Ahh, my first celebrity crush. I fell in love with her when I saw her in Cinderella, and I was 5.
What a sad tale she has of how her Svengali husband dictating her career choices and wardrobe messed up her time on MI.
Direct from Ramsdorf, East Europe:
No one could do a faux German accent like she could! :cool:I wish I could find the ***MAD Magazine ***satire “Mission: Ridiculous” on the Internet; I know it used to be on at least one site. I remember reading it and then not being able to watch the show that week, because I was laughing so hard every time they had a close-up of Martin Landau or Barbara Bain!
What episode was the one in which Bain played a long lost princess? She had gone blind, but “proved her identity” by opening a tricky puzzle box. Supposedly only the “real” princess would have known how to do that.
THE HEIR APPARENT. The best part of that one is, while all eyes are on Cinnamon doing her act, Rollin is waiting as the elderly doctor who’ll get called to discredit her. So nobody – except us – is looking directly at him as he casually removes one part of his disguise after another instead of doing the dramatic peel-off-his-face bit.
So the bad guy eventually turns to him, and – young woman, portly soldier, dude who looks like Martin Landau, old married couple; where the heck is the doctor?
I had completely forgotten this one, but it all came back to me as I was reading the description.
The other one I remember in which Rollin’s makeup was removed bit by bit was when he took the place of a Mafia boss who got a “face lift” from Cinnamon in front of a bunch of wise guys. At the end of the episode…
the main hit man whacked his boss, who had been made up to look like Rollin!
One thing that was funny about this episode was that they had to dub Landau’s voice over that of the boss; Rollin’s impersonation skills apparently didn’t extend to doing vocal impressions. 
The “make up the bad guy so his henchman will whack him” ploy also worked in the gambling episode set on the cruise ship; the evil Communist agent in this one was Michael Strong, aka Dr Roger Corby on Star Trek.
Not only was this (I’m pretty sure) a two-parter (at one point, Jim was apparently whacked by the main hit man), it also had a great “What the *fuck *is he doing???” moment:
At one point in the first hour, Barney is shown synchronizing the movements of two elevators in the Mob building. A week later, near the end of the second episode, it all comes together when we see them substituting the drugged boss for Rollin as the elevators go from the top floor to the parking garage.
The other side of that coin – which is obvious if you’re looking for it, and hilarious once you can see them struggling with it – is Willy being along on the missions.
In the pilot episode, he’s the key: the plan is for a record-breaking weightlifter to carry suitcases into the hotel’s vault as if they didn’t weigh all that much, so a small thief gets smuggled in to pull hijinks behind closed doors. Willy later carries the suitcase and its occupant back out just as casually. And the rest of the team – the planner who came up with that, the master of disguise who impersonates someone, the brilliant tech guy, and so on – has plenty of stuff to do, too.
Okay, now you try to write an episode. Can you come up with something for the planner to do? Sure you can; given the need for a plan, have him plan stuff; it’d be harder to write an episode where he doesn’t. There’s always a plan, right?
Given a bad guy with underlings, have the impersonator replace an underling – or impersonate the bad guy, and order them around. Given somebody who’d get VIP treatment from the bad guy, impersonate that VIP. Given nothing, impersonate the bad guy and frame ‘yourself’. There’s always someone to impersonate, right?
Given a tech problem, get the tech guy to handle it: he’ll play safecracker, he’ll play wiretapper; he’ll sabotage your car, he’ll spoof your security cameras; he’s an artist, and his medium is “alarms” or “elevators” or “whatever you put in front of him”. And if you put nothing in front of him, then he just breaks out cutting-edge tech of his own to drug someone or trick them or frame them or whatever for the win; there’s always something for him to do, right?
Oh, and there’s a strong guy. Can you write in something for him to do every week?
A panel from the abovementioned “Mission: Ridiculous”:
Later on, he’s a “cab driver” … who gets “caught in traffic and has to pick up a real fare!”
I miss the little corrugated metal utility van. Sometimes a different color, usually with a new sign painted on it. I hope when the show ended they put it out to good pasture. 
And Sweet Jesus! I hated that seemingly never-ending calliope music in the 2-parter(“Old Man Out”), when they were trying to spirit away from prison an aging Roman Catholic prelate. The mentalist act between Hill and Bain was ludicrously delightful.
Ya’ know, there’s really not enough time and space to talk about how bad/good this series was.
The calliope music was so Rollin could “time” the escape.
And drive the border guard crazy so they could get away!
Mary Ann Mobley was in this episode wearing a trapeze artist’s costume … and I was a sixth grader oozing testosterone! Oh … my … God! :o
Right down to the “split second”.
Did a quick google search, check out this site: http://neptsdepths.blogspot.com/2014/03/its-time-we-got-mobley-ized.html school down a bit and you’ll be able to relive your sixth grade self.
I think you meant “scroll” there, but ohhhhhhhhhh yeah!!! The picture on the left in particular…
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm! :o
Quick show of hands here: How many of you can still hear the music in your mind, whether you want to or not? :dubious:
I can … every single bar of it! :smack:
Not to mention the catfight between Mobley and Bain. Ripped that one off from From Russia with Love, they did! 