Mission: Impossible (1966)

Mission: Impossible ran from 1966 to 1973. The show was about a team of secret agents called the Impossible Mission Force, or the IMF, who go on covert missions to fight and defeat Syndicate crime lords and evil dictators. Each week the Team Leader would get his assignment from a tape recording left at an isolated location. He would then assemble his team of specialists from a photo dossier, cut ahead to one final briefing, then move out into the field. The IMF team typically was composed of The Master of Disguise, the Femme Fatale, the Technical Genius, and The Strongman. However, they would bring in additional specialists as necessary, anyone from a safe cracker to a contortionist to a memory expert.

The team would used advanced technological gadgets, disguises, drugs, psychological manipulation, and a series of elaborate ruses to break into impenetrable safes, despose dictators, set two bad guys against each other, etc. If they couldn't get the villain punished for a crime he committed, they'd frame him for something he hadn't done or trick him into shooting another bad guy. Each week at the end the team would quietly slip away in a vehicle, their mission completed.

Although the formula varied only slightly from time to time, and very little was ever revealed about the team members' background, the show proved popular enough to run seven years and outlast the other spy shows of the era.


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