Barbara Bain

            On Sunday I discovered that all of the ice from my old refrigerator that I’d thrown out onto the roof was gone. I had planned on airing it out overnight and then cleaning it off before putting it into my new fridge but obviously we have a thief in our midst. This used to be such a nice neighbourhood!

            I spent some time cleaning the inside and the outside of the old Admiral. I don’t mind so much if the things I keep and use are filthy but I don’t want what I throw away to look bad.

            I had planned on taking a bike ride in the late afternoon but around the time I would have started getting ready to go it looked like it might rain. The weather forecast predicted a 40% chance of rain between 17:00 and 18:00, so I decided to stay home and get some writing done instead.

            I had a couple of eggs with toast and a beer for dinner and watched two episodes of Dobie Gillis.

            In the first story Maynard takes some experimental energy pills meant for lab mice and becomes super strong. Dobie’s father manipulates him into becoming a heavy weight champion by always telling Maynard that his opponent hates his hero, Mighty Mouse. Maynard fights his way almost to the top of the heavyweight category although no explanation is given as to how he could possibly even compete in that category when he still weighs only 48 kilograms. The night before Maynard is scheduled to fight the heavyweight champion of the world the champ’s sexy girlfriend comes to Maynard’s hotel room to seduce him and find out his secret. But Maynard cannot be seduced and so he just tells her because he is stupid. She steals the pills and so the night of the fight Maynard does not have the help of the pills. But they receive a letter from Dr Burkhart warning them that they’ve discovered that the pills have a shelf life of 80 days and after that have the opposite effect. The bout is on the 81^st day. Maynard manages to avoid being knocked out until just before the champ collapses, but since Maynard falls down one second before the champ does, the champ wins. It’s odd that Maynard doesn’t fight a single Black man. Sonny Liston was actually the heavyweight champion in 1963 and he was defeated by Muhammad Ali when he was still known as Cassius Clay.

            On this fourth and final season of Dobie Gillis, there were a few Black actors for the first time. They were usually background actors playing usually one female and one male student at Dobie’s college.

            In the second story the Gillises go to Washington with Maynard tagging along. In their hotel lobby two foreign spies, Veronica and Bruno mistake Maynard for a famous rocket scientist and plot to kidnap him and force the secrets from his magnificent brain. The beautiful and seductive Veronica does not interest Maynard but Dobie, thinking that he’s got a shot with her, does not discourage Veronica’s belief that Maynard is Dr. Fahrenheit. She arranges to have dinner with Maynard in the Gillis’s hotel room with the intention of drugging him and turning him over to their chief agent. Two FBI agents are onto the spies and contact Dobie and Maynard, asking them to play along so they can capture them and the chief. But Dobie’s mother and father know nothing about the spy angle and are just worried that Veronica taking advantage of poor innocent Maynard. The Gillises come to the hotel room posing as hotel staff. In the bedroom they find the FBI agents but think they are in cahoots with Veronica. While the Gillises are struggling with the FBI Veronica manages to drug Maynard and spirit him away. But downstairs the smell of a passing roast chicken revives Maynard somewhat and he unknowingly evades the spies while he is chasing the aroma.

            The chief was played by John Banner, who played Sergeant Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes.

            Bruno was portrayed by character actor Henry Corden who from the mid-70s on became the voice of Fred Flintstone and many other Hanna Barbera characters.

            The role of Veronica was realized by Barbara Bain, who played the sultry agent Cinnamon Carter on the original Mission Impossible TV series and later starred on Space 1999 with her then husband Martin Landau who had also starred on Mission Impossible.