Good morning, Mr. Phelps… You See Before You a Gadget Geek’s Paradise.

I am a gadget geek. I build my own computers from parts at home. When I got a used cassette deck on eBay last summer that didn’t work, I ordered schematics from a website in Eastern Europe and tried to fix it. I even suggested modifying the mid-?70s vintage Cuisinart food processor that my wife and I got from her parents house when we discovered that it didn’t have a “pulse” switch (an idea my wife vetoed in favor of simply getting a new one.) For me, part of the fun of putting together a home theater system for our living room is building it from components, not buying some manufacturer’s idea of “home theater in a box.” I like putting together electronics, connecting wires, and pressing switches.

Being born in the late 1960s, the show that most fed my interest in gadgets during my formative years was the original Star Trek series. I was a serious Trek fan, watching episodes that appeared in syndication two and three times a day when possible. I got Star Trek toys for Christmas and my birthday. I remember enjoying Star Trek: The Motion Picture when it came out because a) I was about ten years old and didn’t know better, and b) it was new Star Trek with big-budget special effects. When it comes to cultivating an interest in lights, knobs, and buttons, Star Trek wins hands down.

Lately though, I find myself thinking a lot about the show that has to be a very close second in my gadget-loving heart — Bruce Geller’s original Mission: Impossible TV show. That’s saying something, given that M:I doesn’t have the kind of syndication frequency or spin-off success that Star Trek enjoys; I haven’t seen M:I on a regular basis since the FX network re-ran the whole series when it first started in the mid-90s. Fortunately, promotion for the new Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible 3 motion picture has inspired some affiliates to run afternoon marathons of the series on which it is based.

The show is a gadget-lovers bonanza. Nearly every episode turns on some interesting bit of technology or another. From a 90-pound portable computer sewn into a tuxedo used to compute the odds of casino games, to various atomic weapons, to remote-control cars and helicopters, to those miraculous latex masks, almost every episode dedicates screen time to the assembly and operation of some bit of gadgetry. Even better, the gadgetry sequences are often scored with one of the famous Lalo Shifrin themes from the show known as “The Plot.”

The show also had other plusses. One of the biggest had to be the regular cast. The first three seasons (and in the opinion of many, the best seasons) benefited significantly from the presence of future Oscar-winner Martin Landau in the cast. Every season but the first had Peter Graves as the iconic Jim Phelps. Another was a rotating stable of regular TV actors like Anthony Zerbe, William Shatner, and Malachi Throne, who could ably play allies and villains in each episode. While the show eventually lapsed into the polyester fashion excesses of the early 1970s, its early seasons also possessed a fairly classic sense of late 1960s style that still has a certain timeless resonance. Finally, the plots were generally intricate, well-thought-out games of strategy that stay fresh when chase sequences with period cars would now seem dated.

Of course, M:I also registers with any geek who loves Star Trek because of the presence of one actor in the cast for two seasons: Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy replaced Martin Landau as the resident master of mimicry and disguise for two years immediately following his turn as Mr. Spock on Star Trek. While it is often debatable how good the actors in the cast of Star Trek really were, M:I offers the Star Trek fan the opportunity to see Nimoy in roles other than the one with which he is most strongly identified. Whether as an old man, an oily East European currency counterfeiter, or a Che Guevara-like revolutionary, it is interesting to see Nimoy’s range.

If you find yourself getting tired of the posturing of Tom Cruise in the M:I:III media blitz, I say that someone inspired by gadget geekery cannot do much better than to catch a few classic episodes of the original Mission: Impossible. It’s currently making the rounds on a few TV stations. It’s also available on VHS, with DVD versions rumored to be available soon. Go old school, see the original. You won’t regret it.