Like anyone else who grew up watching Get Smart reruns, my first question when it was announced that a Get Smart movie was going to be made was: “Isn’t Don Adams dead?” The second question was: “What are they going to do about the shoe phone?”
The shoe phone was a crucial gadget in Maxwell Smart’s arsenal back in the 1960s, but I have to admit, it’s looking a little dated now. As a child, I never imagined I would one day have my own shoe phone, let alone a phone I could slip into my pocket, allowing angry creditors to find me any time of the day or night. But as the AP notes, “Today, almost everyone has a pocket-sized version that also takes photos, shoots video, sends e-mail and surfs the Internet. About the only thing it doesn't do is protect your feet.”
A new version of Get Smart requires a new generation of spy gadgetry. In the Steve Carell movie, the gadgets “are just as goofy as they were in the original TV series, but because technology has caught up with the writers' imaginations, there's a big difference: many of the movie's doo-dads actually exist…The film shows a tiny iPod alongside spy-worthy stuff such as a two-way tooth radio and a digital "spy fly" -- all of which are available now.”
So now CONTROL presumably has an account with Sharper Image, but what of the bulletproof pajamas and vibrating paint from the good ol’ days? Well, fortunately there’s always an obsessive somewhere on the web to meet our needs, and the good folks at WouldYouBelieve.com have compiled a comprehensive list of old school Maxwell Smart gadgetry. The cheese sandwich phone! The French bread triangulation device! The Snead Synthetic Onion! Why, if we’d had access to the Omega Deltoid Solatron Mark 2, this whole Iraq mess might never have happened.
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