This Might Be Mission Impossible For Me

I was reading a little bit about "Mission Impossible," the TV show yesterday, for reasons that had nothing to do with Peter Graves dying the other day. It was strictly a coincidence.

I was with a guy who was showing me some of the TV shows he has downloads of, and he happened to have a number of episodes of "MI." The natural question came up, how many episodes were made, as we wanted to determine how many he'd need to have them all. He had around 20 and at first thought maybe that's all they were. I had no idea how many there were, but I knew it had to be more than 20 some.

It turns out -- a big thanks goes out to the bean counters at Wikipedia -- that there were 171 episodes and the pilot episode. And that the show went on for seven seasons, at 20 some per. So this guy had the first season out of what was virtually an endless run. 171 missions that seemed impossible but turned out not to live up to their billing, actually being not only possible but done.

I was thinking, What if I had the entire series? There's so many of them that it might turn out to be Mission Impossible for me to watch them all.

OK, there's no commercials. That knocks them down to about 46-48 minutes each. Still, even if I watched one a day, that's virtually an hour for 171 days. That's a pretty good chunk of time, not even counting whether I'd be interested in one impossible adventure after another for that long. I'd probably lose interest and it'd all fizzle out.

That was a great show. But who knows if it'd be great enough to watch the whole thing now?

He and I watched part of the pilot episode. They had a phonograph record instead of the little tape recorder. And it decomposed after the guy listened to it. Then Martin Landau, the man of a thousand faces, was going to have the mission of disguising himself to impersonate a guy he himself was playing as a second character! Looking at the guy's picture, then seeing Martin Landau, it didn't look all that hard, frankly.