My Favorite Martian is available on DVD, but not The Addams Family or The Wild Wild West or Get Smart. Does that seem right to you?
We recently watched the first two episodes of The Protectors (1972), which wanted to be The Avengers — even quoting from the latter’s title narration at one point, contrasting the “professional” with the “talented amateur”. The plots were tolerably interesting, but the sparkle of the model was missing; as if Gerry Anderson took some leftover Avengers scripts and said, “Okay, now let’s cut out all the humour.”
Today I watched the first two episodes of The Saint (1962), and was surprised at how trite they are: a failed theatre producer plans to kill his third wife for the insurance; a gangster kidnaps an American governor’s daughter to get his brother out of the electric chair, and guess what, the Saint fails to spot the obvious corrupt policeman. Unlike the Saint of the books, this one is not in the habit of working alone; there’s nothing to distinguish him from any number of other teevee detectives, except that early in each episode someone says “hey, that’s the famous Simon Templar!” and a halo briefly appears over his head.
The Saint was, I gather, a very popular series. I shudder to imagine its competition. It would have been better as a half-hour show — and even then it might drag in comparison to its rough contemporary Danger Man.
It may well be that The Saint was reformulated and improved in 1966; the list of episode dates shows signs of a discontinuity, and the later DVDs are numbered separately.
The later Saint is in color, but (to judge by the first episode) no better.