Once Upon a Spy

"Once Upon a Spy" is a TV movie featuring Ted Danson as a computer genius and Christopher Lee as an evil computer genius, Marcus Velorium, bent on controlling the world...much like a Bond villain. But unlike Bond, there is no super-spy to stop the madman...only nice-guy Jack (Danson).

Being 1980, the concepts of computers sure isn't what we think of today. So, when a supercomputer that is the size of a city block is stolen, folks take notice. As a result, one of the foremost NICE computer scientists, Jack, is brought to a top secret location to talk to some humorless woman...and she recruits him to help investigate the theft. Naturally, the computer is being used to vaporize things from space...and I hate when that happens.

As I said above, in many ways this plays like a Bond film....a really bad one featuring a leading man who seems completely out of his element. I think this might have worked had it been more of a parody. Instead, however, it just seemed annoying and childish....and would not appeal to most adult viewers...unless you are curious what Danson was doing before he became famous. Even with the scene-chewing Lee as the baddie, this is pretty limp and dated.

I guess this television Movie of the Week planned to be back-door series pilot. A hokum version of The Man from Uncle with the James Bond like theme after the opening titles.

It stars a young Ted Danson as a government computer expert called in by a mysterious American intelligence service to track down a supercomputer stolen by dastardly Christopher Lee.

The reluctant Danson is paired up with attractive, blonde agent Mary Louise Weller and they make a good pair and Danson does well with the comedy and drama and has some literate lines although the plot is tosh. The final challenge set by Lee is called the Cat and the Canary with some Pacman type graphics.

As it was shown in 1980 a few years before films like Wargames and just before the Home Computer boom of the early 1980s, you have big computers the size of several walls that play a nifty game of chess just like the supercomputer in Wargames.

Danson shows talent which would make him a star a few years later in Cheers, but the the film was rather flimsy. It lacked the spark of the Man from from Uncle and I could not take seriously the secret entrance to the agency's office via a Tunnel of Love ride. From the short of the big wooden roller coaster, it looked like Knott's Berry Park!

One of those failed TV-pilots that then became a standalone TV-movie, ONCE UPON A SPY takes the James Bond aesthetic to the small screen, from formidable (and colorful) technical set pieces to a flaunting trumpet score to a former Bond villain in Christopher Lee, a brilliant computer mogul who, brain-wise, is second to none...

Well except for Ted Danson, turning in one of those "befuddled geeks who's really a handsome diamond-in-the rough/anti-leading-man" types... and it's no surprise, given his near-future turn in CHEERS, he has great comedic timing...

Perfectly paired with (and counterbalanced by) sublime ANIMAL HOUSE beauty Mary-Louise Weller, an Alpha Male-like female operative and, after getting Danson's Jack Chenault out of a stuffy office shared with his only friend, a computer the size of a wall, the action is pretty much non-stop...

So the peripheral world-dominating plot doesn't matters since it's the nifty Odd Couple duo... whether ripping around in a hot-rod on the ground or jumping out of planes in the air... that really matters, and this SPY would have made a genuinely good series (as the creators of REMINGTON STEELE would soon-after prove).

This continues the string of bad-to-middling pictures Christopher Lee lent his services to after he went the Hollywood route; while not terrible as such – at the very least, it reunited him with former Hammer scribe Jimmy Sangster – the end result is best described as terminally bland.

Rather than imitating the James Bond formula (though John Cacavas' score certainly throws several cues in that direction), the film seems like a belated addition to the myriad espionage TV series of the 1960s yet fully embracing the absurd obsession with technology that was redolent of the era in which it was made; interestingly, Lee's shrinking of a cumbersome computer to portable size can be seen as a prophetic indication of the extensive progress achieved in this particular field! He plays a reclusive tycoon, bound all the way through in a snazzy missile-carrying(!) wheelchair, whose everyman nemesis (Ted Danson) not only happens to be an old rival but ultimately contrives to hoist the older man with his own petard. Aiding the protagonist is a female secret agent (a relationship which, typically, starts off on the wrong foot and inevitably ends in romance) and, to further accentuate the feminist viewpoint, Eleanor Parker fills in for the Agency Head.

The film, then, is not unentertaining for what it is and, if anything, manages a nod to both Hitchcock (Danson is about to be eliminated when a crowd of tourists bursts upon the scene and he joins them on their way out towards safety) and the cult TV series THE PRISONER (hero and villain conduct a deadly board game utilizing human pieces).

Neat little TV movie, in the spirit of "The Men From U.N.C.L.E." A pre-Cheers Ted Danson is partnered with an athletic female lead, and Christopher Lee is always good value as the villain. Former Hammer scribe Jimmy Sangster had a hand in the story.