Chicago Spanking Review

I Spy and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

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David McCallum, about to bring the long arm of the law down on Victoria Young's backside.

There has been occasional discussion of these two scenes from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (see Spankings in TV: What If? on the CSR Forum and Interrupted/Offscreen Spankings on Chross's Message Board), and recently an actual request that we post clips of these scenes, so let's go ahead and do just that now.

Some background: both episodes date from 1966, a time when spies were in vogue - the early James Bond films, the movie Our Man Flint, and Get Smart on television all date from approximately this time period. These last two were spy spoofs, and perhaps the producers of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. intended it to fall into the same category, but it was really more goof than spoof. The idea of a U.N.-run intelligence organization never made any sense, with the Soviet Union trying its best to first undermine and then conquer the West, and from our vantage point today, after another forty-five years of the U.N.'s utter failure to bring any semblance of peace or security to the world, it seems positively laughable. Why would you share your best intelligence with the very people who are trying to destroy you?

Nonetheless, American Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughan) was paired with Russian Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum), which already made a mockery of the show's title before it even got off the ground - it should have been changed to The MEN from U.N.C.L.E. once it became apparent that Solo wasn't going solo any more (in fact, his name should have been changed for the same reason). The show never rose above comic-book level - Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD (also from this era) battling HYDRA was as believable as U.N.C.L.E.'s fight against THRUSH!

Robert Vaughan was handsome, but it was McCallum who really caught on with the girls, and it is he we're about to see in this silly scene with Victoria Young. McCallum played it well, and it really looked like he was going to spank Young (albeit with the wrong hand) for giving him so much trouble when he was interrupted by a call on his communicator. No actual spanking, then, which is why we never bothered with this scene before now.

Here is the Windows Media version. To download, right-click and then select "Save Target As".

I Spy was a more substantial show than The Man From U.N.C.L.E., but even so it suffered from generally weak scripts. Robert Lewin's excellent "Tatia" was an all-too-rare exception (not the episode from which this spanking came), and it also featured what we consider Earle Hagen's finest score. Another problem for the show was that it caught on and became "hip" among Hollywood Lefties, which prevented its problems from being identified and corrected. The reason for this was the pairing of the two leads, Alexander Scott (Bill Cosby, then a rising young comic with no previous acting experience) and Kelly Robinson (the late Robert Culp, already an experienced actor whose credits, as it happens, included The Man From U.N.C.L.E.).

The interracial duo, espionage officers whose covers as a professional tennis player (Culp) and his trainer (Cosby), presented an image of racial tolerance for which Sheldon Leonard, the producer, deserved credit. Hollywood was quick to embrace the show and by so doing steal some of that credit and flatter itself with its conspicuous virtue, something to remember when it tries pulling the same trick today (as it occasionally does) some forty-five years later.

Cathy knows something is up, but she doesn't yet realize that "something" is going to be her bottom!

I Spy was not only the better of the two shows, it also had the better spanking scene, for this time there is a real OTK session, although it occurs off-camera. In "There Was a Little Girl" Cathy Sherman (Mary Jane Saunders) is the cabinet official's daughter who leads Robinson and Scott on a merry chase as they try to protect her while she vacations in Mexico. By the last scene, she has caused so much trouble that "the man on top" - a reference to either the Director or the President - has decided that something must be done.

In the final scene, we see Scott take over the solitaire game which Kelly has been trying to win by using wild cards, while Kelly moves on to decoding the latest instructions from Washington. "Hey, Jack, take a look at that," he says, tossing the decoded paper over to Scott. Cathy looks up, only mildly apprehensive, little knowing what comes next!

"I'm sorry, honey," Kelly says as he moves toward her. Scott closes the window for the sake of discretion, and then we hear Cathy's cries of distress ("Oh, Kelly!") as the camera pans over to the table and we can read the decoded missive at last: "SPANK HER". We like set-ups like this one, where the spankee isn't really bad but has nonetheless done something for which she can only atone by getting spanked.

It is perhaps hard to describe to young people today how exciting this scene was back then and in the 70's when the show was being rerun - remember there were no VCR's yet. Exciting, but also deeply disappointing, for we desperately wanted to see Mary Jane Saunders across Robert Culp's knee, her pretty face emoting, eyes closing, mouth forming an "Ohhhh!" as the spanks landed on target.

The player at left should work with most browsers, or you can download the Windows Media version. To download, right-click and then select "Save Target As".

"SPANK HER" - memorable words that haunted us for years. So close, so close to consummation! We'd guess that women into spanking remember this episode fondly as well. Whatever the NBC Censors might have thought about girls in their late teens getting spanked on screen, it was clearly o.k. with middle America. (By the way, Saunders was in her 20's when she did this role, so it's definitely not a case of child-spanking).