"The Avengers" represented a glance at the British sensibility on our American television screens. This is of course the British TV series starring Diana Rigg and Patrick McNee in the mid 1960s. I was in college and marveled at each episode as the Steed and Peel character took on and triumphed over seemingly brilliant villains!
On our B&W TV screen my parents and I enjoyed these James Bondish episodes featuring Emma Peel and John Steed. They unraveled and resolved the weekly dilemma posed by supposedly master-minded villains bent on world domination and related aspirations. The first episodes were in B&W and later turned into color, though we didn't have a color TV until a decade later.
I have in my DVD collection all of the Diana Rigg "Avenger" episodes. There are 52 episodes. So I can, when I wish, travel back in time to those mid 1960s episodes and enjoy what was then a British presentation of the modern woman and her partner in triumph, John Steed.
If challenged then, I would declare the "Avengers" TV series was in my top ten TV shows of that decade! Viewing it some 40 years later, I'm not so sure! The James Bond and British film invasion now doesn't seem so magnificent! With overuse, it now seems to be just a trend.
I, however, will always treasure both the series as a major influence in my viewing life! By the way, Rigg's character's name "Emma Peel" was a brilliant suggestion in a planning session when her character had to have "Male Appeal", or in other words "M"-Appeal!
(The original "Avengers" series starred both McNee and Honor Blackman. Then of course came Diana Rigg. Linda Thorson came next and much, much later Joanna Lumley in "The New Avengers".)
Review by Chuck Kuenneth MPHS Jan 66
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