Without the least bit of politicking or persuasion to any other form or meaning afforded to the term Eighty-Six...whew, do we feature this months Blog topic: Get Smart, the 1965 TV series. And of course heading up the cast are the stars; Don Adams as the title character Maxwell Smart, a highly intellectual but bumbling spy on staff at the CONTROL agency. Max battles the evil forces of rival spy agency KAOS, with the help of his competent and able-bodied partner Agent 99, played by Barbara Feldon. BTW, Max's code name was Agent 86!
So, you think you might know where this is all going...the Comey two step, perhaps. You're close...but, you're not that close. More like the Comedy 2-step, where I remembered Get Smart as being pretty hep with it tongue & its cheek. With the likes of Brooks and Henry how could it not be. One would think the 86 moniker for Max mighta been leaning more towards humor rather than downright nasty.
When I Googled ' Get Smart (86) meaning ' it came back with "86 is used in a humorous way. It's a reference or code in restaurant wait staff/kitchen slang" for; 'We ran out of it' or 'No longer available'. And Don Adams played the character in such a lighthearted manner you'd hardly think of 'em as a radical killer than a metaphor for "We found this agent in the reject pile, why not give him a try".
Perhaps, if you're newly acquainted with the 86 slang, it could be deemed nefarious... in keeping with the situation.
On a more luminous, benign and Living Alone & Loving it note, is Barbara Feldon and her code name - Agent 99. That last link is to her audio book. Here I am in the picture "Missing it, by t-h-a-t Much" with Barbara along with my dirty shoe-phone. That tag line (while using a 2-fingers apart gesture) was the bedrock of Max's humorous character...always being that close to solving cases.
Speaking of solving cases, Google's Ai version of "Get Smart" and Agent 99's number, 99, was intentionally chosen to imply intelligence and effectiveness, even though her real name was never revealed. The show-runners likely favored 99 over 100 (which was originally considered) because 99 sounded more feminine. The number 99 is close to 100, suggesting near-perfect intelligence and capability, which aligned with the character's role as a skilled and resourceful agent.
Barbara Feldon was born on March 12, 1933, in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. She was the younger daughter of Raymond D. Hall, an executive in the paper box industry, and Julia Stewart Hall, a housewife. Growing up in a middle-class family, Feldon developed an early interest in the performing arts.
We're happy to report that Ms. Feldon (92) is alive and well, as we always hope she is, and living in Manhattan, N.Y. You may have guessed already but Ms. Feldon had quite a career as a silky voice-over artist as well.
Guess what? Agent 99 really was more intelligent than the average bear...Bard none. In 1957, she won the grand prize on the game show The $64,000 Question in the category of William Shakespeare. In addition, she is also an author, writing the book "Getting Smarter: A Memoir" Golly Gosh, wouldn't it be the neatest to see her get to the golden age of 99!
On the Ai Front with - Stefan Nadelman our (Main Animation/Animation Director) are the advances in Ai generating platforms...particularly with turning still pictures into moving images (spoiler alert) Stefan says 'anyone can do it' !!
You are now able to create the things I've been posting from the comfort of your computer. Websites like Runway and Kling offer their powerful tools to generate high quality video quickly. Turbo mode costs around 25¢ per 5 second video generation, 50¢ for their higher end models. If you know what you want, it's a powerful tool and relatively cheap. If you just want to futz around and have fun, it's still relatively cheap.
So...I basically got my semi-decent (12 GB VRAM) PC to run ComfyUI a free interface that works with Stable Diffusion (open source Ai) and I can generate video locally on my machine for free. The catch is that I have to work in smaller sizes because generating video takes a lot longer. That's what I've been using for the Terminal Bar stuff. It takes around 5-10 minutes per 3 second video generation. (Runway or Kling can bang out a 5-10 second clip in under a minute). I would not advise this route unless you have a fast PC and have knowledge of node-based interfaces.
Check out how Stefan applied the Ai tools above on his IG page called Workin for the Man. The photo stills are the same used in Stefan's pictorial history of the Terminal Bar, a documentary that won B-I-G at Sundance in 2003. This is where our path's crossed when he very adroitly chose yours truly to voice the characters in TB. And I've been very adroitly thanking his keister since. Hard to believe those stills have been just sittin' around for years. Now they move with extrapolated gesturing and (catch Stefan's IG ones) literally are S-m-o-k-i-N' to become somehow alive.
