Introduction, plus Mr. Big (S.1, E.1)

Welcome to my blog! Get Smart has been my favorite TV show since I discovered it on Nick at Nite as a teenager in the early 1990s. I've watched each episode several times and love them all.

I've been aware of the many great Get Smart sites for a while now. I recently came across the getsmartfans@groups.io site, and a post there led me to the Get Smart reddit page. There I read a post noting some of the filming locations for the Get Smart pilot. I thought it was so cool to go on Google Maps and see Get Smart locations today.

From there I got the idea to look for other Get Smart locations to figure out where they were in real life. Most filming took place in studio but they did go outside the studio occasionally.

I started collecting screenshots, and as I did so I also started becoming interested in the props. The world of Get Smart always seemed so self-contained to me, but there was more of "real stuff" bleeding in then I realized.

I was just doing this for myself and saving everything to a Google site, but was running out of storage so I decided to make this into a blog instead, especially on the chance anyone else might find this minutia interesting! 

On to Episode I, "Mr. Big".

While not quite "filming locations", I find the stock footage used for location shots interesting as well. The first episode starts off with a very famous location, the US Capitol, with traffic in the foreground.

I used Google Maps to try to figure out the exact location. The best I can tell, this is Pennsylvania Avenue, and the area today seems to be more like a lot of parking spots than a busy thoroughfare.

After Max gets his first shoe-phone-call of the show, he leaves "Symphony Hall". On the groups.io site, superfan Carl Birkmeyer revealed the location, the Union Oil Center of California. Built in 1958 as the headquarters of Union Oil, at the time it was the tallest building in Los Angeles.

Max gets into his car to drive to CONTROL headquarters - located across the street!

Though it wasn't a film studio at the time, in 1998 Union Oil Center was repurposed as a film studio, Los Angeles Center Studios. Most of the area is not visible on Google Maps, but the studio website has a nice interactive virtual tour that enables some pretty good views of the filming locations for this scene. You can see here that the basic layout of the street is pretty similar to the layout in 1965.

Max has now crossed the street to the other side of the Center entrance.

Here's the view from the skybridge, where this shot must have been filmed from.

As Max gets out of the car, you can see "Of California" on the building supposedly in Washington, DC.

Elly Cafe is now located at the site of the original CONTROL headquarters. 

Here's an overhead view of the Center, as it looked when it opened in 1958.

 

And here is an overhead view of what it looks like today.

Moving from locations to props, the first of many prop newspapers used on the site, with the famous "New York Mets Win Doubleheader" headline. As a baseball fan, I'm very curious as to who is in the photo. I did a little looking around online but there isn't much to go on.

While most of the magazines seen in this and many other episodes are generic prop magazines, the comic book the kid is reading has an interesting backstory. As shown on the website Outis Fumetti, the 1955 film Artists and Models had a comic book called "Vincent the Vulture" as part of the plot. Ten years later, that's the comic book the boy is reading in the Get Smart pilot. (Image from outisfumetti.com)

Throughout the show, bus terminal lockers were a great way to store agents and other valuables. As you can see, the lockers were made by American Locker Service. The same lockers are seen throughout the show's run.

Here is a close up of an American Locker Service sticker. American Locker was created in the 1930s as a spinoff of US Voting Machine, and still exists today.

Now we get to Cravehaven Labs, the first of several episodes to use the outside of the Sunset Bronson Studio where the series was filmed, as discovered by Reddit user SoftFaithlessness350. This is 1456 N. Bronson Avenue in Los Angeles. You can see 1456 on the top of the guard shack.

Here is the location today; painted and remodeled but structurally still very similar.

As the limo pulls out, the Mobil station on the corner of Sunset and Bronson is clearly visible. You can even see the Hollywood sign in the hills above the palm trees on the left.

There is still a Mobil station at that corner today!

The limo continues on a bridge next to a brick wall.

Here is that same spot today, East 4th Place and Mateo Street.

SoftFaithlessness350 identified the Grinnell building on 350 Mateo and the building nextdoor, Nate Starkman & Son.

The Grinnell building is long gone, but the Nate Starkman & Son building remains. Nate Starkman's paint manufacturing business is long gone, but the building is still used today for film shoots.

Now owned by Johnson Controls, Grinnell is a major brand of fire alarm and sprinkler products. SoftFaithlessness350 has noted that you can see the sprinkler logo on the South Street Novelty Company building.

The interior of the novelty shop has lots of interesting props. In this image you can see a pennant with the phrase "Do Your Best".

This was a common Cub Scout banner - here is a color photo of one.

As a Yankee fan I have to point out these Yankees pennants!

Some more pennants, both Yankees and Angels this time.

A Revell model kit is visible next to 99. Revell was founded in the 1940s and originally made train sets before switching to model cars. The company still exists today.

Standing out among the many toys is an Ideal Toy robot, from 1961.  

Here's a full color photo of the toy.  

Given the history of Ideal Toy, it is no surprise to see one of their toys here. Ideal Toy was founded in 1903 by the inventors of the teddy bear, Morris and Rose Michtom. The Michtoms had a daughter, also named Rose, and Rose had a nephew named Leonard Stern, one of the creators of Get Smart. Stern famously cast his Aunt Rose as an extra in many episodes of Get Smart. It seems they also cast the family toy company's products in the show as well. It shouldn't be surprising, then, that Ideal was the company chosen to make Get Smart toys when the show became a hit. Once one of the largest toy companies in the US, Ideal was sold to CBS Toys in 1982.

At the end of the episode we get some more location shots with the big fight scene on the garbage scow. On Reddit, SoftFaithlessness350 hypothesized that this was filmed at Terminal Island in San Pedro. 

It certainly seems possible; the oil tanks in the background look very similar to the ones on Mormon Island, across the East Basin Channel from Terminal Island.