...but I think that that very depth and realism is a big part of it. I think we post-modern ironists want our 1960s nostalgia to be campy, so we can feel superior to our younger selves. We can laugh at our youthful naivete in watching U.N.C.L.E., we can dig on the pop-art surrealism of Steed and Peel, we can chuckle at teh over-the-topness of James West's foes...
But then we tune in "I Spy" and we are stoill challenged by the darkness of "Magic Mirror" or "Home to Judgment," the ugliness and cynicism of "It's All Done With Mirrors" ("I wish to defect!" "And we'll take him, too, do you know that?") and it's not that comforting sense that we're smarter than we were. Indeed, it's that for all our supposed modernism, in many ways we're more naive today than we were those generations ago. The Boy King of Khadra and Bobby Saville would have sneered side-by-side at Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush claiming the Iraquis would be hailing us as liberators.