TCM is showing 8 Man From U.N.C.L.E. movies tomorrow starting at 6AM EST.

6:00 TO TRAP A SPY

7:45 ONE OF OUR SPIES IS MISSING

9:30 ONE SPY TOO MANY

11:15 THE SPY WITH MY FACE

12:45 THE KARATE KILLERS

2:30 THE SPY IN THE GREEN HAT

4:15 The HELICOPTER SPIES

6:00 HOW TO STEAL THE WORLD

I can only record one daytime showing after TO TRAP A SPY, so right now I'm leaning to THE KARATE KILLERS just because it's got Joan Crawford.

I believe ONE SPY TOO MANY, with Rip Torn, is considered to be the best or one of the best of the U.N.C.L.E. movies. I'll be recording them all.

ONE SPY TOO MANY is culled from my favorite UNCLE two-parter (Season 2, Episodes 1 and 2, "The Alexander the Greater Affair"), and it's got the most infectious score of any of the episodes, so I'm sure the movie version must be good.

I have a vague memory of seeing 2 Man from UNCLES movies on the big screen at a Saturday morning matinee in 1966 (more or less).

I also remember being confused because while I recognized the story from TV, it still seemed quite different from the TV episodes.

Did they do any more recutting to these other than what was necessary to avoid weekly-TV overlap?

Two of the films were created from hour-long episodes that were shot in color but broadcast in black-and-white; these were turned into color films with additional material. I just finished checking the copies I recorded from TCM and was amused to see that some footage is slowed-down during the title sequences and other times sped up, and one movie opens with footage of Mr. Waverly watching as Solo walks down all the corridors leading to his office on a security camera. The image of Solo is in black-and-white, so probably taken from a first season episode and planted into this color footage as filler. There might also be some rescoring going on in places.

I believe all of Yvonne Craig's scenes in one of the movies (ONE SPY TOO MANY, I think) were filmed solely for the theatrical release.

I've watched two of these so far, TO TRAP A SPY and ONE OF OUR SPIES IS MISSING. TO TRAP A SPY is played as a completely straight spy movie (the infiltration of UNCLE headquaters by WASP agents is a thing of beauty). The camp is starting to kick in (gently) with ONE OF OUR SPIES IS MISSING. David McCallum's plays Comedy Relief (but hey, if it's good enough for Porky...). There's definitely a touch of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (Olga). Since TCM took the trouble to run all of them I wonder why they decided to show them out of chronological order. Not that it seems to matter so far (or at all I suspect). Looking forward to watching the rest.

TO TRAP A SPY was the series pilot. The show was really quite a different beast in its first season, before making the transition to color and quite a bit of heavy camp.