation of this show came from a request by
Daniel Melnick, who was a partner, along with
Leonard Stern and
David Susskind, of the show's production company,
Talent Associates, to capitalize on "the two biggest things in the entertainment world today"—
James Bond and
Inspector Clouseau.[SUP]
[2][/SUP] Brooks said: "It's an insane combination of
James Bond and Mel Brooks comedy."
The show was inspired by the success of
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Talent Associates commissioned
Mel Brooks and
Buck Henry to write a script about a bungling
James Bond-like hero.[SUP]
[8][/SUP] Brooks and Henry took the show in a different direction. Brooks described the premise for the show they created in an October 1965
Time magazine article:
"I was sick of looking at all those nice sensible situation comedies. They were such distortions of life. If a maid ever took over my house like
Hazel, I'd set her hair on fire. I wanted to do a crazy, unreal
comic-strip kind of thing about something besides a family. No one had ever done a show about an idiot before. I decided to be the first."[SUP]
[8][/SUP] Brooks and Henry proposed the show to ABC, where network officials called their show "un-American" and demanded a "lovable dog to give the show more heart" and scenes showing Maxwell Smart's mother.[SUP]
[8][/SUP] Brooks strongly objected to their latter suggestion:
"They wanted to put a print housecoat on the show. Max was to come home to his mother and explain everything. I hate mothers on shows. Max has no mother. He never had one."[SUP]
[8][/SUP] Although the cast and crew—especially Adams—contributed joke and gadget ideas, dialogue was rarely ad-libbed. An exception is the third season episode, "The Little Black Book."
Don Rickles encouraged Adams to misbehave, and ad-libbed. The result was so successful that the single episode was turned into a two-part episode.[SUP]
[9][/SUP]
Oh, edit here... Almost forgot this link!
https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/cia-museum/spy-fi-archives/item15.html (yeah, that's right...the CIA has a page for the Shoe Phone!!)
Dr. Martin Cooper (link) was my first avatar, but he was less recognizable, and didn't really convey the light-hearted attitude I wish to portray here, so I changed it to Maxwell Smart.
View attachment 50974
(The inventor of the Portable Cellular Phone - and of course, MOTOROLA's employee, and the phone...yes, a Motorola 8000X - affectionately called "The Brick", with a whopping 30 minutes of talk time! Note the 2 button side-by-side layout of the keyboard. This was the first prototype. The later models had the standard 3X4 layout.
View attachment 50975
It was the FIRST PORTABLE CELLULAR PHONE. "it took only 90 days in 1973 to create the first portable cellular 800 MHz phone prototype." Truly amazing! I actually used one of the Motorola 8000X phones for a while when I was a Bell Atlantic Mobile Agent. That was in 1994, and that's where I got my three phone numbers that I still have today...all are thousand numbers;
###,###,8,000 (my phone number - after the 8000X), ###,###,8,100 (the wife), & ###,###,8,200 (my son). :biggrin:
