Barnes & Noble

Although it provided fodder for dozens of comedy sketches and eventually became a parody of itself, this high-adventure series got off to a good start with gripping, surprisingly complex yarns of Cold War intrigue. Mission: Impossible premiered in 1966 with a largely unknown cast but, by virtue of its unusually clever scripts and exotic settings, became an early example of "destination TV": a show around which people actually arranged their schedules. Steven Hill portrayed Dan Briggs, head of the IMF (Impossible Missions Taskforce), a top-secret private agency engaged by the government to carry out dangerous assignments too hot to be handled by American military or law-enforcement agencies. His team -- chosen at the beginning of each adventure in a little ritual that became one of the show's trademarks -- included actor and makeup genius Rollin Hand (Martin Landau), actress Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain, then Landau's real-life wife), technical wizard Barney Collier (Greg Morris), and strongman Willy Armitage (Peter Lupus). The IMF's various missions taxed the ingenuity of the writers, who almost always rose to the challenge of providing exhaustively detailed capers that kept home viewers riveted to their seats. Among the best shows of the 28-episode first season are "A Spool There Was," a Landau-Bain tour de force that finds Rollin and Cinnamon going it alone to recover a crucially important wire recording; "The Traitor," in which the IMF discredits an American defector and whisks him out of enemy territory before he can impart top-secret information; and "Action!," which finds Dan and the team sabotaging the efforts of an Iron Curtain filmmaker who has been manipulating footage of American troops in his movie about wartime atrocities. Ed Hulse

All Movie Guide

Season one of Mission: Impossible finds Steven Hill heading the cast as Dan Briggs, head of the top-secret Impossible Missions Force. Issued instructions at the outset of each episode by that famous "self-destructing" tape recorder, Briggs proceeds to select the IMF operatives best suited to the covert assignment at hand. There are three "permanent" members of the team during season one: versatile femme fatale Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain), electronics expert Barney Collier (Greg Morris), and muscle man Willie Armitage (Peter Lupus). As originally conceived, the fourth member of the team, master of disguise Rollin Hand (played by Martin Landau, then the husband of Barbara Bain) was supposed to have been an infrequent guest star, but audience response was so positive to Rollin that Landau ended up a series regular. However, there are instances during season one in which a guest actor is recruited by Dan Briggs for a specific assignment, notably Wally Cox in the opening episode, Eartha Kitt in the episode "The Traitor, and Mary Ann Mobley in the two-parter "Odd Man Out." In the course of the IMF's first year on the air, the team steals a pair of nuclear warheads possessed by a Latin American despot; convinces an enemy agent (Fritz Weaver) on a deadly mission that he has been in a coma for two years; thwarts the development of a plague virus by posing as spy trainees in a replicated American town somewhere behind the Iron Curtain; foils the scheme of a Communist filmmaker to fake a documentary depicting American atrocities in Indochina; infiltrates a group of neo-Nazis bent on creating a Fourth Reich; creates a phony 27,000-carat diamond in order to oust a greedy African dictator; and rigs a high-stakes poker game to retrieve a cache of secret government documents. Although Mission: Impossible's ratings were good during its inaugural season, the series never cracked the Top 30, prompting CBS to move the show from Saturday evenings to Sundays in season two. However, the series managed to win three Emmy awards, for Outstanding Actress (Barbara Bain), Outstanding Writing Achievement in Drama (Bruce Geller), and even for Outstanding Dramatic Series. Hal Erickson

Product Details

• UPC: 097360384529
• Source: PARAMOUNT
• Region Code: 1
• Aspect Ratio: Pre-1954 Standard (1.33.1)
• Sound: Dolby Digital Mono, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
• Language: English
• Time: 23:24:00
• Sales Rank: 17,454

This set contains DVDs which may be available separately:

• Mission: Impossible: Pilot Episode
• Mission: Impossible: Memory
• Mission: Impossible: Old Man Out, Part Two
• Mission: Impossible: Odds on Evil
• Mission: Impossible: Wheels
• Mission: Impossible: The Ransom
• Mission: Impossible: A Spool There Was
• Mission: Impossible: The Carriers
• Mission: Impossible: Zubrovnik's Ghost
• Mission: Impossible: Fakeout
• Mission: Impossible: Elena
• Mission: Impossible: The Short Tail Spy
• Mission: Impossible: Operation Rogosh
• Mission: Impossible: Old Man Out, Part One
• Mission: Impossible: The Legacy
• Mission: Impossible: The Reluctant Dragon
• Mission: Impossible: The Frame
• Mission: Impossible: The Trial
• Mission: Impossible: The Diamond
• Mission: Impossible: The Legend
• Mission: Impossible: Snowball in Hell
• Mission: Impossible: The Confession
• Mission: Impossible: Action!
• Mission: Impossible: The Train
• Mission: Impossible: Shock
• Mission: Impossible: A Cube of Sugar
• Mission: Impossible: The Traitor
• Mission: Impossible: The Psychic
• Mission: Impossible: The Legacy

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